Optimize Your Business With Effective Digital Analytics

The ushering in of the digital era has allowed businesses of all sizes to secure a more transparent and tangible understanding of how their marketing funds, advertising budgets and overall website digital investment are being spent, as well as the ability to attribute those funds and budgets back to very powerful and insightful data to make real world business decisions. Digital analytics, once merely considered a nice-to-have add-on feature, has always been a blend of both artistic interpretation and a type of sweet science, straddling the fence somewhere between IT, marketing, and the executive boardroom.

Today, digital analytics is the cornerstone practice area for corporations and enterprise businesses of all shapes and sizes to make data-driven decisions on what to do next. The reason for the rise in prominence of digital analytics is that corporations invest heavily in all aspects of the digital space, from website development, mobile apps, digital advertising, UI/UX enhancements as well as high-powered personalization experiences. Each one of these core digital focus areas relies heavily on the data powered by a correctly configured digital analytics platform - and the insights and recommendations gleaned from savvy analysts -  to help make and draw business conclusions from. Considering the financial investments as well as the desire and need to for organizations to be data-driven, a proper digital analytics framework, implementation, reports and functionality is required for your organization’s success in the digital space.

The Pieces of the Digital Analytics Puzzle

Since the early 2000’s, our team at Analytics Metal has been at the forefront of the digital analytics industry, speaking at recognized industry events, invited to and participating in private Google and Adobe conferences, and publishing points-of-view in a variety of blog posts, articles, and books. For instance, Analytics Metal’s very own Founder & CEO has had a helping hand in charting a course for design and development of specific product features within Google Analytics that are now used by hundreds of thousands around the globe.

Google Analytics (or, Adobe Analytics or digital analytics platforms in general) is only one piece of the puzzle - one pinpoint on the map to success in the digital space. Beyond the digital analytics platform itself, organizations need to consider the following in their digital analytics road maps:

A. The Shape, Size, and Scope of Your Team

For most organizations, one single analyst or team member will not be able to do everything on their own. The practice of digital analytics comprises many converging technologies and programming languages, all requiring their own unique skill sets and levels of experience for optimal success. At Analytics Metal, we have deep expertise in tag management using Google Tag Manager, Adobe Launch, and Tealium. We have decades of combined experience in gleaning analytical insights using platforms such as Google Analytics (GA4), Adobe Analytics, Piwik, and older platforms like WebTrends and Omniture SiteCatalyst. We have many years of experience and have built hundreds of dashboards using reporting and visualization techniques with Looker Studio, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Qlik and many other tools. We are passionate about A/B testing and personalization, using platforms like Google Optimize, Monetate, Oracle Maxymiser, and Optimizely to demonstrate the power of hypothesis testing. Our background also includes expertise in data science and data engineering, using R, Python, and the many flavors of the SQL programming language, utilizing platforms like SAS, Alteryx, AnalyticsCanvas, and many others. Lastly, the team at Analytics Metal have navigated the delicate balance between deep analytical insights and executive decision-making, helping organizations small, medium, and large make data-driven decisions and adapt when appropriate.

Your organization’s team needs to have all of the aforementioned hard and soft skills to be successful in digital analytics.

B. Tag Management

In order to get clean and ready-to-use digital analytics data in your platform, your organization must have a tag manager or tag management team that will not eat up IT resources and not tie up a front-end developer’s bandwidth. Typically, folks who have skills and experience in tag management will possess an inclination toward programming languages or web development, but sometimes they will have marketing or IT-related backgrounds.

Tag management is a core component of a successful digital analytics team. Many tags, triggers, variables, and custom scripts can be created and deployed via tag management platforms that will significantly enhance the digital analytics dataset, making the analysts’ job more meaningful, rewarding, and easy to perform. The vast majority of marketing scripts and pixels from Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, remarketing / retargeting platforms and CDPs alike can be deployed via a tag management system, with a competent team of tag managers at the helm, ensuring proper quality control and version control along the way.

Tag management, especially during the post-Covid-19 era, has become even more critical as platforms like OneTrust have deep integrations with tag management platforms, helping organizations with the majority of their cookie management and online privacy matters. As the European Union’s GDPR compliance continues to regulate online data transparency and digital safety, and as other countries around the globe create similar governing articles, tag management’s importance and relevance in the overall digital space and within the digital analytics industry will only continue to grow.

Our tag management at Analytics Metal is front-and-center across all of our client’s digital needs, as it should be in your organization as well.

C. A/B Testing, Multivariate Testing, and Personalization

One great way to establish a deep partnership and connection with your user-experience (UI/UX) team - and many in your organization - is to have A/B testing and personalization capabilities within your organization’s digital analytics team. A skill set that often goes hand-in-hand with tag management, A/B test ideation, creation and execution can guide your organization’s design and iteration, release or sprint process, allowing results of concepts or ideas to be available before they are pushed to production or a live environment.

A typical scenario in A/B testing or with Multivariate testing is that the analytics team - through the analysis of data - discovers something that can be optimized against a target goal and creates a hypothesis. Then, a set of parameters that will govern the A/B or multivariate test will be established. Next, design mock-ups or concepts are created for approval by all interested parties. After approval, the test is deployed and monitored carefully, and, if all goes well, results become available typically after a few short weeks. Finally, a smart, data-driven decision can be made about the test subject, which could include an iteration for an additional test or a deployment to all users, creating space for a quasi-personalization to be hosted by the A/B testing platform prior to a hard-coding or hard-wiring into production.

A/B and multivariate testing are another set of skills and another discipline readily available at Analytics Metal.

D. Data Science / Data Engineering

Most digital analytics teams focus only on digital and eCommerce, and do not venture out beyond those friendly confines. Having personnel or a team that is capable of extracting, transforming, and loading data, creating advanced workflows and writing out statistical and predictive models while working with extremely large and raw datasets could be the difference maker in your organization.

Most businesses have swaths of non-digital data at their disposal, be it in-store sales data, financial data, HR data, and IT data that generally lives scattered throughout a file server or on local computers in Excel or .csv files. Some organizations have platforms like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, or TeraData that safeguards all their sales, product, inventory, and financial data. Having the foresight and vision to blend this type of data with digital analytics can unlock the power of your team, by piping in multiple data streams that could lead to insights that could differentiate your organization from your competitors.

Analytics Metal is a data-centric, data-scientific organization in its own right, having created advanced predictive models across different industry categories and verticals.

E. Reports and Visualizations

Whether your organization uses PowerPoint, Excel, Looker Studio, Tableau, Qlik, Power BI, or something else, most everyone who works in digital analytics has come to understand that distilling the level of complex data into nice-looking and timely visualizations is paramount for leadership and management teams to listen and to trust in you. While it can be challenging, architecting the correct framework of report date-ranges, filters, segments, charts, data blending and delivery mechanisms, all while conveying an articulate and easy-to-interpret message, will earn that seat at the decision-making table. In a lot of ways, in digital analytics, it all comes down to how well you tell a story and present your findings to a room of folks who may very well not understand the inner mechanics of your day-to-day role.

Our team at Analytics Metal has deep expertise and decades of experience in knowing how to prepare for a leadership or boardroom meeting, and how to read a room to react in real-time to changing needs or random one-off questions.

F. Executive Sponsorship

Having the most robust set of tools, skill sets, and personnel will only get your organization so far in digital analytics. Being able to partner with your executive teams or company decision-makers and win their buy-in is possibly your largest and toughest challenge. Your executive teams have to be sold on the idea that data-driven decisions can be made from insights gleaned via digital analytics tools and associated platforms, and that the data used to form those decisions can be trusted.

This is where Analytics Metal comes in. We have decades of combined years of experience in diving deep through challenging currents in the executive boardroom and corner offices, successfully persuading business owners and executive managers with demonstrable results. We know how to translate very technical and detailed subject-matter to derive what really matters, why it’s important, and how likely our recommendations are to work.

In summary, digital analytics is one of Analytics Metal’s core competencies and an area of deep subject-matter expertise. We are steadfast in our belief that we have the experience and expertise in digital analytics that rivals any consultant, agency partner, or internal team in this space. If you are reading this, chances are that your organization needs help - we offer a Free Consultation, where our team will assess the current state of your implementation, tagging, reporting, dashboards / visualizations and how

you deliver actionable insights and recommendations internally throughout your organization.

Let’s have an initial discussion to learn more about each other and to see how Analytics Metal can help your organization succeed in the digital analytics space!