Online Marketing for Marketers

With the volatility in the economy these days, marketers are being held more accountable for the dollars being spent online. Quality has replaced quantity, and getting your arms around the ROI from each campaign is a much more pressing issue. Fortunately, given a proper strategy, marketers can obtain the tools needed to help them spend wiser.

Developing a campaign tracking strategy is a common challenge for organizations. However, this strategy is fundamental to the success of your campaign analysis. A campaign that is tagged improperly will yield incomplete data which negates a marketer’s ability to track ROI and often leaves marketers with unanswered questions about their campaigns. Educated guesses need to be replaced with data-driven decisions as it pertains to what works and what doesn’t as you embark down the path of campaign optimization. Read more

Last week I talked about some of the new changes Google is phasing into their web analytics platform. This week I wanted to introduce yet another enhancement that the folks from upon high in Mountain View bring to us - Event Tracking. With Event Tracking Google is really stepping out into the more advanced or enterprise level reporting realm.

The idea behind Event Tracking is that now you can track discrete user actions beyond and deeper than at the page level. For instance, now you can track user interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as AJAX, Adobe Flash / Air, Microsoft Silverlight, and many social networking applications. Read more

One of the questions I often get from clients is if the Google Analytic platform is sufficient for their needs. The answer usually depends on the nature of their site and what they would like to accomplish business-wise with it. Many B2B web sites are primarily concerned with promoting their corporate brand and lead generation. Their conversion funnels tend to be relatively simple, tracking a visitor through to a lead for example. Interestingly, many organizations only use 10-20% of the overall functionality of their web analytics platform. Read more

Social media like Facebook, Flickr, and Delicious has been around for a couple of years now and companies are starting to dip a tentative toe into the water. While such courage should be applauded, serious missteps have occurred that embarrass the offending company.

And it is not the courageous steps that have been embarrassing, but the sheer level of assholery with which companies have partaken their social media experiments. Because social media is all about sharing, collaboration, and communication, it is little surprise that folks expressed outrage at the heavy-handed or downright immoral dealings of the companies outlined below. Read more

Last week at OMS in San Diego I spoke about some of the challenges of measuring results from online campaigns.  In last week’s post, I wrote about the shortcomings of cookie-based tracking. This week, I’ll address the issue of measuring engagment through multiple touchpoints.  I call it the Wingman effect. Read more

When I talk to people at OMS and other events, one of the most frequently cited needs I hear about is the ability to measure (and make sense of) results from online campaigns. More specifically, the gap is most organizations is their ability to trace results (e.g. engagement, leads or sales) back those individual ads, email blasts or search phrases that drove the desired results. They have data but it often doesn’t make sense. While many have figured out how to use tools such as Google Analytics for measuring conversions and attributing those to the ad unit (e.g. search phrase) that preceded the conversion, the results often do not make sense, or are contradictory to what their media plan said should happen.  Read more

With the new release of Chrome (Google’s New Browser) yesterday and Microsoft’s recent “In” Ad-blocking option for IE8, it’s reasonable to say that the two most influential companies in Online Marketing have reenforced what most of us in the industry (and our ad agencies are realizing) already know… Advertising in its traditional sense and the Internet do not work.   Read more

I’ve had the honor of presenting in Milwaukee and Boston, and both shows had a fantastic turnout. I enjoyed all of the conversations I had in both cities, and was glad I had the chance to sit in on the other presentations. I could go on and on for both cities, but I came across two consistent themes at the OMS that I thought were worthy of note. First of all, it was very interesting to see how many people are using more than one analytics tool on their site for the same pages. Read more

When I wrote on my blog about my first post here on SEO for content sites, I added a couple key blogs that provide SEO resources and information on the search marketplace. Then I heard about the Google Trifecta webinar and video, so I thought I would wrap up my SEO series by sharing these other important resources….

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I am a firm believer in building on concepts, so let’s pretend that you already read my blog about confidence and that you are completely confident in the data you are collecting.

So, what now? Where should you be looking next?

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