Analytics are one of my least favorite parts about being a business owner, especially on the e-commerce side of things. It is difficult to get a handle on what everything means and what I am supposed to be looking at. Even compiling the data is difficult when I am trying to do it on my own.
When I started to look for solutions to this problem, it was difficult to find one at first. It feels like there have been very few innovations in this field for a long time. However, once I dug deep enough, I discovered that there are programs that can track ads and help me in this avenue of my e-commerce website.
If that sounds like something appealing to you, be sure to continue reading. I will discuss some of the different features to be on the watch for. Hopefully, you can walk away feeling more confident in what to do as far as analysis goes for the ads that you run!
What are Analytics?
In general terms, they are a systematic gathering of statistics or data, as you can learn more about on this page. For the purpose of this article, though, I will be discussing how it relates to business. After all, you can apply it to most concepts, but I will stay specific today.
We use them in business for a variety of purposes. Some examples of this are describing, predicting, and eventually improving the performance of our company. That is primarily why people try to gather these statistics.
There are a few different types of analytics to be cognizant of. These include (but are not necessarily limited to) predictive analytics, cognitive analytics, prescriptive analytics, descriptive analytics, and diagnostic analytics. Each have their own place and purpose, so try to familiarize yourself with them at least on a basic level.
If you work in fields like marketing, finance, online systems, management, software services, or information security, you are probably already deeply familiar with these concepts. However, they are important for almost every job, even if we do not realize it. That is why I like to place such an emphasis on them.
How to Apply Them
This is where things get a bit more complicated, as I am sure you can imagine. There are so many different applications for this and analysis as well that it can be hard to keep them all straight. However, one of the main ones to keep in mind is marketing optimization.
This is where an ad tracking system can really come in handy, as gathering the data is the first step to improving your current strategies. The goal with this type is to gather the reactions to a certain ad campaign and determine whether it had the impact that you wanted it to. The data types analyzed should be both quantitative and qualitative.
Usually, you then use what you have gathered to create models and attempt to predict outcomes of future campaigns. The other types to be aware of are people, portfolio, digital, risk, security, and software. I will not go into the others too much here.
What is Ad Tracking?
Now that I have covered the basics of analytics, let me get into more detail about what ad tracking is and how it works. In essence, companies and businesses use popups or cookies to track online behavior and figure out purchasing habits. What are the common techniques, though? You can learn more here before I discuss it further: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/30296/analytics.
The usual programs that a company might use to do this are known as URL trackers, cookies, pixels, or even special scripts in some cases. The goal is to create a profile of consumers to determine some basic personal information about them and determine whether an advertisement campaign is working as intended.
If you did not know, most businesses run ads with a target audience in mind. For example, a company that sells baby clothing is probably looking to reach new parents or pregnant people. If you are seeing that ad but are neither of those things, their programming probably is not working as they want it to.
That is part of why tracking services are important for companies to utilize. Now, I do think it is important to consider the privacy of customers. You should not be trying to gather invasive information or data. Rather, simply try to understand their demographic. It might even help you find your target audience if you have not identified one yet.
One of the most common strategies are cookies, which are small pieces of code. They are intended to record any online activity and then save it into a browser. This allows that cookie to track the consumer between the websites that they visit.
Usually, customers are given a popup when they visit a website that utilizes cookies that is essentially asking for consent, but that is not always the case. I do think that is a good practice to have, though, so that you are not invading privacy too much.
Benefits of Tracking
Now, you may be wondering why it is important for organizations to track your online activity, anyway. The main reason is to keep themselves relevant. What do I mean by that? Well, I already briefly touched upon this, but a lot of e-commerce has to do with finding a target demographic and then catering to them.
In this way, if you are tracking consumers, you can make sure that you are only spending your ad campaign money on those who will actually be interested in your product. That is a more cost-effective manner of doing it then anything else, like running surveys or something.
Of course, there are some moral questions, but as long as you are not doing anything malicious with the data it is more than likely fine. If parsing through the data on your own sounds overwhelming, consider other companies or programs that are designed to help you with this!
