When it comes to internet marketing – or any kind of marketing for that matter – there are very few things that are more important than metrics. Metrics let you track your customers and they let you track the performance of your site.
The single customer view is your single control panel to this end and a place where you can get a broad overview of all metrics in one place. And with a tool like this, the possibilities are near-endless.
The term single customer view refers to a console, a database or any other aggregated view of all the data you know about your customers. This in turn allows you to perform stronger analyses that can help you to identify weak points, define strategies and target the right types of users in the right ways.
Top Tools for Collecting Data and Metrics
There are many tools that you can use in order to collect data about your users. These include:
- Google Analytics – Google Analytics is perhaps the most well-known tool for collecting data regarding a website’s performance. Here, you can look at information regarding your number of hits, number of visitors, average bounce rate and MUCH more. You can also set up goal tracking and more advanced strategies.
- JetPack Analytics for WordPress
- Plus any other tracking/analytics tools that may have come with your hosting account etc.
- PPC platforms - If you use pay per click advertising through Google AdSense or through another site, then you can get a lot of information from here regarding the types of people who click on your ads, which ads perform best etc.
- Surveys – Collecting data from your users and visitors is a very good way to find out more about them and especially when it comes to collecting qualitative data.
- Market Research – You can ascertain and extrapolate information from looking at the performance of your top competitors. Who uses their sites? How much overlap is there likely to be here?
And of course, there are also many more options for collecting data.
Using a Single Customer View
By using tools like this, you can then collect a lot of data about your audience and view it in a single place. This could be a piece of custom software that you develop in-house, or it could be a 3rd party tool that can help to collect lots of data in a single place. Then there are the other methods: such as manually collecting the information.
This will then allow you to see the broader picture when it comes to your customers and your marketing and will let you choose the best way to bring more visitors to your site – or to spend your ad revenue etc.
Some top metrics to look for include:
Demographics: Knowing the sex, age, location, marital status and more of your target audience will allow you to develop products and content aimed specifically at them. Know your buyer persona. It will also allow better targeting through tools like Facebook Ads. Income is also important, as it tells you how much they are likely to be able to spend.
Point of Origin: Knowing how your audience got to your site is important. It tells you where they were before they came to your site and that tells you which channels are most effective.
Interests: This is very important for finding routes to market and more.
Engagement: Think about lead management and nurturing. Is this person on your site a cold lead or warm lead? How ready are they to buy?
CLV: CLV is customer lifetime value. It tells you how much your average customer spends with your brand and how much profit you area likely to make from that.
The Opposite Argument
Before we sign off – consider one opposing argument put forward by author and marketing guru Tim Ferriss. He suggests that you should focus on just one metric that is representative of everything else. This makes tracking easier and means that you can hone your performance. That metric should ideally be correlated with all the others, meaning you get a single customer view from a single data point.
