Now that we've talked about offline data or ways to collect information about your customers behavior in their everyday lives, let's look at what online data is, what insights it can provide, and how to collect it. With society today becoming more and more digital, marketers have a vast number of tools they can use that will help them gain insights from customers' online behavior. Those insights can better inform marketing efforts, make advertising more personalized, and engagement more meaningful. Here are some of the ways that marketers can track customers as they move through their journey to a purchase. Brand engagement may begin by interacting with a brand's content or posts on social media for instance. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have insights or analytics dashboards that can reveal a lot about an account's followers, including the number of followers, where they're from, what their age is, their gender breakdown, when they're most frequently online, and what languages they speak. This can help a business understand who their audience is on social media, and if the audience they're targeting is indeed the one following them. Social media insights can also provide information on which pieces of content are being interacted with the most, which is also helpful knowledge about your audience. User engagement may also begin when someone sees an ad on social media for a product or service you offer. This is different from the kind of organic engagement a business would build with original content in the way of posts and videos. Instead, the business would create ads targeted to a specific audience with specific characteristics and demographics. When someone clicks on the ad, the business can track the interaction and further interactions with business. Businesses who created ad campaigns through a platform like Facebook Ads Manager, can see when people interact with their ad and what consumers do as a result of seeing the ad. Do they visit a website or app, sign up on the email list or buy a product or service? This data, so knowing whether an ad campaign results in a full purchase or just a website visit, is incredibly valuable to have in order to better understand the impact of your marketing efforts. Website insights produced by dashboards like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, are also able to give you a lot of rich audience data that you can use to inform your marketing strategies. Similar to social media insights, website analytics will tell you how many people are visiting your site, where they're from, what language they speak, their age, and their gender breakdown. It will also tell you where they're entering or leaving your site, how long they're staying on your site, and which pages they're drawn to the most. You can use website data to see how well you're doing on website engagement, content areas to fix, and if your efforts to drive your audience to your site are working. Keep in mind that these insights from social media dashboards and Google Analytics are going to be anonymous to you. You'll know, for example, that 1,000 people between the ages of 30 and 40 living in New York City, clicked on your ad, but you won't know who they are. If you sell products online, you can track not only purchases, but names and information of your customers, like the point of sales data collection we saw in the last video. Here's an overview dashboard from Shopify, a popular e-commerce software tool. Purchasing information will give you a lot of demographic data, product preference data, and customer purchasing behavior insights to use for your future strategies. You could also, more actively, collect customer information through something as simple as a sign-up form for a newsletter, a free e-book, or a rewards or loyalty program. Or you can also gather customer information through feedback questionnaires and surveys that can give you insights on how a customer feels about your brand, uses your products, or how likely they would be to recommend you to others. So far we've talked about data that can be gathered online for a specific website, app, or online business. However, there are instances where marketers want to collect information about the competition as well. They may want to know what audience a competitor attracts, or they may want to get more insights into how they stack up versus the competition. Marketers can leverage third-party databases to gather data about competitors. These third-party databases provide data collected and reported by someone else, namely a third party. In most cases, marketers will have to pay for that data. As with offline data, there are many third-party databases available related to online behavior. Marketers use tools that provide data on online browsing behavior, as well as data gathered from social media posts. Comscore and Nielsen are two prominent providers of data on online behavior. Both report on which websites and apps people use, how much time they spend on them, the demographics of the people who use them, and so on. Together with their data on offline media usage, they provide marketers with a good picture of how users spend their media time. Another type of data tools that can be useful to marketers are social listening tools. They can help marketers understand what people outside their audience are saying about their brand online. They monitor how often different brands are mentioned in social media posts and they provide insights on whether these mentions are mostly positive or negative. As with any type of data you collect, the impact on your marketing strategy and overall revenue generation and brand awareness doesn't come from simply collecting the data. It comes from analyzing it, gaining insights in what it's saying and using those insights to inform your future strategy. In our next videos, we'll take a look at how data is collected and how some data will be more useful than others.
