When comparing digital and traditional advertising, one of the greatest benefits of utilizing digital marketing is the powerful insights you can collect regarding the performance of your ads. When compared to traditional methods like radio or newspaper which cannot accurately measure performance, digital advertising can deliver in-depth reporting, outlining things like the number of people your ads reached, how many times they reached each person, how many people interacted with the ad, and even demographic information like age, gender and location.
Access to this information allows you to define a target audience for your advertising. Diving into the analytics, you're able to determine who, based on the demographic information above, are interacting with your ads the most and for the lowest cost. Using this information, you're able to adjust the targeting to your ads to ensure you're only showing your content to the people most likely to engage. This maximizes your ad spend and ensures your ads are not being shown to the wrong audience.
Once you have your audience defined, it's time to take a look at another key metric, which is your conversion rate. While digital marketing is an effective tool even for simply getting impressions or views, it's best utilized when there's a specific goal in mind, such as an online store purchase or a lead submission through your website. The action that your customer would be taking after interacting with your ad would be your conversion. The number of people that follow through with this action versus the total number of visitors you receive would be your conversion rate.
Similar to defining your audience, analytics can be used to maximize your conversion rate. By reviewing how your audience is interacting on your page, you're able to make adjustments and tweaks to make the conversion process more seamless for the end-user. Strategies such as split A/B testing allow you to make changes to your online store or landing page and compare the performance of two different versions of the same page. Adjustments to your digital marketing based on your analytics are a key factor in performing well.