As an expert in your industry, it’s easy to assume that you know everything you need to know about your audience. You may believe to understand how your audience thinks, what your audience wants, and how you should talk to “said” audience. Yet marketing, digital or not, is not about familiarity or intuition. It’s about data.

Here’s why:

If we scrap the facts and instead rely on intuition, we’ll likely make wrong assumptions—like when we thought the earth was flat or at the center of the universe.

Digital marketers see this all the time. Online campaigns that ignore data nosedive. Unlike other marketing mediums, digital marketing collects a lot of information. Marketers must refer to this data early and often: 

• How often is an ad shown to someone online?
• How often is an ad clicked on?
• Which headline receives the most response?
• Which call-to-action inspires the most activity?

Digital strategists, like us, interpret this data and use it to our advantage. In each campaign, we make a hundred slight modifications to ensure we meet the campaign objectives. Your objective could be one of the following:

• Increase the quality of our website traffic
• Generate 5-10 quality leads every month
• Receive 300+ phone calls from patients looking to schedule an appointment
• Increase blog subscribers by 150%
• Increase E-commerce product sales by 15%

Using metrics to measure campaign performance is critical. Without tracking these metrics, a campaign may seem successful when website traffic and conversions went nowhere. Paying for digital campaigns that have little to no effect on your business is pointless. Instead, strive to know all aspects of your user to optimize your campaign.

Is Your Website a “Hot Spot”?

Puns aside, knowing how traffic is engaging with your website helps you control the fate of its success. Web developers can change the UX all day long, but does the change drive conversions? Where should the change actually be done? 

Mobile is becoming the primary source of web traffic in most industries. We expect this trend to continue. Thus, it may help to analyze button click conversions on mobile vs. desktop devices to ensure comparable performance. If merely 10% of your subscriptions come from mobile traffic, that’s valuable intel you have to know. After identifying the issue through statistics, work with a web designer to identify ways to improve the likelihood of mobile conversion.

For your website to thrive, know what the user is doing - not what you think they will do. Here are simple questions every digital marketer should know the answer to:

• Where is website traffic coming from? (organic, referral, PPC, etc.).
• Is mobile traffic engagement consistent with desktop?
• Are users seeing the pages I want them to see?
• What percent of traffic is converting?
• What is driving users to convert on the events I’ve set up? 
• What is making users leave my website?

Once we know the facts, we use them to improve the website and ensure its goals. If our initial strategy is not working, we run A/B testing or other experiments until we figure out what does. Serve users a website they want to see, not one that never needs to change.