How To Use Statistics in Digital Marketing - PPC Hero

Marketing, traditional or digital, relies mostly on human psychology. As a marketer, you can follow a few fundamental customs that have worked for similar businesses in the past but can never be too sure about its success until it works. It’s especially true in the case of traditional marketing, where a lack of metrics is quite evident. 

However, with the rise of analytics, numbers have started to play a major role in the success of digital marketing approaches. For example, now that marketers know email marketing, on average they get a return of $36 for every $1 invested and they can spend a lot more resources on it. 

Statistics offer the much-needed support that marketing strategies need to precisely hit the target audience and their pain points. In this article, we’ll discuss the use of statistics in various digital marketing strategies. 

Content marketing involves producing and distributing content in the form of videos, blogs, and social media posts to stimulate interest in the product or service. Although the objective is to generate sales, content marketing doesn’t explicitly promote the products to the audience. 

When you put your first set of content out, a huge engagement and conversion shouldn’t be expected. As you keep uploading content, you start to understand who your ideal audience is and what you can do to refine your approach with content marketing statistics. As a business owner wondering how to grow your business online, closely monitoring the marketing statistics with statistical data analysis methods can help you identify the trends early on, to make the best use of them.

A handy tool for tracking content is Google Analytics. It offers a wide range of metrics including:

If your content is indexed, you’ll start seeing numbers on these pages. If an underwhelming output is perceived, you need to tweak your approach to satisfy the needs of your intended audience. 

For example, suppose the session duration is lower than expected without it being a fault of the website. In that case, it tells a content marketer that the users aren’t taking the content as valuable and bouncing back sooner than intended. It empowers the marketer to work on it and try something that may work better—like a long-form blog post.  

Another use of statistics in content marketing is keyword research. Content is costly, and resources and money are wasted if you don’t put enough effort into researching the keywords that your content may rank on. The search volume, YoY change, and other attributes are factored in while researching for keywords. Depending on the industry and ranking, you can either go with short-tail keywords or longer ones. 

It’s quite challenging to generate leads and gain customers without paid advertisements. Although content marketing strategies are great for long-term returns, they don’t work well to get quick returns as paid ads do. Social media platforms, search engines, and mobile apps are major sources of paid ads. 

Statistics and paid ads are linked together to a great extent. Although it may seem like you can get increasing returns by spending more on ads, it’s often not the case. Even if your ads are optimized, it takes in-depth data analytics to generate a satisfactory ROI. 

Irrespective of the platform, you need extensive insights to help you optimize your ads. But let’s keep the discussion limited to Google Ads for they are as effective and complex as you would need.

When starting with Google Ads for any business, different marketers take different approaches. But all of them rely on ad statistics. A common strategy is to start with the PPC model. In this model, the marketer takes the necessary keywords and produces ads that run on a pay-per-click billing system. This often results in great engagement and provides the marketer with insights about the ideal customers and demographics. You can tweak your ads depending on these information sets. 

Following the success of the PPC campaign, you can either go with the conversion or ROAS model. However, if your target is to generate leads or increase brand awareness, you may go a different way depending on your requirements and industry. 

Social media has become an integral part of marketing campaigns for most B2B and B2C businesses. Although the average conversion rate from social media is quite limited, being free, they’re great for brand awareness campaigns. However, you may need to tweak your approach and content depending on the particular platform.

These constant “tweaks” that you need to implement in your social media marketing rely on statistics. Even though some platforms have more users than others, they may not be the best for your business and industry. 

For example, if you’re an HR SaaS provider, you may find better engagement on LinkedIn than on TikTok. On the other hand, if you’re selling cosmetics, Instagram may be the best place. Marketers should determine which platform deserves their time and resources through statistics.

Statistics is also used in social media marketing to determine the ideal customer profile. As social media users are diverse in terms of their interests and demographics, the harvested data from previous post engagements offer a great insight into who might be your best customer. You can build your sales funnel around their demographic, interests, and behavior to maximize the interactions & conversions. 

Social media is also great for understanding customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and feedback. The homogenous data from the platforms allows social media marketers to understand their prospects better and analyze what can be done to improve unfortunate situations.   

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not only about indexing a page and backlinking. It also revolves around: 

As a marketer, it’s your responsibility to take care of these elements statistically before engaging in other marketing approaches. 

Google search console and Analytics are notably competent tools for this purpose. From providing data about search performances to letting you know about the responsiveness of your website, they make it easier for marketers to leverage statistics to their benefit. They also help you check the website speed and keywords. By following the recommendations provided by the tools, you can rank higher on SERPs. You also can use PageSpeed Insights to get in-depth statistics on the performance and user experience. 

We already discussed how effective email marketing is in terms of ROI generation. But to get that sort of return, marketers fall back on statistics to a great extent. Moreover, as emails are heavily filtered and neglected by the majority of email clients and users, extensive statistical data analysis methods are essential for them to be nearly as effective. Let’s discuss a few of them: 

It’s the most common tracking mechanism for any email marketer. The clickthrough rate (CTR) is calculated by how many recipients have clicked on one or more links in the email. You can use the data to conduct A/B tests and tweak your future emails to engage more customers. 

Conversion rate is determined by the percentage of users who complete a specific action after clicking on a link. It could be purchasing a product or filling out a lead generation form. These stats are highly effective in informing marketers about their emails’ viability and conversion rate optimization. 

Different from the bounce rate mentioned earlier, the email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. It could be a technical issue or a typo, but you must consider removing the hard-bounced emails immediately. Failing to do so can influence your other metrics negatively. 

The number of recipients that clicked on the “Share” or “Forward” button present in the box determines the forwarding rate. These tracking measures are mostly used for email newsletters and content. However, you may use it to lure newer inactive prospects into making a sale and reaching hitherto territories. 

Although not a reliable stat, unsubscribe rates often allow you to understand how the recipients are reacting to your emails. If you’re getting a lot of unsubscribe requests, you may want to change your email marketing strategy before it does more damage. 

In marketing, statistics are used to identify market trends, measure and evaluate marketing programs, and assess their effectiveness. In order to be successful in a campaign, it’s important to identify the target market accurately as well as use effective marketing communication channels.

Here are some ways to analyze data:

 The purpose of digital analytics is to provide you with a better understanding of what and how users are looking for products and services, and how to enhance your customer experience and strategies by analyzing digital quantitative and qualitative data from all the digital platforms.

If you fully devote yourself to your intuitions by ditching statistics, you may succeed a few times, but you won’t be able to provide results consistently. 

Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, PageSpeed Insights, Google Keyword Planner, etc. are great tools for generating data for marketing purposes. 

Hopefully, you’ve understood how digital marketers use statistics to their advantage. Possibly, if you have ever been involved in any digital marketing efforts, you’ve used statistics to refine your approaches. Statistics help digital marketers make informed decisions to maximize their strategies.