A range of potential customers visits your website every day. With this in mind, it is very important to track key trends in the behavior of these potential customers, including the effect of marketing efforts and sales conversion. Without this information, your business may miss out on valuable opportunities to measure your online performance. Ehime: I'd say we've always used social media since we started, but now we're being very calculated about how we use it. We keep track of our numbers, our impressions, from week to week and compare and see why engagement was up or why engagement was down. What our followers like to see, what they engage with more. I think that before, those were things that we weren't doing and now we have spreadsheets where we track them every week and try to be more deliberate in our actions. Patricia: We have monitoring programs on our social media that tell us how many people are looking at the products and how many people are interacting and actually then we measure how many people actually come through Instagram, or come through Facebook, or just walk-ins or referrals. So depending on, because I mentioned about the different kinds of people that come now, so the youth usually come through Instagram. The decision-makers for bigger businesses usually come through LinkedIn or Twitter. So we are on all of them. So, how do data-orientated businesses collect information needed to drive growth? At the core of their efforts are digital analytics – tools that collect data and generate reports about online activity. For example, digital analytics can enable a business to: monitor website traffic, evaluate which marketing campaigns are most successful, identify the demographic profile of visitors, and learn when embedded videos are played. Given the range of tools and platforms available, knowing which to use in your business can be difficult. There are two primary factors which can help you determine the right tools or platform for you. The first consideration is alignment with your marketing goals and objectives. Digital analytics should support your marketing goals and objectives. When choosing the tools or platform, it is important to pick those that will help you measure the performance of your promotion strategies in direct connection with your marketing goals and objectives. The other consideration is integration. There are two types of integration to think about. First, there is integration of your existing digital tools with a digital analytics platform. These allow you to manage key metrics across multiple digital tools, and observe vital trends such as the relationship between a particular marketing campaign and sales forecasted. The second important type of integration involves the organizational alignment between your marketing and sales teams. In some businesses, a single person may be responsible for sales and marketing, but in other larger businesses there may be a wider team of staff involved. For larger companies, alignment between sales and marketing staff is important to ensure efficiency and to support business growth. Digital analytics can contribute to this alignment by facilitating: integrated marketing and sales activities, shared responsibility for databases, common metrics between teams, data-driven decision-making, and agreement around system processes. If you identify the best way to use digital analytics for your own business, you will be able to evaluate your sales and marketing performance, and drive ongoing growth.