Know Your Audience: Why Analytics Should Feed Your Marketing Strategy

There’s an old saying that goes, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”.

It’s an age-old question, but it’s still a relevant one. If you’ve got a great website, but you have no insight into its users, then is it really as good as you think? Is it working? Are people using it at all?

When it comes to successful digital marketing, measurement and analytics are crucial to your brand’s growth. This is because a solid, yet ever-learning and evergreen strategy thrives on data, whether that’s generated from testing of past campaigns or analytics tools that give you an insight into how users interact with your marketing.

What analytics tools should I be using?

There are tons of tools out there that can gather data about how people use your website. The most popular – and well known – of these is Google Analytics.

Every website should be using Google Analytics, as it allows you to view not just how many users have visited your website, but where they came from, how long they spent on your site and which pages they visited.

It also allows you to set up goals which allow you to track a conversion, for example filling in an enquiry form or making a purchase. This helps you measure how well your website is performing, and then make adjustments to guide more users to completing that all-important goal.

There are gaps in this analysis, though. While Google Analytics gives you data on the pages your users visit, it doesn’t tell you much about how the user interacted with the page itself. For example, users could be dropping off a landing page, but the data from Google Analytics won’t tell you why.

That’s where Hotjar comes in. Hotjar is heatmapping software that helps you better understand a users’ behaviour on your website, giving you more data on how users spend their time on it.

By generating heatmaps of popular areas on a page as well as session recordings, you can get clearer data on any roadblocks in your customer’s journey, and adjust your website accordingly.

What’s the difference between Hotjar and Google Analytics?

Hotjar is no substitute for Google Analytics, but its an important tool that the team at EDGE Creative use to get a better insight into how users are interacting with the websites we build for our clients. It’s extremely useful to use both tools in conjunction with one another, as when combined, they can give a more complete picture overall.

Hotjar allows you to physically see where a user pays attention on a page with heatmaps that track how long a user spends on a certain section – for example if a piece of copy gets scrolled past often, you’ll know that this is an area that needs to change.

From this, you can see where website visitors encounter problems in their journey, where they get stuck before dropping off, and how they interact with individual page elements and sections. You can also garner feedback about website experience through surveys.

Why do I need analytics?

By using tools like Hotjar and combining your findings with that of Google Analytics, you can revolutionise how you plan your marketing strategy.

This is because with reliable and accurate insights into how users interact with certain elements of your website, you can predict what is more likely to generate success in the future. The more analysis you do, the more tweaks you can make – which will in turn generate more data to tell you how effective those tweaks have been.

More data means more informed marketing, and with more informed marketing, you can rise above the competition.

Want to get ahead of the game?

At EDGE Creative, we know that creativity is nothing without strategy when it comes to marketing, and strategy is nothing without analytics to back it up.

This is why when we build websites or launch campaigns, we use analytics tools like Hotjar to give us a clear insight into how users are interacting with our clients’ marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can get more understanding of your audience and transform your findings into success, talk to us to claim a complimentary website audit, where we’ll use tools to highlight how visitors are currently using your website and how it can be improved to drive more conversions.

Call 0121 355 8092 or email us at info@edge-creative.com to get in touch.