faulker046

Do you understand the mechanism of Web Analytics? Do you understand how data is collected and translated into the nice reports that you see in Google Analytics, WebTrends, Adobe etc.? Now you can. Signup for my online course  - "Web Analytics Under the Hood". This Online course will go under the hood and show you how the data gets generated, collected and processed to generate beautiful reports that you see in your Web Analytics tools. Having a good understanding of what happens behind the scene will provide you the confidence you need to support your understanding of the reports and provide a fresh new perspective on Web Analytics reports. This course will be helpful for both newcomers as well as seasoned professionals. I will cover topics that I ask in interviews while hiring a web analyst. This course will help you: Understand how browser/server communication happens. Understand how data gets passed to server. Understand how data is collected ( Javascript, server logs) - ...

As many of you already know, I teach few courses in Digital Marketing and Analytics at various universities and colleges including University of Washington and Bellevue College in Seattle area. Last year I was asked if I can design a course on Data Visualization using Tableau. Since we were actively using Tableau at work I decided to do it.  I have taken that same course, that I taught, and developed an eBook. The audience of this eBook is beginners who want to learn the basic of Tableau and get familiar with various interfaces and terms used in Tableau.  If you are someone who wants to learn Tableau or have looked at Tableau but don’t fully understand it, then this eBook is for you. I am giving away few copies of the eBook in return for the feedback.  If you are willing to provide me the feedback on this book within a week, then email me at batraonline at  gmail.com  or tweet me at @anilbatra and I will send you a copy of it. ———————————————————————————————————...

1st, 2nd and 3rd Party Data Demystified I have referred to 1st party and 3rd party data in a lot of blog posts. Based on the queries I get, both via email and in the classes I teach, it is time to clarify what various data sources mean. 1st Party Data 1st party data is the data that you (brand/publisher/retailer) have collected about your visitors, customers, shoppers etc. You own the data outright and all the rights to it. You can use it for any purpose you want based on the agreements with your visitors, customers, shoppers etc. as specified in your data collection and use policies. Some examples of 1st party data are: Site registration data – name, email, address, gender etc. Visitors behavior data on your site – time of visits, minutes spent, products looked at, source of visits etc. Shoppers/customers purchase data – products purchased, transaction amounts, coupons used etc. Email data – emails sent, opened, clicked etc. It is most widely used data for the marketing purposes. Gene...

Contextual advertising is not new, when I first started writing about targeting advertising the technology was new, the concept was new and few bold marketers were trying and learning from their mistake while helping others teach on how not to make this mistakes. A post by Kevin Hillstrom,  Highly Targeted Digital Ads That, Well, Just Read The Article ., tells me that we have yet to learn from the mistakes that have been made since the early years of online ad targeting. I remember when we are first dabbling with display ad targeting  and  retargeting  back in early 2000s, one of the things we were trying to solve for is to understand the full context of the content you were reading.  We saw many marketers making the mistake of not understanding the negative context of the content and wasting their ad dollars on wrong content. For example we saw an ad targeted (I believe it was served by Google) on a page talking about plane crash that showed an ad for carry-on ...

“What is the business objective and who is the audience?” this is the question you should always ask before developing  data insights .  This will help you figure out if you need to focus on Interesting or actionable insights. Yes, actionable insights are also interesting but not the way Media thinks. Media hypes Interesting Insights, insights that might not be actionable and valuable to the business. Your business stakeholders might prefer actionable insights over interesting. I said might because some business stakeholders (sometimes) will prefer Interesting even though that can’t do much with it, it just sounds good in their presentation. Let’s look at example of Interesting insights that gets coverage in Media. For example, here is except from  The Weather Channel’s Secret: Less Weather, More Clickbait “We can tell you that on a January morning in Miami, if a set of weather conditions occurs, people will buy a certain brand of raspberry,” he says. Not just any fruit. ...

Data is the raw material for developing insights. If the complete data is not available to insights team then you can’t expect the insights to be very valuable. Insights teams will make the best out of what they have available but you will get far better insights if you spend little time with them to understand what they need and help them with these for major roadblocks. Data Sources and Collection – Insights team has identified the data sources required for them to provide great insights, the data is all there either available internally or externally. The big challenges comes when the data teams actually start to figure out how the data will be collected. For  internal data sources  the organizational barriers are the biggest ones that prevent one team for getting access to the data that other team owns. Your team will need your help in navigating those barriers and help the free flow of the data. If external data sources are on their list then your help will be needed to p...

Email list growth is the foundation of email marketing program. Unless you keep care in protecting and growing that list you will end up non functional email marketing program. Recently, I wrote a post on  23 Metrics for Email Marketing Metrics  that you should know about, in this post I am taking 3 metrics from that list and adding one more to call out the 4 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the email list growth.  Here are the four KPIs: Email Complaint Rate/Spam Complaint Rate  – SPAM complaints can kill your marketing program. This KPIs allows you to see if SPAM complains are becoming an issues, you goal should be to minimize this KPI. Spam complaint rate is measures as the percentage of your email recipients who marked your emails as Spam. Looking at this number campaign by campaign and then aggregated over month will show you if you are annoying your subscribers to a point where they consider your email as spam. This number is readily available in mo...