Benard Kiplangat Your company’s data is always an indispensable part of your marketing strategy. It is crucial to collect relevant insights from the right data sources to monitor and inform your digital marketing strategy. But why should it be essential to collect business data for your company?
Collecting and monitoring the right data for your company helps you grow your business. You will be able to make critical decisions that can significantly impact the performance of your company. Therefore, the more accurate information you collect, the better decisions you can make and the more you can take your data reporting to another level.
This article will discuss the seven essential data sources you can use as a marketer to monitor your company’s performance.
Seven important Data Sources to monitor your business data
Web analytics
Web analytics is one of the most important data sources to monitor that allows website owners to analyze the behavior of their web visitors. The analysis process involves reviewing, tracking, and reporting data to know the extent of web users’ engagement on the website and all its components like videos, images, and web pages.
Web analytics has two main categories:
- Off-site web analytics: This analytics is assessing an activity outside your website so that you can measure the potential of your audience. Web analytics will enable you to analyze the performance of your business in comparison with your competitors. The analytics are based on data collected from web services such as social media platforms, search engines, and forums.
- On-site web analytics: This is a narrow focus on a specific website to determine the website’s performance. This analytics can help you determine how many visitors your site has received in the recent past. The data gathered from this analytics is relevant to the website owner and may include the most popular content on the site.
As a marketer, the data you can collect through web analytics include page views, paths, conversion rates, referring sites, and traffic sources. All this data collected through web analytics is part of customer management analytics, which is used to make better business decisions. By using web analytics, you can retain your customers, attract more visitors and increase your customers’ expenditure volume.
Advantages of Web Analytics:
- Predict the products that are likely to create more sales in the future.
- Know how much money customers spend.
- Perform geographical analysis to know the regions with the most and most minor web visitors and buyers.
- Determine the probability of a past or present customer returning to purchase in the future.
Apart from helping you obtain data from several website data sources to help you monitor your business’ data, web analytics also help you align your product promotions to some customers with the high possibility of buying. Also, they can help you know the customer’s most preferred products, allowing you what to prioritize on your webstore. Therefore, web analytics can strategically improve your revenue.
Keyword trends
Keyword trends is another data source that you should monitor, based on what is trending on Google News, YouTube, and Google Search. To see what is trending quickly, you use the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph connects Google with real-world things for their algorithm to group the trends according to their volume of searches.
Google trends enable web owners to determine the number of searches done over a particular period. It analyzes a portion of the total Google web searches to show the number of searches. To calculate meaningful comparisons from the searches, Google adjusts the search data.
The adjustment is significant because it prevents the websites with high search volume from being ranked the highest in the popularity trends. To successfully adjust the searches, you divide the data points by the total number of searches from a particular geographical location within a given time range to create relative popularity. The result from the division is then scaled in a range of 0-100, where 100 represents the highest popularity.
Keyword Trends Graph
As a marketer, you can use a Keyword trends graph data sources to monitor your relevant keywords for your business. This graph will show you the average keyword trend for all the keywords in your campaign. The numbers on the graph show the total number of searches on a given term done within a particular time relative to the total Google searches within that time.
When you see an Upward Trend, it means that there is an increase in keyword popularity over time, not an increase in search volume. In general, it’s an increase in popularity compared to the total number of searches.
How are Keyword Trends Compared?
On a scale of 0-100, you can identify the item with the highest popularity, with 100 being the highest.
Using the Keyword trends research, you can receive reports within a time range that you need and select the title of the custom report (this is optional). You can also set the keyword tags you want to be included in the information and adjust the location.
The location feature is important because data is relative across different regions, hence the option of selecting a specific location. By default, the location is set to worldwide. After fixing everything, you can now filter out the searches and determine what is trending and what region it is trending at that time.
Social Media analytics
Social Media Analytics collects information from social media channels like YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter and finds meaning in the data to boost your business decisions. As a marketer, social media analytics can be beneficial to you in the following ways:
- Understand what people are saying about your products and services.
- Discover what your competitors are saying and how effective that is.
- To spot trends related to offerings and brands.
- Derive the customer’s thoughts about your products and services.
- Identify what features of specific products are of high value.
- Compare the response of customers on social media channels compared to other communications.
Social media analytics can help make significant adjustments like addressing an issue in an angry tweet and driving other strategic decisions. Analyzing the social media posts allows you to identify the customer pain points, needs, and desired features. This data can be essential to help you make informed decisions.
Business performance trackers
To measure the performance of your business, you need to monitor the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). There are various areas to look at when determining business performance. The areas to be considered are:
- Financial Performance: Various financial ratios can provide valuable data about your business. You can calculate the Gross margin, net margin, percentage of revenue from sales, Business cost recovery, Return on assets, Current ratio, and Business growth.
- Customers: Customers form an essential part of your business. Analyzing various aspects of customers, such as customer tracking, customer satisfaction, and sales trends, can give valuable data.
- Operations: The processes that take place around your business can also provide you with valuable data; under operations as a measure of business performance, you will look at aspects like time efficiency, materials, and energy needed, the costs of production, capacity utilization, safety, and quality concerns. All this data is vital for decision-making.
Advertising platforms
Advertisement is always at the front. It is significant because it can help expose your product to prospective customers, and online campaigns can boost your ROI and increase your sales and revenue.
There are various advertisement platforms for your business, such as Google Ads, LinkedIn ads, Amazon Ads, and many more. Not forgetting, WhatsApp is now becoming very popular. Social media advertisement is an excellent way to gather your business data.
With the high number of social media users, getting customer feedback can be very useful. By building a solid relationship with your customers by engaging them in the product creation process, you will have a reasonable opportunity of obtaining most of the helpful customer information.
Digital advertising platforms have an online shopping cart, which customers can use to make instant purchases. Using digital marketing platforms like Business WhatsApp, you can easily track your performance for your marketing campaigns.
CRM data
CRM data is the data in the customer relationship management (CRM) system. The data stored in the CRM is related to customers, leads, operational performance, and revenue of your business.
CRM software is also one of the most significant data sources to monitor because you can collect vast amounts of data when the system is adopted correctly. The CRM automatically tracks the client’s activity and success rate without you having to constantly input data.
You should set your permissions to control who needs to access what from the CRM. CRM has advanced permissions and visibility settings that can help you regulate what your users can see and do.
Data you can track with CRM
Sales data
CRM helps you determine your business’s success rate in terms of sales. You can know how much you are winning and the areas within the sales funnel that need your attention. The software can detect when customers deactivate their accounts or withdraw their interest in your products and services.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV is the total amount of money customers are likely to spend throughout their lives as your customers. An effective business is one that, apart from gaining new customers, retains the existing customers too. So, using this data, you can determine your business’s level and how you can market your services.
Lead Source
Through CRM, you can determine which medium is the best at drawing clients and maybe help you know which strategies need much of your attention.
Sales trackers
A sales tracker is an application you can use to understand how your business performs. Sales trackers help enterprises to manage deals, calls, or quotas. Using this application, you can track your sales, identify the products that are performing better, analyze your competitors’ prices, and create new leads. It can help you manage your inventory, streamline your business operations and reduce costs.
The significant advantage of using the sales tracker in your business is it helps you to stay organized. You can track your sales in several ways: monthly, quarterly, or yearly. You can track the progress of your business, which is vital in setting up strategic plans. Other advantages of using sales trackers are creating a good customer experience, smooth operation, and faster process.
The sales tracker enables you to analyze the data and behavior of your customers. This data is helpful, especially if you are a retailer, to allow you to understand your customers’ behavior patterns. With the sales tracker, you can quickly identify the reasons for the declining sales of a particular product.
What is required for effective use of the sales tracker?
- Store data in a single space: This will make information accessible from any department.
- Gather meaningful data only: Using important data only will help you use little time focusing only on the most critical areas.
- Use a broad amount of data: A large data pool will help you to manage your sales in a better way. Sales reps use sales tracking templates to generate the required broad data pool.
- Broaden your thinking: Customers’ behavior constantly fluctuates with time. Therefore, you need to broaden your thinking to answer the questions that may arise from your customers.
Next Steps: How can you manage the data sources that monitor your data?
Collecting your data from several sources can be daunting if you do not have a tool to help you source all of them automatically. Luckily, our Dataslayer tools are here to help you. Whether you want to bring all your data to Google Sheets, Google Data Studio,, BigQuery, or Power BI for your reporting, Dataslayer will help you fully and efficiently.
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