So many marketing strategies are available to blogs, stores, businesses and brands today. Whether you’re using search engines, social media, email or some combination thereof, you can reach people in almost every way imaginable. Entire industries have popped up around not only how to market more effectively to your audience, but also how to discern whether your marketing efforts are having an impact. As you collect data and insight via analytics about your visitors’ behaviors, you are collecting valuable data that can give you some answers about your strategic influence. Today, we’ll talk about how your visitor data can be used to determine whether your marketing plans are working.

Specific Patterns of Content Preference

When pinging your website with one piece of content after another, it can all seem to run together from a production perspective. However, your readers, subscribers or followers won’t see it that way. By mining your analytics to see which specific pieces of content are generating the most clicks, likes, shares, conversions or other positive metrics, you’ll slowly but surely begin to paint a picture of what works best. You can then begin to align your broader marketing strategies with what works best for your potential audience. Likewise, brands and businesses seeking to expand into new audiences can overlay this data with specific audience types to determine how best to grow in new markets and with new demographics.

Precise Pages Generating Success

How do you measure success? Every brand has a different definition. For some, it may be subscribing to their monthly newsletter. For others, it could be clicking on a specific product advertisement. As you pour over visitor data, be sure to look not only at the top-line conversion statistics, but also where that success is coming from. Which pages are generating the most conversions for you? Is there a specific pattern that emerges that might not have been obvious during standard A/B testing? Whether you’re dealing with blog posts, landing pages or social media ad campaigns, take the time to review each specific page or element that is generating success above and beyond the rest. You’ll learn valuable lessons from each that can enhance your marketing effectiveness.

Preferred Venues of Traffic

Whether you’re trying to increase the amount of raw traffic coming to your website or striving to boost the number of sales, it’s important to understand how people are arriving at your website – and what each group is doing once they arrive. When dissecting this data, you may discover a variety of surprising trends: for instance, that visitors via direct referrals are converting at a lower rate than visitors through Google AdWords. Your marketing campaign can then adjust accordingly; perhaps pinging your website via one marketing effort suddenly makes more sense from a cost-benefit perspective. This kind of data awareness will ensure optimal efficiency of each marketing campaign you unleash.

There are dozens of different ways to look at visitor data and learn more about your marketing campaigns. Improving overall efficiency matters – by spending less where it’s wasted and focusing resources where you can be successful, you’ll have more money, time and energy to grow your brand’s clout. Leave us a comment below about any recent tweaks you’ve made to your marketing strategy, why you made them, and what results you got from the changes.