Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

The Future of Market Research: 5 Innovations to Watch for in 2012

The great David Ogilvy once said, “I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.” Those words from the great David Ogilvy are as true today as they were then.

Market research professionals, firms and organizations from IBM to Forrester Research are projecting the next trend in market research to be “making the transformation from research to insight.” If you ask me, that’s what market research has always been. An effective market researcher should be able to plan, conduct, analyze, and report actionable market insights and solutions to  clients.

If you can’t do that, you’re probably just sharing stats that you found on eMarketer. I’m not discrediting eMarketer, which is an excellent research provider, but I see many advertising and marketing professionals searching for and relying too much on the latest stat or trend instead of taking that data point and translating it to something of value. Does that trend even make sense for your client’s unique situation? Or are you simply trying to impress them? This is not a problem with the research provider, but the researcher himself.

Instead of projecting the next trend in market research to be “making the transformation from research to insight,” which should already be innately infused into the mantra of the market researcher, I project the future of market research to be the convergence, or mash-up, of emerging technologies and lateral creative thinking across industries with the discipline of market research.

We are all living in a perpetual state of beta. We all have the ability at any time, to analyze our past and present to optimize for the future. And for market researchers, now is the perfect time to seize the opportunity to innovate the industry in ways George Gallup could have never imagined. So borrow from other competitors, borrow from other industries, borrow from culture – use lateral creative thinking to expand your potential and create new methodologies to reveal new insights and solutions. Below are five examples of this approach, which will continue to grow, especially in 2012.

Continue reading The Future of Market Research: 5 Innovations to Watch for in 2012

April 4th, 2012 by The Adcom Group in Analytics, Brand Management, Content Marketing, Creative, Impact Marketing, Integrated Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Media Planning & Strategy, Social Media, User Experience | No Comments »

Measuring Social Media with Analytics

The big question on most marketers’ minds is “How do I measure social media performance?” For me, anytime you say the word measure, I immediately think of analytics. Since we have been implementing Google Analytics for the vast majority of our customers, I am going to focus on how to build a solution that will allow measurement in that tool.

There are two approaches to understanding the impact that social media is having on your website. The first thing to consider is what you want to measure. Are you putting effort into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as part of your effort? If that is the case, you might want to just track those tools to see the traction you are getting through advanced segments.

If you are active in multitudes of social networking tools that include sites like Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, friendfeed or others, you might want to take a different approach and create a filtered profile.

Advanced Segments

One of the simplest ways to see traction in your analytics is to create Advanced Segment. In the left-hand panel of the Google Analytics screen, there is a section called “My Customizations.” This section will contain a link for Advanced Segments. Once you are on the screen you will need to do the following to set up a segment:

  • Click the Create new custom segment in the top right corner
  • Under Dimensions, select Source from the Traffic Sources list.
  • You can either select a specific source from the drop down list, or you can type in a series of sources for you to track like digg|wikipedia|linkedin|facebook| twitter|feedburner
  • If you enter multiple sources, you will need to choose Matches regular expression from the drop down list
  • Give the segment a name in the box below
  • Click Create

The benefit of selecting an Advanced Segment is that you can compare the social media traffic to the other traffic on the website. This setup will allow you to see the behavioral differences that are happening between your direct, organic, paid and social traffic users. Where do you want to drop the social users? Is it in a different place than paid search? Do you need to create social media landing pages for your Facebook or Twitter programs?

Advanced segments will allow you to leverage all of your existing reports and show a comparison to the overall site and existing basic segments created by Google.

Filter Profile

I had written a blog post talking about filtering traffic for your profile. In order to create a social media profile, you would just need to create a filtered profile as described in the previous post. When creating the filter, just name it Social Networks and add the sources to track. It is done in the same way as the advanced segment “digg|wikipedia|linkedin|facebook| twitter|feedburner”- you can add other domains to track such as technorati, blogger, tinyurl and others as well.

By creating a filtered profile, every report you run will be specific to the social media outlets you are tracking. You can copy any custom reports you created and see all of your e commerce information in this profile.

Regardless of the way that you create the tracking, the ability to see the traction and behavior of social media users will give you greater insight into the value of these users to your website and business.

June 8th, 2010 by The Adcom Group Tags: , , in Analytics, Social Media | No Comments »

Google Analytics Setup

As mentioned in my previous post, Making an Analytics Choice, every marketer needs to be able to measure their online marketing campaigns and website performance in order to improve and succeed.

Using Google Analytics is a great way to get started tracking your web stats. Google provides the tool online at no cost. The web-based tool allows you anytime, anywhere access to your website analytics information. Before you can get started with looking at your stats, you need to create an analytics account and get the tracking working on your website.

First, you will need a Google account. If you don’t have one, it is the first step. After that, you just need to sign into the Google Analytics. Google will ask you a few simple questions to create your account.

Next, you will need to install the tracking code provided by Google at the footer of your website. If you have a website that is a series of standalone HTML pages, you will need to install the script on every page in order for it to be tracked. You just need to copy and paste the script just above the tag. If you have an include that automatically generates information for the footer of every page, you will most likely need to put it in there.

On the tracking code screen, you will notice a lot of options including Advanced and Customer Options. We will cover more advanced configurations of Google analytics and when to use those features. Once you get the script installed, you can come back and check to make sure it is tracking correctly. Once your script is tracking, you can start to use the Google Analytics reports and all of your website visitors.

Now that you have analytics up and running, we will start to focus on the Google Analytics Reporting Interface during the next post. Until then, keep measuring!

P.S . . . If you ever need to back to your account to find your tracking code, it can be a bit tricky to find it. Here is how you do it:

  1. Log in to Google Analytics
  2. From the Overview page, select the account that has the profile for the tracking code you’re looking for, as the code is profile-specific.
  3. Select the profile from the accounts Overview page.
  4. From that profile’s Actions column, click Edit
  5. At the top right of the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ box, click Check Status

Your tracking code will be on this page.

March 8th, 2010 by The Adcom Group in Analytics, User Experience | No Comments »

Making an Analytics Choice

There is a saying that you cannot improve what you don’t measure. This tome is the foundation for online marketing analytics. If you don’t really know how your work is performing, do you really expect those efforts to do more for you?

Over the next few weeks, I am going to be writing about how to use analytics to help you measure and improve your online marketing efforts. From choosing an analytics tool, to setting goals and understanding how to make improvements, there are a lot of different aspects of analytics.

Let’s start from the beginning – the analytics tool. If you are not measuring, start now. If you are measuring, make sure you can get enough detail to make decisions. There are several analytics packages available with multitude of price ranges and complexities. Avanish Kaushik, the current Google Analytics Evangalist, put together a great web analytics tool comparison.

If you are just starting out, I would recommend Google Analytics as a solution. Google does not charge you for an account, you only need to have an gmail account to sign up.

One of the benefits of the Google Analytics platform is that is gives you a good view of basic information out of the box, but it allows you to build a high level of complexity as you want to get deeper into the data of your online marketing campaigns.

Contrary to popular thinking, analytics is not only for your website. It can be attached to any of your online marketing in order to measure campaign effectiveness. For example, you can add parameters to the end of the URLS in your email, online display or paid search ads.

In my next post, I am going to cover how to set up Google Analytics on your website and configuring your profile. It isn’t a huge task, but it is one you want to do correctly.

Until then . . . keep measuring!

February 3rd, 2010 by The Adcom Group Tags: , , in Analytics, Email, Online Marketing, Paid Search | No Comments »

Social Media in an Econmic Downturn

In my last post, I explored social media in the b-to-b world. A vast majority of marketers were not using web 2.0 techniques because of staffing, executive buy-in or knowledge. Where does that leave them? With a great opportunity.

With tightening budgets, marketers can turn online to start understanding and participating in social networks. As a matter of fact, the same participants who stated the main three reasons for not getting involved, overwhelmingly indicated they are planning on breaking the social media barrier (see chart below) by almost 3 to 1.

Chart showing who would pursue social media in an economic downturn

The best advice for these marketers is to make the person in charge of analytics your best friend. If you set up your analytics correctly, it can help you to further understand several aspects of your social media campaigns including:

  • Increased traffic to your website (that was a gimme)
  • Increased user engagement through time on site
  • More inbound links for your website from sources like Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Delicious, etc.
  • New sources of customers when you mine the inbound traffic source list past the top 25

So overall, the economic downturn might prove a great opportunity for marketers to start using social media because the big budget for trade shows or tv ads just doesn’t exist.

November 17th, 2008 by The Adcom Group Tags: , in Analytics, Social Media | No Comments »