There’s no such thing as too much data in marketing and business, especially when it comes to web tracking data.
As the saying goes, if you aren’t measuring, you aren’t improving. Informed decision-making is about getting out of your own head and putting yourself in the place of your potential customers. They want great products, excellent customer service, and competitive prices—and they want all three in equal measure.
What is Web Tracking?
Web tracking is a method of measuring user interaction with your website. A web tracker follows users as they browse your site, collecting data about their actions and recording it in log files.
From there, an analyst can review those logs and identify trends or patterns that will help inform marketing decisions. With analytics, you’ll be able to measure how people interact with your brand and make informed marketing decisions based on facts rather than opinions.
What is Web Tracking Important?
Here are a few reasons why web tracking is important, and why you need to be using it. One of the most common reasons that businesses collect web data is to determine how much revenue their website generates.
Using various web metrics including visits, pages viewed, time on site, and bounce rate, we can derive value from these numbers in our reports.
Leveraging Web Tracking Data For Informed Decisions
Every e-commerce company is judged by…Sales. And, when you are in charge of an email program, you feel the pressure put on you to perform a positive ROI. The goal is clear, but sometimes there is no silver bullet on how to achieve it.
You may consider yourself a master marketer, skilled in the ways of copywriting, segmentation, targeted advertisements, and the best day and time to send emails, or you may be like most of us who learn on the fly through testing and data collection.
Most ESP’s today track users’ conversions by item, tie it back to an email address and package it up into a predefined set of reports for you to digest. However, there is always one missing report that you wish you had because it is valuable to your organization.
This report likely is created from multiple sources of data and often involves complex automation across these sources, leading you to combine them into either an excel file or some other BI solution to visualize it.
“Easy and efficient right,” -said no one ever.
Empowering The Data-Driven Marketer
As a customer who uses iPost, our tracking pixels are continually collecting website user raw tracking data, including conversions. From there, we then derive the reports that you see in the platform that has been carefully crafted from what data-driven marketers need to achieve their goals.
However, an anomaly is that every marketer, every company, and every campaign is unique, and the pre-defined reports available to you might not be what you need or want.
Email marketers want a scalable and flexible solution to their needs, not the vendor’s needs; in our latest release, we have decided to expose ALL of the raw data for you to use.
iPost’s SQL Editor will let you, the email marketer, query the entire database of tracking information precisely how we received it to collect information. No aggregation or editing was made.
Here are 8 examples of how you now have complete control over the data you own:
- Look at the raw, non-aggregated data: the level of detail is the single event happening with your emails.
- Create your formulas: if, for example, you compute click-to-open rate differently, now you can easily derive that, together with any other complex calculation.
- Create the reports and filters you need: browse just the metrics you use for the time period you need.
- Besides Orders and Order Items, you now have access to the full web tracking data
- Funnels (from your Abandoned Cart automation, for example)
- Custom Conversions (e.g. a video)
- Page Tracking data (who navigated to my website starting from an email? Which pages did they visit? Which link did they click on?)
- The ability to use this data outside of queries (in Dynamic Lists, Dynamic Tables, Automation Engagement Splits, and more)
CONTINUOUS INNOVATION
iPost is committed to innovation, especially when it comes to giving you our customer control over data and using it as it was meant to be used. We are excited about this recent release of using this data outside of queries, and we welcome your feedback and suggestions for the future!
Our goal is to make sure that web tracking becomes an effective tool in your email marketing toolbox!
