Web Analytics
Web Analytics refers to frontend (i. e. happening in the user’s browser) data collection with the goal to analyze how users interact with the website. Even in 2020 way too many companies are unable to answer even basic questions about what people, their potential customers, want and do online.
- How many users find our site through our different traffic channels?
- Within the SEO channel, which pages generate the most traffic?
- Which parts of that SEO traffic really generates customers and sales?
- What did it cost to acquire the user?
- How often does a customer need to buy in order for us to turn a profit?
- How can we avoid spending resources on users who are not going to become happy and profitable customers anyway?
- …
It can be quite difficult to get the data to answer these questions. But if you’re missing the necessary data in the first place, it will be impossible. Having data is better than needing it and that’s why hume.dev here is all about teaching you how to collect it.
Marketing Tech
Marketing technology for me describes any implementation that enables data collection with the primary purposes of marketing products and services to people. In most cases, people’s behavior is analyzed to infer to what kinds of offers they are most likely to respond to in order to maximize ROI by either increasing conversion rate, lowering advertising cost or both. The most common examples for this are the tracking SDKs offered by all major content consumption platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat. Simple conversion tracking “pixels” which count conversions or very specific implementations like on-site personalization to increase the average shopping basket size all fall under this category.
Not all Marketing Tech happens in the browser though. Once the data is collected, there are usually all kinds of different processes to reformat, clean and move it until any real analytical insight can be generated from the data. If the phrase “Data is the new oil” holds any truth, MarTech is the refinery process necessary to actually turn it into a valuable product.