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Digital Data - Internal Sources

This document discusses various internal and external sources that can provide digital data about customers, including Google Analytics and CRM systems. Google Analytics provides aggregated data on visitor behavior, such as acquisition sources, pages visited, and conversion events. CRM systems allow companies to capture more specific one-to-one customer data, such as names, addresses, purchase histories from e-commerce stores. This rich internal customer data provides valuable insights but also legal and technical challenges in how companies set up and manage sensitive customer information.

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24 views

Digital Data - Internal Sources

This document discusses various internal and external sources that can provide digital data about customers, including Google Analytics and CRM systems. Google Analytics provides aggregated data on visitor behavior, such as acquisition sources, pages visited, and conversion events. CRM systems allow companies to capture more specific one-to-one customer data, such as names, addresses, purchase histories from e-commerce stores. This rich internal customer data provides valuable insights but also legal and technical challenges in how companies set up and manage sensitive customer information.

Uploaded by

Rathan k
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Digital data from internal resources

External data helps you build a picture of the category and your target
audience. But, it can only take you so far. You can only access what those
sources give you. And the data is shared. Anyone can access it.

If you want data that’s unique to your brand and customers, you need to
look at internal sources. You set this up, so you’ve a lot more control over
what data you capture.

Google Analytics
One of the first jobs you do when setting up a website is to attach Google
Analytics to it.

Google Analytics is an online tool that measures and tracks what people do
when they visit websites. It’s a vital tool to understand what works and what
doesn’t on your website.

This understanding helps you set and track key digital objectives and
measures.

Google Analytics is an aggregated data source. It doesn’t identify individual


visitors. But it does show what visitors as a whole do on your site. So,
you’re able to look at common patterns of behaviours.

For example, Google Analytics can tell you how many visitors come to
your site. But not just that, it can tell you what time of day they came,
down to the last minute. It can identify which cities or countries they were
in and what type of device and browser they used.

Acquisition
Acquisition tells you how customers found their way to your website. Did
they click through from your social or SEO activities for example? Or was it
a link from another site?

You initiate this by placing “tags” into your digital media campaigns.

These are small pieces of code, which send a notification to Google


Analytics when a specific action happens. For example, someone clicking
on the advert.
You use this data to evaluate the impact of your advertising and your media
choices. You understand what works and what doesn’t based on how
customers interact (or don’t).

In simple terms, the data tells you to do more of what works. And less of
what doesn’t.

You should check your acquisition data regularly. In some cases, that could
be daily. In others, monthly can be OK. But the insights it gives you help
you optimise your digital media. You get more bang for your buck when you
use this data.

Behaviour
he Behaviour section on Google Analytics lets you know what customers
do when they land on your site. There are some key metrics you should
review regularly. These include bounce rate, pages / session and average
session duration.

Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page but then have
no interaction with the page. They ‘bounce’ off the page and off the site.
You generally want customers to interact with the page. For example, you
use calls to action like click a link, view a video, download a file and so
on. If lots of customers don’t interact with a page (i.e. it has a high bounce
rate), it suggests something’s wrong in the set-up of the page.

Bounce rates vary from site to site and from category to category. But as a
rule of thumb, a bounce rate over 60% is usually cause for concern.
Anything under 30% is usually good. And anywhere between 30% to 60%
is the ‘norm’. You can make it better, but it’s not a disaster.

Pages / session
The pages / session metric is helpful if your site is designed to be an
information guide. Or where you want people to read a wide range of
content. The average session duration is similar. This data is often used
to measure sites where the objective is to build customer
relationships. (rather than being an overt “sales” driven site).

Both metrics help measure customer engagement. And they often correlate
closely with future brand (sales) choice.

With online store sites however, the measures might show more of a
problem. If your objective is more conversion (i.e. sales) driven, you want
customers to find the right products quickly. You want it to be fast and easy
for them to buy. High numbers in pages / session and session duration may
show products are hard to find. Or that something’s wrong with the site
navigation.

So, you need to have the context of your site in mind when analysing these
numbers. Again, you should check the performance of your behavioural
digital data on a regular basis. Use it to adjust your website activity
accordingly.

Conversion
The final section in Google Analytics is Conversion. Here you can set up
specific events or goals to track. These are specific actions customers do
on your website, which you want to measure.

These can be as simple as recording a sale on your e-commerce site. But


they could also be more complex. For example, people who viewed a page
or added the product to their cart, but then didn’t buy.

They don’t always have to be sales conversions. They could be any call to
action. Reading a specific page. Spending a set amount of time on the site.
Downloading a specific tool. Registering for email updates. These would all
be examples of conversion goals.

One-to-one internal data


Beyond Google Analytics, you can also capture specific one-to-one
individual data through your website.

Most commonly this would happen through a CRM system.

We cover how CRM is set up and the role it plays in your business in our
guide to marketing technology. We also have a separate article on B2B
CRM, as it’s particularly useful when dealing with professional customers.

But the types of data you capture through a CRM system need to be
carefully monitored. You need to think about the number of individual’s data
you will capture and how much and what type of data you will capture
about that individual.

CRM and email


Something like an email newsletter for example might only require the
capture of an email address. But you may also want to capture when the
registration happened. For example, so you could tie it back to a campaign
that tried to drive registrations.

And while an email address is helpful, if you can start to add more digital
data to that email address, you can start to pull out much richer insights.

CRM and e-Commerce


For example, where you have your own e-Commerce store and details of a
consumer who buys from you, you will by nature of the transaction capture
a higher level of detail about the customer. Their name, their shipping and
billing address and what and when they shopped with you.

As we cover in our set-up your own store guide, you’d most likely use a
third party payment gateway to manage their credit card details. But
nonetheless, there’ll still be a large amount of digital data you’ll have about
the online shopper.

This CRM and e-Commerce data is extremely valuable to build up your


level of insight about customers, and helps you build more loyalty with
them. .

It helps you offer them better, more


personalised and relevant experiences. But it also comes with challenges
from a legal and IT point of view, in terms of how you set-up and manage
this data.

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