Digital analytics can be described as the eyes and ears of an online business.
There are so many sources of data that it can become overwhelming. Part of the role of digital analytics is to identify what data should be analysed.
Below are some of the most common data sources used in digital analytics:
Site Functionality and Availability
This is usually the first port of call of the IT or technology team as a non-functional site is a failing site.
One of the tasks to do would be to monitor the frequency of error pages from web logs. Error codes to especially look out for would include 404 (page missing), 500 (generic server error) and 503 (service unavailable).
For e-commerce sites, payment gateway transaction errors would also need to be identified and monitored.
Of course, if the site is functional then it needs to be responsive which is why site availability and load times should also be monitored.
These should really be monitored by the IT or technology team. However, the digital analytics team would need to be aware of technical issues as this could explain some of the other metrics that are being analysed.
Some example log analyser tools include:
Site availability and loading times are also analysed and monitored using tools such as:
Clickstream or Behavioural Data
Standard web analytics data including number of visits, visitors, pageviews, conversions, path analysis, traffic sources and several other reports. This usually applies to analytics data from a website, mobile website or mobile apps.
Some web analytics tools include:
- IBM Web Analytics (Coremetrics and Unica)
Voice of Customer data
What’s usually called qualitative data; this is data sourced from questionnaires or polls. These are either sent to existing customers (usually via email), placed on a website or by analysing social media “chatter”.
Some vendors include:
Competitor Analytics
Competitor analytics data is third-party data that is sourced from ISPs (Internet Service Providers), panels or a combination of both. It’s used mainly to compare yourself against your competitors as well as to look for opportunities that you may be missing out on.
Some vendors include:
Webmaster Tools Data
Webmaster tools from Google and Bing can tell you the general health of your website from a search engine’s perspective.
This includes things like broken links, site crawling errors, issues with sitemaps, etc.
Customer databases
Each individual customer, subscriber, member or even lead of a website should have a unique ID. This is generally a user ID, email address or similar identifier and is usually located in an internal database.
Amazing insights can be gleaned by connecting this unique identifier to the same or a similar identifier on the website.
The challenge is making the connection using an identifier that is not considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
