What is Digital Analytics and Why Is It Important?

What is Digital Analytics and Why Is It Important?


With the help of digital analytics, businesses can better understand their product data, customer behavior, website and application traffic, and other important KPIs.

These metrics can help an organization improve its marketing and product performance, hence catering to customer satisfaction. But what is digital analytics, and how is it beneficial?

What is Digital Analytics?

Digital analytics refers to data collection, measurement, analysis, and interpretation from digital platforms such as websites, mobile apps, social media, SaaS products, and other digital channels.

It is used to track and assess user behavior, engagement, and performance metrics to better understand how users interact with their content, products, or services, helping them optimize their services or products.

Why are Digital Analytics Important?

There are several benefits of digital analytics, making it an important aspect of business. Here are some of the reasons why digital analytics are important:

1. Make Data-Driven Decisions

With digital analytics, businesses can adapt to changing trends more rapidly than ever and even allocate resources more effectively. You can continuously improve and foster accountability when and where required. It is a guiding compass for businesses towards better innovation and growth in this wide digital landscape.

2. Understand Your Users Better

You can understand your users better by tracking their behavior and getting to know their pain points. Customer behavior tracking leads to a better understanding of where your customers are stuck. Knowing all of this helps you solve their queries better and improve their customer experience.

3. Learn Customer Journey

Another benefit of digital analytics is learning the customer journey by exploring their key interactions. This includes the customer’s first touchpoint with your business and their final point of sale. By learning this, you can make any improvements needed.

4. Develop Marketing Campaigns

Using digital analytics, you can track performance and develop marketing strategies. You can use different metrics from these analytics to understand which marketing campaigns have worked best for you in the past. Having a good knowledge of this will help you allocate your marketing budget to what’s necessary and avoid spending on something that may not work.

5. Improve Product Performance

Digital analytics help in tracking user interactions, engagement metrics, and traffic patterns, which is a valuable insight for product managers and digital marketers to understand customer preferences and behaviors. This works in the company’s favor as product managers and digital marketers can improve their products and campaigns, respond to user feedback, enhance future products, and ultimately increase conversion rates.

Who is Digital Analytics Useful For?

Below is a detailed list of departments and individuals that can benefit from digital analytics:

1. Marketing Team

Whether content, customer, or product marketing, your marketing teams can benefit by using digital analytics to align their marketing strategies with customer preferences, interests, and trends. They can optimize ad spends, measure campaign success, and improve the overall conversion rate.

2. Business Owners and Executives

For decision-makers, digital analytics can provide meaningful insights into overall customer acquisition, business performance, and revenue generation.

3. Product Managers

Product managers rely on digital analytics to track how users interact with digital products or services. It helps identify features that resonate with users, highlight pain points, and guide product development based on user behavior.

4. Customer Support and Success Teams

Through digital analytics, your customer support teams can identify customer issues and satisfaction trends. This can be done by tracking their user engagement and behavior, enabling customer support teams to address problems and improve the overall user experience.

5. Data Analysts

Data analysts use digital analytics to visualize, track, and interpret data. They generate business insights by identifying correlations, trends, and patterns in user behavior.

6. Sales Teams

Sales teams can leverage digital analytics to understand customer journeys, identify lead sources, and improve conversion tactics, enhancing overall sales strategy.

7. Content Creators and Strategists

Digital analytics helps content creators understand what types of content resonate with their audience, informing future content development to improve engagement.

8. E-commerce Businesses

E-commerce businesses benefit from digital analytics by tracking customer journeys, online sales, cart abandonment rates, and conversions to improve their online store performance.

9. UI and UX Teams

Digital analytics for UI and UX teams provides real-time insights into user behavior, helping them understand what works and what doesn’t in their digital products. These demographics, user journeys, and interactions can be tracked through tools like heatmaps and session replays, creating data-driven user personas and optimizing designs.

Sources or Examples of Digital Analytics Data

Below are some examples of digital analytics data:

1. Product & E-commerce Data

  • Product inquiries
  • Returning visitors / Repeat shoppers
  • Average order value
  • Cart abandonment rate
  • Bug reports
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Revenue by source
  • Transaction history
  • Sales conversion statistics

2. SEO Metrics

  • Keywords
  • Search volume
  • Keyword rankings
  • Share of search visibility
  • Organic traffic
  • Clicks and impressions
  • Content performance score
  • Technical errors (e.g., 404, 503 errors)

Social Media Data

  • Engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares, etc.)
  • Growth in the number of followers and subscribers
  • Content engagement
  • Reach
  • Impressions
  • Post clicks
  • Average video watch time
  • Influencer marketing tracking

4. Paid Marketing Data

  • Ad impressions
  • Click-through rates (CTR)
  • Cost per click (CPC)
  • Cost per acquisition (CPA
  • Conversion rate by campaign
  • Return on ad spend (ROAS)
  • Quality score
  • Keyword performance
  • Ad position and ranking
  • Total ad spend
  • Budget utilization
  • Audience demographics and targeting

5. Website Performance Data

  • Traffic sources by channel, device, and keyword
  • Pageview
  • Time spent on page
  • Bounce rates
  • Form completions
  • Demo and free trial sign-ups
  • Lead-to-close ratio
  • Heatmaps/session recordings

6. Email Campaign Metrics

  • Click-through rates for emails
  • Open rate statistics
  • Device-based open rates
  • Unsubscribe rates
  • Email bounce rate

7. Customer Interaction and Support Data

  • Onboarding insights
  • Chatbot/live chat interactions
  • Customer reviews and ratings
  • Customer interviews
  • CES, NPS, and CSAT surveys
  • Customer complaints or feedback

How to Implement a Digital Analytics Strategy?

Now that you are aware of all the benefits of digital analytics and who exactly can benefit from it, how to implement a digital analytics strategy? The processes and tools you use to track these analytics may differ for different organizations, but here are some of the general practices for implementing a digital analytics strategy in the most straightforward way:

1. Set Clear Goals

A strong digital analytics strategy starts when you know what you want it to achieve for you. Define your overall mission and break it down into smaller milestones.

2. Establish KPIs

What does success look like to you? What benchmarks do you want to set to achieve by tracking the established Key Performing Indicators (KPIs)?

3. Identify Current Gaps

Now, evaluate the existing processes and tools to understand whether there are any knowledge gaps or limitations. You can also learn the kind of information you need to reach a specific milestone or goal.

4. Select the Right Tools

Once you identify the current gaps, you can learn what tools you need for the type of functionality you want to prioritize.

5. Define Data Sources

You need to know what data you want to collect through digital analytics to understand user interactions and behaviors better. This can include behavior analytics, funnel analytics, customer relationship management, and customer feedback.

6. Collect Data

The next step of implementing a data analytics strategy is to collect both qualitative and quantitative data, such as the number of unique users, adoption rate, and performance overview.

7. Analyze Data

Once you collect the appropriate data, analyze it. Look for any customer correlations, trends, or patterns that can help in strategy development and decision-making.

8. Optimize Your Strategy

After analyzing the data, optimize your products and strategies based on the information collected. Take action where needed to improve customer satisfaction by catering to their needs.

How ViewMetrics Can Help You Check Digital Analytics?

ViewMetrics can play a significant role in enhancing digital analytics through several key features:

  • Customizable Dashboards: Tailor your KPIs to focus on what matters most with the ViewMetrics add-on.
  • Comprehensive Reporting: Combine data from multiple sources for in-depth analysis.
  • Data-Driven Decision Making: By providing actionable insights and comprehensive data analysis, Viewmetrics empowers organizations to make informed decisions and optimize their digital marketing strategies for better results.
  • Easy Integration: Connect with other tools for a holistic view. ViewMetrics can seamlessly integrate more than 20 tools for your convenience.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the difference between digital analytics and data analytics?

Digital analytics includes collecting and analyzing analytical information gathered from a wide range of digital platforms and channels that are beyond websites. These include email campaigns, social media, mobile applications, and other channels where user interactions happen with your business. Data analytics, on the other hand, collects and tracks data for both digital and non-digital business activities, such as text documents, sensors, and databases.

What are the four types of analytics?

The four types of analytics include descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. Descriptive answers what you have done in the past, diagnostic analytics is for understanding why you have achieved success or failure in the past, predictive includes the where and when aspect of your efforts, and prescriptive analytics focuses on the action that needs to be taken for driving success.

Which tools are best for digital analytics?

Depending on your budget, needs, and features, there are several tools available for digital analytics. These include Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and more. Learn more about the list here.

How can businesses integrate digital analytics?

Organizations can leverage the benefits of digital analytics with the help of different tools available in the market.

Track your marketing efforts and simplify reporting

Get started for free