Top 3 reasons Marketers aren’t maximising their use of data

Marketers are talented people, they understand the value of data and the ability for data to identify high quality prospects and to indicate when a prospect is ready to convert. Despite their understanding and desire to use data, there are blockers that stand in their way of effectively and efficiently maximising their use of data.

We work with a lot of marketers and there are three key reasons that we hear over and over again from marketers.

1. Google Analytics is difficult to use

Google Analytics is a massively powerful tool, it has an absolute wealth of data. But its ugly, cluttered and confusing. Let’s take a look:

I have 10 menu options down the left side. I have 12 panels all with very different data. I have more options to choose from across the top menu bar and once I expand one of those menu items the list of options to choose from explodes!

So while Google Analytics has all of the data that I need, its usability is a massive blocker, particularly for marketers - the exact group of people who would most benefit from the insights.

2. Google Analytics is just one piece of the marketing puzzle

Google Analytics provides us with the data we need to understand our prospects once they get to our website. But as a marketer it is just one piece of the puzzle. There are two others that are needed to understand the holistic website performance.

How did my website visitors get to my website and how is my website performing?

To answer these two key questions, I need to evaluate data from Google Search Console and Google Page Speed in addition to the Google Analytics data.

Google Search Console provides you with data on how your website is performing in Google Search - where a great deal of your website visitors are probably acquired. Again Google Search Console suffers from an overwhelming user interface, with 20 options on my left menu alone! But there is some real gold in Google Search Console. You can find out what search terms you are appearing in the results for and your click through rate and position for each one. These insights are critical to shape and improve your website content.

Google PageSpeed provides you with a snapshot of how fast and efficient your site is on desktop and mobile devices. But using Google PageSpeed as an end user gives you that data at that moment in time only. What is really important is:

• What is the trend over time - consistent, improving, declining?

• What is the performance at different times of the day?

Most marketers don’t have the time to check Google PageSpeed regularly and at different times, so these insights are lost. What is needed is a way to automate and save the results from Google PageSpeed so you can build up the picture of how your site is performing over time and at different times of the day.

But the absolute number one unanswered question we hear consistently from marketers is…

3. How am I performing in comparison to similar websites?

Durations and bounce rates are important metrics, but knowing if your values are similar, better or much worse than a competitors website is a big flashing beacon that shouts “you need to fix this”. Benchmarking your data gives you the ability to see where you are in comparison to your competitors and prioritises how and where you spend your time improving your own website.

Benchmarking your site against similar sites provides a big flashing beacon that shouts “you need to fix this”

So what is the solution?

We have worked with a number of our marketing clients to create a solution that solves these three key problems.

Our Marketing Analytics solution pulls together data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google PageSpeed. It provides the insights in a clean and easy to understand dashboard. Most importantly, we provide benchmarks for websites of similar sizes, so you can see how your site is performing relative to your competition.

Our Marketing Analytics platform is available from $100/month, if you would like to find out more or to see a demo, please fill out the form below or give us a call on 1300 475 510.