Journey analytics show the customer experience through a different lens

Marketing directors can’t make decisions in a vacuum. They need information about their customers, their channels and all the touchpoints that help them to connect with each other. How can they deliver what the customer wants unless they can see through the customer’s lens?

Customer interactions with a brand are now defined as their ‘journey’ and it is insight into that journey that helps organisations to plan product roadmaps or launch new services. McKinsey...

26 February 2018 | Customer Experience

How testing can harm sales

Testing is important in marketing. An ongoing cycle of testing, optimising and retesting helps to ensure that you’re always improving, and A/B and multivariate testing are incredibly popular for websites. Identifying the factors or combination of factors that deliver the best results is extremely valuable.

But one thing that is commonly overlooked is the impact of testing on websites – or specifically, on page load times.

Not everyone realises that third-party...

20 February 2018 | Best Practice

Analyse, report, repeat: Here’s what you need to be tracking

When your boss asks you how the online marketing efforts are doing, what do you say? “We’ve increased impressions by 30% and traffic is up 15%.” Do you know what that means for business growth? Does your boss?

Digital marketing is great for equipping businesses and marketers with the data to define their success and find unending opportunities for growth. Unfortunately, this also makes it incredibly difficult for marketing leaders to determine what truly matters to...

10 August 2017 | Attribution

Product pages: make them perfect

As ecommerce continues its explosive growth, consumers are buying more than ever before.  Dollars are shifting to digital, with online sales projected to exceed $523 billion by 2020.

That’s a big deal.

At the same time, the landscape has also grown fiercely competitive and consumer-dominated.

More connected and empowered than ever before, today’s shoppers don’t just expect, they demand immersive, engaging digital experiences.

It’s...

7 June 2017 | E-Commerce

Four ways user data can inspire Google-relevant redesigns

It’s not just SEO hype — search is becoming more data-driven, and metrics like goal conversions and user engagement are more important than ever.

All signs point to a shift in how we use search engines to navigate the internet. Google’s Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Vault, and Accelerated Mobile Pages projects, for example, are clearly designed to provide snippets of data to mobile users. This is significant, as Google’s continued existence relies on its dominance...

1 June 2017 | Data-driven marketing

Don’t leave your social media data trapped in walled gardens

Opinion A few years ago it seemed the rise of apps was unstoppable. With smartphones and tablets attached to everyone’s palm, the implications for marketers seemed clear: As consumers spend more time in apps and social media on their mobile devices, this is where marketers’ ad spend should be concentrated.

When the main apps competing for our attention are the social media giants, many then began directing spend in this direction, which explains why the IAB’s latest...

14 March 2017 | Data-driven marketing

Don’t let big data make your head spin: Building a user-friendly marketing ecosystem

Welcome to today’s marketing data ecosystem.  It’s a myriad of data sources and tools that are supposed to help you to make more informed ‘data driven’ decisions; taking the guess work out of everything from media buying to sales and revenue attribution. That said, in reality, it can seem like a daunting array of ever-proliferating information, technologies, and vendors that makes you wonder: will it really make my job easier? The buzzwords alone - like Hadoop,...

13 March 2017 | Big Data

DataSift partners with LinkedIn to take marketer insights to the next level through AI

(c)iStock.com/gmutlu

Data marketing firm DataSift has announced it is to join forces with LinkedIn to provide greater insights into the Microsoft-owned B2B network for marketers.

The company, which describes itself as a ‘human data intelligence’ provider, is unveiling PYLON for LinkedIn Engagement Insights, which gives users various methods of increasing their engagement, from discovering new audiences for brands and products, to benchmarking, and learning which...

23 January 2017 | Data Science

Why marketers need to see beyond click-through-rate

(c)iStock/Geber86

Using click-through rate (CTR) as your primary digital campaign metric is like using snake oil as your primary medicine. It might make you feel good at first, but it’s not going to cure anything.

This metric is — at best — misleading and — at worst — fraudulent. 

The unfortunate difference between snake oil and CTR: Modern medicine has eradicated snake oil. Sadly, even in the face of more reliable metrics, CTR lives on...

9 November 2016 | Web Analytics

How to meet marketing ROI milestones

(c)iStock.com/Davizro

Measuring the success of marketing programs is nothing new, and there has always been a focus among B2B marketers to quantify the reach and engagement of their initiatives. 

In the past, much of this measurement focused on metrics like the circulation of print publications, the growth of catalog mailing lists, business cards collected at trade shows, and completed magazine 'bingo cards'.

Today, online channels command the bulk of B2B marketing...

15 September 2016 | Web Analytics