Web Analytics Archives - Online Marketing Blog

Measure for Success: 7 Secrets of Actionable Content Marketing Dashboards

Tiffani Allen on Jan 31st, 2019 Content Marketing, Web Analytics

Hey, content marketers. Imagine this: You’re sitting in a marketing meeting and you hear the following:

Our conversions are up 50% year-over-year!
Our blog traffic is down.
We saw a big spike in traffic this month to our primary service page!
Our bounce rate is all over the place.
This blog post about “X” had 2,000 page views last month!

What are the first thoughts that come to mind? For many, the first thought would likely be: Why? Followed by a: Is that good or bad? And then finally: What do we need to do next?

If you’ve ever experienced a similar scenario, you’ve come face-to-face with insight famine. The statements above simply relay data points and lack the insight needed to take any sort of action. And this is why an actionable content marketing dashboard is so incredibly important.

Measure for Success: 7 Secrets of Actionable Content Marketing Dashboards

New Year, New View: 3 Ways to Approach Analytics in 2019

Lane Ellis on Dec 20th, 2018 Web Analytics

Blue and purple hydrangea flowers image.

Welcome to the eighth installment of our “Collective Wisdom” series, featuring wisdom from a wide swath of thought leaders in the digital marketing industry and beyond.

This year, with the help of many great minds, we’ve covered the full range of content marketing tactics and best practices, including planning ahead for success, the art of crafting powerful content efficiently, and several strong promotion tactics. Most recently, we also dove into analytics and how they can best be used to measure content marketing success.

Now, with the new year drawing closer, let’s continue our exploration of content marketing measurement with an eye to the bright future ahead.

#1 – Widen Your Analytics Scope

Small planets next to huge sun image.

New Year, New View: 3 Ways to Approach Analytics in 2019

Measuring Content Marketing Success: Analytics Advice & Insight from the Experts

Lane Ellis on Dec 13th, 2018 Web Analytics

Welcome to the seventh installment in our “Collective Wisdom” series of content marketing strategy and tactics articles.

Previously we’ve covered planning ahead for content marketing success, the art of crafting powerful content, and an array of strong promotion tactics.

So, what’s up next? Measurement and analytics. Measuring and analyzing your content’s performance is critical so you can uncover new opportunities, make improvements, and determine whether you’re meeting your goals.

Here we share some tidbits of analytics wisdom and insights from some famous figures inside and outside the digital marketing realm.

Having the Right Data is Crucial for Measuring Success

How do you gauge success in content marketing?

At the most basic level, you want to learn how much online traffic is coming to see your content. But what should you count and what can be ignored?

Measuring Content Marketing Success: Analytics Advice & Insight from the Experts

How to Find the Stories in Your Data for Compelling Reporting

Joshua Nite Content Marketing World, Google, Online Marketing, Web Analytics

Our hyper-connected digital world is defined by an overabundance of data. Everything’s measurable, trackable, and quantifiable. Want to know how many people died on screen in your favorite movie? Or how much ice cream the average American eats per year? The data’s at your fingertips.

The ready availability of data is great for marketers. It helps us optimize performance, personalize content, and prove our value to the business.

But data in a vacuum isn’t informative or useful. It’s not about the facts and figures themselves; it’s about how we shape that data into compelling stories.

As an Analytics Advocate at Google, Adam Singer has years of experience finding and revealing the meaningful narrative in datasets. His presentation at Content Marketing World 2017 was all about how to create clean, informative, compelling data visualizations.

How to Find the Stories in Your Data for Compelling Reporting

3 Ways to Gather Actionable Insights From Google Analytics to Inform Your Marketing Plan

Kevin Cotch Digital Marketing, Online Marketing, Web Analytics

Google Analytics Actionable Insights

Today’s marketers are lucky. Why? The amount of data and tools to help interpret that data present an opportunity to be far more effective than in the past. However, marketers may not be using one of the most well-known tools in the most effective way.

We’re talking about Google Analytics. Unfortunately, it can be incredibly easy to merely focus attention on the vanity metrics within the platform. By vanity metrics, I mean sessions, users, pageviews, and other metrics that sound important. Of course it sounds great to have one millions sessions, but that metric doesn’t provide me with any actionable data. In fact, vanity metrics don’t provide much, if any, value.

3 Ways to Gather Actionable Insights From Google Analytics to Inform Your Marketing Plan

Improve Digital Marketing Performance with Attract, Engage, Convert Sales Cycle Analytics

Evan Prokop Web Analytics

Web analytics across the sales cycle

According to recent research from Hubspot, CMOs are planning to increase their budgets for web analytics by 60% in 2015. That may sound like a lot, but it’s money well spent when you consider that web analytics are the key to measuring, understanding and optimizing the effectiveness of your digital marketing programs.

Getting Started

With the vast amount of data available from modern web analytics tools, it’s easy to get lost or focus on the vanity metrics, missing the truly valuable insights that can benefit your business.

For example, it’s tempting and all too common for businesses engaging in Facebook marketing to focus solely on increasing ‘likes’ to their page and content. It’s certainly not a bad idea to track this metric, but on it’s own it doesn’t say much about the real business impact. Tracking and reviewing actions like referral traffic to your website from Facebook, leads generated or social sales will tell you much more about the true business impact of your Facebook marketing initiative.

Improve Digital Marketing Performance with Attract, Engage, Convert Sales Cycle Analytics

3 Ways to Use Multi-Channel Analytics Reporting for Better Content Marketing

Alexis Hall Content Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Web Analytics

The average consumer goes through more than five touch points with an ecommerce business before they convert. This number is trending upward, as companies and customers continue to interact across a greater number of platforms. B2B companies, with often greater price points and a longer buying cycle, may find the number of interactions with prospects prior to conversion even higher.

Good content marketers know that integrated, consistent messaging is critical across multiple digital platforms. It allows us to connect with our customers how – and when – they expect to connect with us.

With so many touch points between first contact and conversion, how are companies able to break through all of the data within analytics? We need to determine not only which channels are most effective, but also how to customize marketing activities to the behavior and preferences of the audience in that channel, at that point in their decision.

3 Ways to Use Multi-Channel Analytics Reporting for Better Content Marketing

Mobile Web Analytics Apps – Measure Web Stats on the Go – Google Analytics & Piwik

TopRank Marketing Editor Mobile Marketing, Web Analytics

Staying up to date with your website’s analytics can seem like a full-time job. If you use Google Analytics, this past summer you were forced to adopt the newest version. Google Analytics version 5 brought a new interface and new reports. For some, that meant learning where all the reports moved. Aside from the obvious learning curve, many people had to spend more time to accessing simple metrics.

Today’s fast-moving business sometimes requires you to do a lot more while you are on-the go. Unfortunately, like most Web-based analytics graphs, the graphs in Google Analytics require Flash to render properly. Adobe Flash doesn’t fare so well on mobile browsers, especially those mobile browsers running on Apple mobile devices. So how do you stay connected to your Web analytics while on the go?

Mobile Web Analytics Apps – Measure Web Stats on the Go – Google Analytics & Piwik

Meaningful SEO Metrics: 3 Ways to Approach Measuring Online Business Success #SESLondon

Lee Odden Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, Search Engine Strategies, SEO, Web Analytics

SEO Metrics What good is great content optimization and social media promotion without meaningful measurement? This session at SES London focused on three different perspectives towards measuring performance which were as relevant to any online marketing as they were to Search Engine Optimization.

In fact, that notion of “SEO is Marketing” lends really well with the trend a lot of people are talking about in the online marketing industry. Many SEOs are building up more strategic skills and approaching optimization more holistically. Ironically, this is my topic next week at Search Congress in Barcelona so this session proved to be quite useful for a more holistic online marketing measurement perspective (with a SEO slant).

Meaningful SEO Metrics: 3 Ways to Approach Measuring Online Business Success #SESLondon

#MIMASummit: Avinash Kaushik Keynote on Improving Engagement Through Innovation

Ashley Zeckman Content Marketing, Marketing PR Conferences, MIMA Summit, Mobile Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Engines, Web Analytics

Photo from our interview with Avinash at SES Hong Kong

The morning keynote speaker for the 2011 MIMA Summit was none other than Avinash Kaushik co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google. Avinash was a very funny and engaging speaker. Nothing was off limits during his keynote. Caught in the crosshairs of Avinash’s presentations were what he called “small” local companies (General Mills, 3M, etc) that dared to provide a “less than ideal” user experience.

Innovation was the topic of the morning’s keynote, ranging from which companies are a good (and bad) example of implementing innovation to proper metrics to show success.

What Are the 3 Definitions of Innovation?

#MIMASummit: Avinash Kaushik Keynote on Improving Engagement Through Innovation

Meaningful SEO Metrics – #SESSF

Lee Odden Online Marketing, SEO, Web Analytics

SEO Metrics Panel SES San Francisco 2011 The only session I’m liveblogging day one of SES San Francisco conference is this one, “Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers” so the pressure is on the awesome panel including: Todd Friesen, Ray “Catfish” Comstock, Rob Garner and moderation duties handled by Richard Zwicky.

First up is Rob Garner, VP Strategy at iCrossing and a VP at SEMPO. Rob started things off with a description of the challenges that most often occur with measuring the search channel.

90% of search channel bugets go to paid media, but paid media supplies 20% of returns. Only 10% of budgets go to SEO but a huge percentage of search marketing performance can be attributed to SEO.

Meaningful SEO Metrics – #SESSF

5 Social Media ROI & Measurement Books to Grow Your Social Business

Lee Odden Book Reviews, Online Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics

One of the most compelling challenges for companies entering the world of social business is measurement. The ability to attribute cause and effect directly can be elusive when it comes to measuring business outcomes like increased sales, improved customer retention and lowered support costs. But that’s only because this is new territory. Business participation with social media on the web at large and internally has absolutely made measurable progress for numerous companies and organizations. The trick is to learn how, create a model that works for you and to sell it internally for testing, implementation and adoption.

One way to facilitate learning about Social Media ROI, Measurement and Analytics is through books from subject matter experts. Here are 5 that I’ve found useful and hopefully, you will too.

5 Social Media ROI & Measurement Books to Grow Your Social Business