How can you track and measure your digital performance?

1 Define your goals and KPIs

Before you dive into the data, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with your digital strategy. What are your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals? How do they align with your overall business objectives and customer needs? Once you have your goals, you need to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you track your progress and success. KPIs are quantifiable metrics that reflect how well you are performing on your goals. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, your KPIs could be the number of visitors, sessions, page views, bounce rate, etc.

2 Choose your tools and platforms

Depending on your goals and KPIs, you'll need to choose the right tools and platforms to collect, analyze, and report your digital data. There are many options available, but some of the most popular and widely used ones are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, social media analytics, and email marketing analytics. Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that allows you to measure and understand your website traffic, behavior, conversions, demographics, sources, etc. You can also set up goals, events, segments, dashboards, and custom reports to track and visualize your data. Google Search Console is another free tool that helps you monitor and optimize your website's performance and visibility on Google search results. You can check your site's health, index status, crawl errors, keywords, links, impressions, clicks etc. Most social media platforms have their own built-in analytics features that let you measure and evaluate your social media performance. If you use email marketing as part of your digital strategy, you can use tools such as Mailchimp or AWeber to track metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, conversions etc.

3 Set up a measurement framework

In order to effectively organize and structure your data collection and analysis process, you need to create a measurement framework. This document should outline your digital strategy objectives and how they relate to your business goals and customer needs. Additionally, it should include the strategies and tactics you'll use to achieve your objectives, as well as the KPIs you'll use to measure performance and set targets and benchmarks. Furthermore, the data sources and tools you'll use to collect and analyze data, as well as the reporting and optimization methods you'll employ to communicate and improve results should be included in the framework. This will help inform your decision making and action plans.

4 Collect and analyze your data

After setting up your measurement framework, you're ready to start collecting and analyzing your data. Depending on your tools and platforms, you'll have access to different types of data, such as quantitative data, which is numerical data that can be measured and counted; qualitative data, which is non-numerical data that can be observed and interpreted; primary data, which is data you collect directly from your own sources; and secondary data, which is data you collect indirectly from external sources. To analyze your data, you'll need to use different methods and techniques, such as descriptive analysis to identify patterns and trends in your data; diagnostic analysis to understand the causes and effects of your data; predictive analysis to forecast outcomes in your data; and prescriptive analysis to optimize performance in your data.

5 Report and optimize your results

The final step of tracking and measuring your digital performance is to report and optimize your results. Reporting involves communicating and sharing data analysis with stakeholders, while optimizing applies and tests data analysis to improve performance. To report and optimize results, you'll need to use different formats and methods, such as dashboards for monitoring performance in real time, reports for evaluating performance over time, stories for conveying value proposition, tests for validating strategies, and actions for achieving goals. Dashboards are visual displays of key metrics, reports are written or verbal presentations of findings, stories are narrative stories of successes and challenges, tests are experiments of assumptions, and actions are decisions that implement recommendations.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?