Hands up if you’re a marketer who’s exaggerated how good your analytics skills are.

Keep your hand up if you haven’t even checked your analytics at some point in the last month.

If your hands are still firmly on your desk, give yourself a pat on the back and go and make another cup of coffee. If your hand is up and you’re currently looking around sheepishly, then don’t worry – you’re in good company.

The truth is that the majority of people in the marketing industry are still struggling to grasp the importance of digital analytics. In fact, nearly one-quarter of all marketers say it’s the biggest gap in their knowledge.

(Looking to shore up this knowledge gap? We recommend CXL’s Digital Analytics Training, but we’ll talk more about this at the end of the article.)

And let’s be clear. When we say digital analytics, we’re talking about more than just page views and loading speed.

We’re talking traffic, leads and sales – the cold, hard figures that show whether your marketing strategy is a success or a failure.

With many marketers still failing to take advantage of the tools at their disposal, here are five important reasons why you should stop putting off that digital analytics training right now.

A website is usually a business’s most expensive digital asset – show it some love!

1. Make the most of your biggest asset

For most businesses, building and maintaining a website is the single biggest marketing investment they will make. Despite this, many marketers are failing to carry out even the bare minimum research to work out how well their website is functioning, and how it could be performing better.

Tools like Google Analytics allow you to track all kinds of useful data to find out who is visiting your website, how they got there and what they do once they’re there.

Think about how much you know about your website: Which pages are performing well? Which pages do people spend the most time on? Which pages are causing people to bounce back off your site?

If the answer to any of those questions is a blank shrug, then you might need to go back to class.

How well do you know your audience?

2. Get to know your audience

One of the most important aspects of any marketer’s job is to get to know the people they’re selling to. Luckily, the power of digital analytics makes this job a whole lot of easier.

Gone are the days of endless surveys and phone interviews. Now, you can simply dig into the data to find out exactly who your audience is and how you can help them.

Whether it’s your website visitors or newsletter subscribers, there is a ton of information at your fingertips. Criteria such as age, gender, language, location and online behaviour will help you to shape your content and create a user experience that will turn leads into customers.

3. Work smarter, not harder

Our professional and personal lives are busier than ever. This should be having a huge impact on your marketing – nobody wants to go all-out creating a weekly newsletter, only for none of their contacts to see it because it’s being sent out on Friday afternoon.

Since timing is all-important, digital analytics should be your first port of call.

Whether its which day is best for promoting your latest blog, which type of email campaign has the highest ROI or what time of day should you be increasing your PPC activity, it’s never been easier to tap into the data and make informed decisions about how and when your marketing activity takes place.

This allows you to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t – helping you to save valuable time and money.

Be proud and show off what you and your team have achieved

4. Start claiming credit for your work

It’s the old cliche: a big marketing push seems to coincide with a bump in sales, but how can you prove that your campaign is responsible? In years gone by, you’d be scratching around for the merest shred of evidence. Today though, the answer is simple: you measure the results.

Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2018 report found that proving the ROI of marketing activities was a top concern for 41% of marketers, but it needn’t be such a worry.

Google Analytics provides marketers with the perfect solution. By tagging your communications and tracking whether they leads to actions such as orders placed, accounts created, or enquiries made, you can measure the real monetary value of your marketing activity.

Put simply, if you’re not regularly looking at your analytics, you’re throwing away the opportunity to prove beyond a doubt that your work is making a difference.

5. Improve your career prospects

By now it should be crystal clear that digital analytics should form part of your marketing toolkit. But even if you’re not convinced, then your employer probably is.

In this era of data-driven marketing, digital analytics is one of the most sought-after skillsets. A quick search on LinkedIn reveals over 5,000 job adverts including the term ‘digital analytics’.

Yet, as we’ve seen, these skills are in short supply. Research by Marketing Week found that nearly 20% of businesses have struggled to recruit data specialists due to a lack of suitable candidates.

By becoming fluent in the language of data, you’re not only helping yourself to do a better job in the short-term – you’re also marking yourself out in a crowded job market and improving your career prospects for decades to come.

Next Steps – Picking A Digital Analytics Training Provider

While there are many training providers in this space, the quality and reputation of each one varies, that’s why we’ve picked just one to get you started…

Whether you’re starting from scratch or topping-up on training, we’d recommend this digital analytics training programme from CXL. With the kind of first-class instruction you’d expect from the world’s leading provider of conversion optimisation training, you’ll get all the digital analytics skills you need to accelerate your career through more effective marketing.

It’s certainly comprehensive, with over 130+ hours of videos and study material, and it’s taught by nine of the best analytics professionals in the world. It’s designed to take someone from the complete basics, like why and how to use Google Analytics, all the way to using important analytics tools like Google Tag Manager, Data Studio and Microsoft Excel. You can see the full curriculum here to see if the course is right for you.

Invest in your analytics skills by signing up to CXL’s training programme here.