Today’s analytics systems collect billions of data points daily—a vast collection with a short shelf life, from which we must select only the data that adds value to our operations. So, how do we identify the data that’s essential for our business?

Actions Begin with Strategy

The foundation of any action plan is strategy. Formulating a strategy requires analyzing various factors such as the product itself, its market, the target group, and the tools we have at our disposal. With this in place, we can set the goals we want to achieve and estimate that we can meet them with the available resources. This is the first moment when we need to refer to numerical values. Ideally, we can base these on knowledge from historical campaigns of a similar product or targeting a similar group. But what if we’re entering a market where we’ve never operated before? In such cases, we need information from multiple sources. When it comes to data, the industry categorizes it by its owner:

• 1st party data – the advertiser’s own data from analytics systems, CRM, or sales systems;
• 2nd party data – first-party data shared with another entity, such as a publisher providing user data to an advertiser when running a campaign;
• 3rd party data – data collected by entities whose sole purpose is to aggregate and sell data, often shared via data management platforms (DMPs).
  
  

Where to Source Data?

The simplest and most reliable method is to commission market research. Though expensive, it provides structured, in-depth knowledge on a particular field. A more cost-effective solution is to purchase access to platforms like Gemius, which offer real-time monitoring of competitors or entire market sectors. These platforms, focusing mainly on online data, provide the highest accuracy when compared to other media measurement methods. The last, nearly free option (if done in-house) is collecting data from the web, which is full of reports, free analyses, and databases such as those from the Central Statistical Office (GUS). These sources are not only free but also vast and multidimensional, ensuring you’ll find the foundations for your strategy.

We should also remember the tools offered by Google—Keyword Planner and Google Trends. Complementing this statistical knowledge with empirical insights gathered while browsing competitors’ websites is essential. This helps us spot the tactics advertisers use, understand the messages they communicate, identify the channels they utilize, and see how frequently they run campaigns and which keywords they target. In reality, all of the above data sources should form the basis for drafting your strategy.

How to Identify Valuable Data?

We now reach the point where we must determine which data to collect and analyze. Google Analytics (GA) will always be a natural starting point, but we must remember that GA operates on predictive values and may lack precision. Improved data quality from GA can certainly be achieved through proper goal configuration, implementing Google Tag Manager, and using UTM parameters, but it’s still statistical data. What we need to do is constantly compare the data from analytics systems with actual events.

For example, we can cross-check completed forms, records saved in a CMS, or emails arriving in our inbox with the numbers shown in Google Analytics. Similarly, we should regularly compare order data from Analytics with financial results from accounting systems. This approach will help verify the accuracy of our analytics configuration and website code or highlight discrepancies.

What Metrics Are Essential for Building an Effective Strategy?

Let’s return to the question of which metrics we should collect to ensure our strategy is implemented successfully. Each target group will have a unique set of performance parameters, but here are five key metrics that are common to all campaigns:

• CTR (Click-Through Rate) – This measures clicks on an ad, indicating the quality of the graphic, the visibility of the ad placement, and the relevance of the target group. Its multidimensionality doesn’t allow for straightforward conclusions, but it provides valuable insight into the user’s first point of contact with the campaign.
• Time spent on site – This reveals whether visitors to our site are engaging with the content. A supplementary metric could be visit depth, which measures how many pages the user clicks through. However, one must be aware of how “time on site” and “visit depth” are measured by analytics systems like Google Analytics. Depending on the structure of the website, these data points could be misleading.
• Form completion or data submission – This indicates interest in our product. The number and cost of acquired leads should be key KPIs for the campaign.
• Ad interactions – Knowing the types of ads users engaged with and the content they interacted with helps place them at the appropriate stage of the purchase journey, influencing subsequent targeting efforts.
• Conversion and attribution – This not only tracks the occurrence of events we defined as campaign goals but also attributes conversions to the various channels with which the converting user interacted.

Now, it’s time to apply these metrics to the KPIs set out in your strategy, analyze them, and implement the appropriate optimization measures. This is the most exciting part of the process—drawing conclusions and testing new solutions. We always recommend the Test, Learn, Scale method, which minimizes media waste while testing tactics on real audiences.

Collecting accurate data is essential for making informed marketing decisions. The integrity and freshness of this data should be one of the primary intermediate goals of any 360-degree online strategy.