The importance of data analysis for planning: Real-time analytics
Turn around a sales slump, troubleshoot technical glitches before they impact your conversions, and seize marketing and sales opportunities before they slip away.
Real-time analytics enable you to react quickly, giving you the ability to draw instant insights and act upon them immediately.
What is real-time analytics and why does it matter?
Real-time analytics is the analysis of data as soon as it’s created, enabling instant insights.
Knowing how, why, and when, your customers make (or don’t make) buying decisions in real-time, allows you to make fast, effective changes to increase high-value interactions, such as phone calls.
Gain a tactical advantage
Being able to monitor and analyse your website traffic, calls, and marketing response on the spot gives you an enormous tactical advantage.
Relying on reflective, or ‘after the fact’ insights, means you may miss potential opportunities to get ahead of the curve.
With their existing analytics stack, a financial services client had to wait up to a day to see some of the data they needed. That created a problem because they wanted to be able to react quickly to market trends and promote services that are in demand. Being able to see what their enquiries are in real-time allows them to market the right services at the right time to the right people.
Tweak your budgets to reduce costs and improve marketing ROI
A clear understanding of how much you’re spending on your advertising campaigns is invaluable. Careful monitoring of your expenditure means you’ll know how much you can increase bids by if you need to.
By analysing campaign response data in real-time, you can take smaller, calculated risks to achieve higher rewards.
With this information available instantly, you can take advantage of advertising opportunities that your competitors are missing.
See what your users are doing right now
- How many active users are on your site at any time?
- What pages are they looking at?
- Where are they located?
- What actions are they taking?
Use this insight to optimise your user experience: Promote offers, sign-ups, and new products, at the best times for your customers.
Run tests and get results quickly
You might want to test something, such as the position of a phone number, the colour of a button, or a new call-to-action, and see how it affects your conversions. Real-time data will allow you to analyse the results of these tests immediately, so you don’t waste time – or risk losing revenue.
React quickly to unpredictable trends and events
Economic impacts, market swings, changing consumer behaviours, can happen at any time. Monitoring your analytics in real-time allows you to see instantly if there’s a sudden change in your conversions or traffic, enabling you to react quickly to a pressing situation and avoid lost revenue, or damage to your business.
If, for example, you get an unexpected spike in calls, you can quickly increase call handling capacity. Analysing the calls in real-time enables you to understand the issue or opportunity and allows you to put the right measures in place to deal with them effectively.
Check your analytics is set up properly
If you’re implementing a new tracking technology on your website, you’ll want to know that it’s working. By monitoring this in real-time, you can see instantly whether it’s working or if there are any issues that need to be fixed.
Using real-time analytics for marketing success
Gaining tangible insights from analytics remains a challenge for marketers. With the right tools, analysing your own real-time data will transform your insights into meaningful results.
Book a 15 minute online demo and see how Mediahawk’s real-time data improves marketing ROI.
This is the fourth article in our series explaining how important data analysis is for your marketing planning. Catch up on the rest of the series here:
