Know Your Digital Marketing Metric Flow

Analytics are essential for making educated improvements to your digital marketing campaigns, but only if the data is reliable. As the number of digital marketing tools expands, so does the complexity of the data. Minimizing your tool set helps minimize the complexities that can cause problems but even a streamlined digital marketing platform should be mapped so that you know how your data is flowing.

Most digital marketers run a monthly report of their numbers and then drill into any anomalies. That’s a great cadence for review but one that can gradually pull you from making accurate conclusions if the data is incorrect.

As an example, digital marketing platforms or apps like Eventbrite are often used to set up landing pages for calls to action. It’s not uncommon for digital marketers to forget to integrate that data into their preferred analytics platform (like Google Analytics) or account for the built in data for those tools.

This can pose a big problem. In this example, the digital marketer might only see outbound links from the website as traffic and ignore social or email traffic. They might then compare that fractional amount of traffic to the conversions they’ve achieved from the page and decide that the landing page is having an outstanding performance. So they re-focus on generating more traffic to the landing page which might not actually be a problem to begin with rather than page conversion tests (which might also not be a problem).

The point is that missing pieces of your metric flow can cause digital marketers to work on the wrong problem, or a problem that doesn’t exist at all. Make sure you fully understand how your marketing tools are collecting data so that you can come to reasonable conclusions based on that full data set.