Do You Make These 7 Inbound Marketing Mistakes?

May 26, 2012 By David Crankshaw
inbound marketing mistakes

The World Wide Web exploded the traditional dynamic between B2B buyers and sellers. Buyers were longer dependent on sales people for information about problems, solutions, and products. Buyers could educate themselves before engaging with sales. In response, B2B marketing organizations gradually adjusted to a world where buyers control their education. They realized that they had to focus … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Analytics Products & Trends

Time Savers for Web Analysts from Will Critchlow’s Toolkit

May 23, 2012 By David Crankshaw
Will Critchlow's Toolkit

“Our ability to use APIs, scrapers, multiple tools is going to be super critical.” — Avinash Kaushik B2B online marketers frequently must find and analyze information from a variety of sources. Some of these tasks they conduct often and they use a software application. But what about when you only have to do the task once? … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Analytics Products & Trends

The Future of Analytics: Transforming (some) Organizations

May 17, 2012 By David Crankshaw
Future of Analytics

What can we say about the future of analytics? Let’s start with what we know: Moving our activities online has caused us to produce mountains of data to analyze. Too much data many would say. Much of this data is imperfect. Many online activities cannot be measured directly, so we settle for indirect measurements and infer results as best we can. We are constrained by the cost of … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Management & Culture

Web Analytics Accuracy vs. Precision: Which to Choose?

May 14, 2012 By David Crankshaw
300px-High_precision_Low_accuracy.svg

We use measurements in many different situations. The cook in the kitchen with measuring cups and spoons to make a cake. The carpenter with tape and t-square to build a house. The crew of the fishing boat looking for fish in the ocean with sonar and fluorometry. For the cook and the carpenter the measurements must be accurate, else the cake and the house will fall. And they must be … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Management & Culture

Google Analytics Interface Map

May 9, 2012 By David Crankshaw
Google Analytics Interface Map

The interface to Google Analytics crams a lot into one screen. This makes it possible to go to many places in the application with just one click. But the interface has so many components that even experienced analysts can miss a useful feature. And what about marketing managers that don't use GA every day? It's likely that you've looked over some features that could help you get more … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Analytics Products & Trends

Group Decision-Making: Pitfalls to Avoid

May 8, 2012 By David Crankshaw
Group Decision-Making: Avoid some common pitfalls.

David Raab posted an article on what current brain research says about decision-making and software selection (his specialty). It made me think about some of the additional pitfalls that B2B marketers face in group decision-making. I don’t mean the daily decisions that individual marketers make in a data-driven organization. These decisions are usually straightforward. They are informed … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Management & Culture

Take Action on Your Web Analytics Results

May 4, 2012 By David Crankshaw
Top Challenges: Taking Action

Yesterday I mentioned the top challenges in the Bienalto annual survey of web analytics. In yesterday's article the topic was analytics staffing challenges. Today it is the challenge of how to take action based on web analytics results. It’s unrealistic to expect that analysis and subsequent quantitative insight will lead directly to a decision or action. That’s not how people operate. … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Analytics Community

Overcome the Analytics Staffing Challenge

May 3, 2012 By David Crankshaw
TopChallenges: Staffing

Companies in Australia report that a top web analytics challenge is analytics staffing. U.S. Companies would likely report a similar challenge. This conclusion comes from Bienalto, an Australian marketing services company that conducts an annual survey on the use of web analytics in Australia. Their report covers a range of topics including technology adoption, management, and web … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Analytics Community

How to Measure Content Marketing Results

April 30, 2012 By David Crankshaw
Gutenberg press operators didn't have to measure content marketing.

B2B companies know they must measure the results of their content marketing. They want to tie their results to conversions, leads, and revenue. But it's not easy when you have multiple buyers participating in a long buying cycle with many stages. We still have a lot to learn on this subject. Rebecca Lieb described what we can do today to measure content marketing at a recent … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Online Marketing

Traffic Source Diversity for Healthy Customer Acquisition

April 29, 2012 By David Crankshaw
Traffic Source Diversity example from Kaushik

Cultivate traffic source diversity to your website like a money manager who allocates assets to create a balanced portfolio of investments. Investors want to own a mix of securities in different asset classes like stocks, bonds, and cash. A mixed portfolio spreads opportunities for gains. It also protects investors from the risk of exposure to poor performance in any one asset class. … [Continue reading...]

Filed Under: Marketing Channels
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