What is Data Tracking?
Data tracking is collecting specific data through your different business channels, organizing that data, and using it to create insights that drive business decisions. Data tracking takes advantage of data to create a more personalized user experience and better website performance.
For example, if you decide to collect data on which of your web pages are creating more conversions, you can use that data to optimize other pages. If the data shows that successful pages feature videos for instance, you would learn that video content is helping users continue their customer journey.
What Types of Data Can Your Business Collect?
Your industry, online channels, and audience size will affect the quantity and quality of data. In general, a business can use data tracking to collect:
- Personal Data: Information that relates to the identity of an individual. It can include names, addresses, phone numbers, and geolocation.
- Behavioral Data: Information on the patterns of your customers such as transactions, subscriptions, repeated actions, or used devices.
- Engagement Data: Information on how users interact with your different channels such as websites, social media, or email. For example, you can track the number of website visits, clicks, reactions to social media posts, or length of a video’s watch time.
- Attitudinal Data: Information on how customers feel about your brand, your products, or your services. For instance, you can collect user reviews or survey results to track users’ opinions.
To make the best of data tracking, create a plan that identifies your business goal, so you know which data to collect and from which sources to gather it from.
For instance, if your goal was to create ads targeted to a certain city or area, you could use personal data to find out users’ general location and behavioral data to check where past customers are located.
Otherwise, you would be relying on hunches or instinct and creating campaigns that may fail. Data tracking helps you ensure your strategy is based on insights derived from your audience engagement with your online channels.
Business Benefits of Data Tracking
Data tracking provides a roadmap for your organization to deliver the best possible experience to your customers. You can leverage data to:
1. Better Understand Your Audience’s Needs
With data tracking you can discover how your audience is interacting with your website, social media channels or apps, and create ways to serve them better.
Data insights such as which types of blogs your readers enjoy, which products have higher satisfaction, or which social media posts create the most engagement can help you develop marketing campaigns based on that information. By doing so, you are anticipating the needs of your audience so that their journey along your online channels becomes smoother.
2. Track and Improve Your Website Performance
With data tracking tools such as a website heat map, you can analyze where on a web page users are clicking, scrolling, or hovering. This tool can help you measure which pages are leading to conversions or to higher user engagement.
Additionally, metric pages such as Google Analytics give you a comprehensive view of your whole website. In it, you can see which pages are most visited, how much time visitors spend on each page, which ones lead to conversions, etc.
3. Improve Your Marketing Strategy
Businesses that use data-driven marketing strategies are six times more likely to be profitable year over year than companies that don’t, according to Forbes. This is because data tracking allows organizations to create plans based on patterns and user behavior.
Businesses can develop campaigns that align with current trends and user pain-points by taking advantage of data. Thus, marketing strategies can be specific and fact-based rather than rely on guesswork.
4. Create Personalized Content and Ads
80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from brands that personalize their experience. To do this for your customers, you can use data to find out their product and content preferences, personalize your online ads depending on a viewer’s location, or send your audience emails according to their past interactions with your brand.
Data analytics can also help you segment your audience. You can create segments based on your audience’s age, job title, gender, etc.
5. Make Data-Driven Decisions
The biggest benefit of data-tracking is that it allows you to make decisions based on information your customers provide. As you develop and launch marketing campaigns, you can check back on this data and improve your strategy with each campaign iteration.
Data helps you visualize the gaps in your strategy so you can focus your resources on specific goals and get measurable results.
How Can You Collect Data?
One tool that lets you collect data across all of your departments into one common database is enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. An ERP solution gives you visibility on the effectiveness of your sales, marketing campaigns, order management, inventory, and more.
Besides other tools you are probably already taking advantage of such as Google Analytics and KIPs on your social media channels, an ERP gives you access to insights across your whole organization, so you can make the best of your resources.
To learn more about how your business can get data insights with an ERP system, head over to the blog Competitive Advantages from Enterprise Resource Planning.
