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Many organizations fail to create a culture of analytics, not because they don’t understand the value of analytics, but because the analysts fail to craft a good and relevant story with the data.  We have all seen reports filled with pretty charts, graphs and numbers.  After going through all the data if the audience doesn’t have a clear understanding of what the reports are telling and what they should do with those charts and graphs then the analyst has failed in his/her job, no matter how pretty the reports are. Let’s face it, numbers are interesting for a while but a lot of numbers without a story leaves audience either unsatisfied or bored.  However a well-crafted story with data weaved in can keep your audience involved. It is still the data presentation but with a solid story that ties the data back to the business objective. Data Analysts need to become better story tellers if they want to build a culture of analytics at their organization. Here are some of the el...

Number one mistake marketers make with email marketing is to send “Irrelevant” messages to their customers. It is not because they don’t understand that sending relevant messages drive higher conversions. It because they think that email messages are “Free” and incremental cost of sending messages to “non-target” customers is Zero. They hope that, by sending emails to everybody, some of the “non-target” customers will respond to their message thus causing overall conversions to go up. However, this is a big mistake because what they don’t realize is that ultimately they will lose the privilege to this “Free” marketing. Here is how you can see this unfolding and ways you can measure the impact In the beginning, engagement with the “irrelevant” email starts to slow down. People still open emails with a hope (if brand is one that they trust) that they might find something relevant to them. This issue will be evident in your declining (or low) click-through rate. Then when people get ti...

Marketers spend millions of dollars on digital marketing campaigns every day. Analytics help marketers get the most of out of every dollar spent and drive great benefits for them and their organization. Data collected at each step of the way to conversion can help marketers and their agencies in optimizing each campaign's performance. Below I've outlined five tips on how to use the data to optimize marketing campaigns. 1. Target the Right Customers For a campaign to have any chance of succeeding it has to reach the right customers. Clearly defining customer segments is a critical component of any campaign. You can use historical data from previous campaigns to determine which customers are more likely to respond to your campaign. For an in-house email list, you can use attributes that you have available in the database and create a segment of customers with those attributes that have responded in the past. For display advertising, you can use email attributes or o...

Lack of standard definitions for the metrics causes people to report different numbers for supposedly same metrics, leading to confusion and total lack of trust in data.  No trust in data means that nobody is going to use the data to make strategic decisions and there goes all your efforts to create a culture of Analytics. Having standard definitions is not as easy as it sounds.  It starts from you and your team having a clear understanding on how to calculate various metrics.   Some seemingly simple metrics can be calculated in various different ways and all of those ways might be right but getting one standard way of calculating those removes any confusion and gets everybody on the same page. Let’s take an example and see how many ways you can calculate “COST”.  How do you calculate cost? In case of Search Marketing, I am sure you are taking actual amount paid to Google or Bing. Right?  So that is actual media spend. But what about the cost yo...

I rarely write tool specific posts on this blog but since I have recently been asked by a few people about this issue and it affects every web analytics tool, I decided to post it here. A few months ago, Google, the search engine, started encrypting searches for user who are logged into their Google account while conducting the search. As a result of this encryption, the keyword that the visitors search to arrive to your site is not passed in the referring URL. Web Analytics tools rely on the keywords passed in the referring URL to build the search engine traffic report and in the absence of the keywords there is nothing to report, though they still see that the visits came from Google search. So Google Analytics now marks those visits that do not have a keyword but come from Google with “(not provided)” keyword instead of the actual keyword . Finding those keywords Google still tracks all the keywords search by logged in users but just does not pass it in the referrer to the site that...

This morning, Web Analytics Association announced that it is changing its name from Web Analytics Association to Digital Analytics Association . Why the change? All of those who have been working in this industry for few years know that the term “Web Analytics” does not reflect the actual work we do. As I wrote in my last post “ Move Web Analytics Data Out Of Silo ”, “Web Analytics” purpose was to report on one channel “your website”. Nowadays the story is different, customers interact with your brand in so many way, your website is just one small part of the whole “web” ecosystem. The work most of the web analysts do today involve more than web. Web Analysts today analyze many “digital” channels such as social, mobile and email along with web. Many are starting to deal with other digital channels such as “Set top boxes”. So definitely “Digital” is a better term to describe the work that web analytics groups undertake. I like the evolution of “Web Analytics Association” to “Digital A...

Web Analytics tools are great for providing a good view of one channel i.e. your website (ok, maybe slightly more than one channel e.g. some email, some social media, some offline). They worked great in silo for first few years of the internet because the only way for customers to interact with your brand online was on your site and websites were not an integral part of the business. Nowadays the story is different, customers interact with your brand in so many way, your website is just one small part of the whole "web" ecosystem and "web" is just one part of the whole "customer" experience and buying cycle ecosystem. Customer’s don’t think and operate in one channel i.e. your website. However, many "web analytics" tools do not even provide you full view of a customer journey and interactions online let alone the offline journey. To understand today's customer and performance of your marketing efforts, web analytics data has to move out of it...