This article is designed to help you understand how to analyse and monitor your digital marketing platforms. You can use it at the strategic or tactical level when developing future plans. I am not going to go into the theories associated with strategy design or business planning because I have already written about these subjects (you can find the post here). The main objective is to highlight the types of free digital monitoring platforms you should utilise.
Most of you will already know how to complete a PESTLE analysis or do a review of Porters 5 forces: these are two fundamental processes that need to be completed when analysing your digital marketing platforms. Use them as a checklist for testing a given market. It will help you identify the current and future competition (you will use some of the platforms listed below to test and compare their digital positions). These processes will also help you to understand the wider environmental impact of your existing or future strategies and they are a great way to benchmark your performance.
The list below is not everything that is available out in the market place, there are many commercial options (ie pay to use) that could provide a better solution for you: if there are any others that you think I should add to the list then please make a note in the comments section. These are the ones that I am comfortable with and use often, they include:
- Alexa.
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Analytics
- Linkedin Analytics
- Serch Engine Results Page (SERP)
- Keyword analysis (Using Adwords)
- Backlink Checker
- SEO Checker
- Google webmaster tools
- SumAll
- Tweepsmap
- Klout
- Social Impact
Lets now look at each of these individually
Alexa
Alexa is a Web Information Company. It provides free website analytics for all websites. Its best known for its ranking system which tracks over 30 million websites worldwide. Use this tool to benchmark your site with others. For a fee you can create a dashboard to view other tools.
Alexa’s traffic estimates are based on a diverse sample of millions of worldwide internet users using thousands of different types of toolbars. You can use this to monitor your sites and your competitor’s sites. (Source: Alexa.com)
Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to review your web performance over any given time period. You can also view the performance of your ads, videos, and social platforms. You can monitor the performance of your digital platforms across desktops, tablets and smartphones. (Source: Google Analytics)
There is a whole host of things you can do with Google Analytics, the figures above are just two examples of what can be done. It should be noted that with Google Analytics you can only monitor the sites that you own. I would recommend that you have a good process for managing who you have given the analytic access to: I know a number of people who can still view the data for organisations that they have left. There is an administration page that allows you to do this.
Facebook Analytics
Facebook Analytics lets you monitor your Page’s performance. It should be noted that you can only gain access to the analytics if you have at least 30 people liking your Page. The analytics platform provides you with anonymous demographic data about your audience. (Source Facebook)
It should be noted that you can only access Facebook analytics for those pages which you have administration rights.
LinkedIn Analytics.
If you are operating in a B2B environment then I would encourage you to have a LinkedIn company page. You can highlight or promote your products/services here: use it as an extension to your own website. What I would say is, if you are going to invest the time and effort to managing such a page then you should have a means of monitoring it: LinkedIn has a set of built in tools to do this. If you are the administrator you will have access to the number of people engaging with your organisation’s company page, the trends across any key indicators you have set and the follower demographics. (Source: LinkedIn)
Remember you need to promote the fact that you have a LinkedIn company page. The best thing to do is create a link button at the bottom of the email for all staff encouraging others to like the page. This is another tool that will only give you access to your company data. Anyone who has registered with LinkedIn and has an appropriate email address (ie the @yourcompany.com, relates to the company page you are looking to setup) can setup a company page: this means that you need to set up policies for managing the process. I have wasted many hours working for organisations trying to find out who set up their original company LinkedIn page to claim back the administration rights.
SERP Tools
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) tools are designed to identify the search engine results position (why they have called it page instead of position still baffles me!) for a given term, on a given search engine, for a given website. You should use this to monitor how your website and your competitors are performing. I have found many SERP tools (using Google) that don’t actually work for me. The most reliable one is an app called 4th (see figure below):
This is particularly useful to me because when I am with a client I can quickly demonstrate where their keywords appear in an internet search.
Keyword Analysis.
To help you get a better handle of your SERPs you need to understand how competitive your keyword is. To analyse this you need to sign up to Google’s Adwords: this is a platform that allows you to advertise your organisation on Google. It’s Keywords tool will give you a view of the number hits each word is likely to have by location. It is fair to say that keywords do not have the same prominence as they use to have in SEO, you will need a good idea of the keyword impact when developing your title. Incidentally, if you are doing Pay Per Click Campaigns the you should use this as an analytics tool: I am not going to cover it in this section as I want to do a more in depth review later.
Backlink Checkers.
Backlink Checkers will highlight who has links to your site. There was a time when the quantity of these backlinks were an important factor in determining your search engine position. Today it is more about quality so you still need to know has hooked up to your site because the wrong links could have an adverse effect on your SEO.
There are many backlink checkers available online and what you will find is that the results may not always be the same. You need to find the ones that give you the “Google Page Rank” (ie how Google Ranks your website) and “No Follow” status (this is the attribute to instruct search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index). Here are some examples of the many backlink checkers out there:
You can use this tool to monitor your sites and your competitor’s sites backlinks.
Google Webmaster.
Google Webmaster Tools is a service provided by Google for digital managers and webmasters (a similar platform is also available from Bing). It houses a range of tools that you can use to test your sites digital optimisation. You can only use it if you are the owner of a particular site and you will have to prove that you are by embedding some code into your header.
It covers in detail all the elements I have already discussed above. One of the great things about the Google Webmaster Tools is the Author Stats: it will show you the average search engine results position for every page you have over a given period. This is a great way to say how well your SEO is working. Alternatively you can use one of the many other tools it has to maximise your site’s impact.
SumAll.
SumAll is a tool that consolidates your analytics in one place. You can view sales, site visits, fans, followers and much more. You will also get daily reports on your platform’s performance. SumAll is ideal for comparing the impact of each platform: it should help identify where to focus your efforts. I personally use it as an initial summary review of my campaign activities. It is also useful as a dashboard for senior executives and staff: it gives them an element of ownership and comfort (if things are going well) knowing how their digital channels are performing. (Source: SumAll)
Tweepsmap
Tweepsmap is a tool that will allow to quickly identify where your Twitter followers are located. It will help you establish if you followers are located in the market you are operating in. You should decide if the effort invested in managing this platform is worth it. For a fee you can gain an even more comprehensive report of your followers. To find out more about Tweepsmap please refer to an earlier article I wrote (click here).
Klout
Klout is a platform that has developed an algorithm to measure an individual’s (or brand’s) social media influence. The algorithm will produce a score (the Klout Score) between 1 and 100. The higher the score the better the influence. They use multiple pieces of data which is gather from a number of social media networks. (Source: Klout)
You may also want to consider using Social Mention or Addictomatic to review your Social Media impact.
These are just some of the tools you can adopt to analyse and monitor your digital marketing platforms. I selected them because they are the ones I use and they are free. There are many more available, some at a cost. The most import aspects of using these tools are:
- Having the resources to do it.
- Having the processes in place to manage it (access, responsibility, etc).
If there are any new tools that I have missed then please add a comment as I and the readers will be very interested.
Alan Shaw
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