Module 7 – The Role of Analytics in Measuring and Optimizing Business Success
The mere mention of data analytics can cause some to duck and cover. Fear not. You don’t need to become a data scientist to benefit from the valuable insights revealed by customer and marketing stats. This article offers a few tips about identifying, gathering, and analyzing data that can help build business success.
About This Article
Reading time: ~6 mins
Format: Article
From Aspirations to Analytics: Key Steps
Knowing what you want to achieve is an essential first step in identifying the analytics worth tracking. Your big picture business goals should be as specific as possible, e.g. a 20% increase in guests from Northwest USA. Your more immediate business objectives also need to be described as clearly and specifically as possible.
Use the SMART method to ensure your objectives are clear and specific:
| These are the five steps to setting SMART business objectives.
|
||
| S | SPECIFIC | Objectives that are vague or overly complicated are a recipe for disaster. Keep them simple, clear, and specific.
|
| M | MEASURABLE | Make your objectives measurable, so you understand what success looks like. How will you know if you are moving closer to, or have achieved, your objectives?
|
| A | ACHIEVABLE | Position you and your team for success by setting objectives that are realistic.
|
| R | RELEVANT | Objectives should align with what the organization and/or the team needs to achieve.
|
| T | TARGET DATE
(Timebound) |
Objectives should have a time frame for completion, so you have something to measure against and know if and/or when they have been achieved.
|
Once your goals and objectives are clearly defined, your marketing strategy and tactics should be designed to drive toward those goals. But how will you know if those activities are working? That’s where metrics and KPIs become your best friends. Tracking relevant data points will help keep your marketing effort on course.
Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, often get mixed up with metrics. KPIs measure performance relative to business goals. Metrics measure specific business activities. While metrics might tell a pilot the air speed and fuel consumption of an aircraft, KPIs relate to the overall goal – arriving at a destination by a specific time.
Both KPIs and metrics tell you what tactics are working to help you achieve your objectives. Here’s an example:
Objective
-
- Increase brand awareness with leisure travelers from Northwest USA for whale watching tours.
Tactics
-
- Improve website SEO for better search ranking.
- Run paid search ads to drive qualified leads to the website.
Measuring Success
-
- KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): Increase in website traffic from Northwest USA
- Metrics: Individual data points that indicate how the tactics are working, e.g. improvement in search result ranking, cost-per-click.
The Customer Journey
When building a measurement plan, it is important to think about the data that can be collected at each stage of the customer journey. And subsequently, the data that relates to your specific objectives.
This conversion funnel defines the customer journey in four stages. For travel and tourism businesses, it is helpful to label these steps: Dream, Plan, Book and Visit. Collecting data at each step can reveal where customers are dropping off and opportunities for improving the content and messaging to move users to the next stage.
Customer behaviour can change based on where they are in the funnel and the channel where they are engaging. Some channels are more effective for awareness (e.g. social media ads) while others, like your website, can facilitate advanced funnel activities such as booking. The available metrics vary by stage and channel. The data related to your objectives should be monitored on an ongoing basis.
Website Data
Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is a free tool that provides a wealth of data about your website. Here are few handy things to know about GA4:
- Universal Analytics was sunsetted in June 2023. If you haven’t created a GA4 property yet, Google created one for you based on your Universal Analytics settings.
- GA4 enables you to see how users interact with your website or app over time including the pages people view on your website, button clicks, even information you’ve collected in another platform (like your email marketing platform or CRM).
- GA4 lets you track additional interactions like video views, searches within your website, and adding items to a wish list. This allows you to understand which content resonates with potential travelers so you can optimize your website accordingly.
Developing Actionable Insights from Your Data
Raw data alone often doesn’t tell us much. The goal for businesses is to turn data into actionable insights. Here is an overview of the process that can help take you from analytics to action:
- Gather the data ideally in one place. This could include data from your website, social media channels, sales reports, and from the various stages from the customer journey.
- Clean the data by fixing or removing errors, duplicates, and inconsistencies. “Dirty” data can lead to misleading insights.
- Visualize the data so it is easier to identify patterns and trends. Charts, graphs, and other data visualizations can help you see what’s going on.
- Reflect on the observations to gain knowledge and consider what questions the data answers. What do the patterns and trends you see in your data tell you about your customers and your business?
- Develop actionable insights. What can you do with the information you’ve learned from your data? For example, if you see that a certain type of customer is more likely to convert, you can target your marketing campaigns to that customer group.
Data is a powerful tool that can create significant competitive advantage. Remember to consider it in the context of your business goals and objectives. What are you trying to achieve? How can your data help you get there?
Last updated: August, 2024
