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Digital Marketing

Why Your Data and Analytics Team Should Be Best Friends

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I first saw this cartoon on LinkedIn from Avinash Kaushik, and it really hits home.

I have often been the person standing there pointing out the obvious. “Let’s look at the data to make our decisions.” But it is always amazing to me how few people in business either don’t have the capability or patience to do this. They want to follow “their gut.”

Sadly there are also many marketers that don’t want you to look at the data because they will be exposed to being incompetent, a fraud, or because their initiatives just didn’t work.

Analytics Can Raise a Question of Ethics

When you are responsible for the analytics it becomes an ethical question. Do you expose the data that shows the million-dollar campaign, did nothing? I have always taken what I think is the ethical option… YES. But this then makes you the enemy of whoever was driving the initiative.

Analytics Can be Your Best Tool for Success

The worst part is, it doesn’t have to be that way. If marketers would embrace analytics and data, they will have the chance to correct and save their campaign before they burn through a lot of money with no results. The analytics and data team should be your best friend and involved from the very beginning of every business initiative.

Of Course I Can Track That, But So What?

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of course I can track that, but so what?

As analytics experts, this is the question we have to ask ourselves every time we work on reporting. With today’s tools we can track just about anything you can think of, but the real question is

SO WHAT?

You have to ask yourself, “Why is this important? How does this help us better understand our customers? Does this data really help us with actionable insights?”

If you can’t answer yes to at least one of these questions, or justify why the data is relevant in some way, then don’t add that table to your report or add another slide to your presentation deck.

Clear actionable data is much more powerful than puking data just because you can.

Digital Marketing Plans – Be Prepared!

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One the most important things you need to be able to do if you work in digital marketing is adapt.

It’s paramount to create a strategy and plan for how you will accomplish your goals. Whether you want to increase revenue, reignite your client base or simply drive awareness. You need a plan, but you also need to realize even the best plans have obstacles. The digital marketing landscape changes at a breakneck pace, monthly, weekly, sometimes even daily! To be successful you need to be prepare to navigate through these changes.

your digital marketing plan with obstacles

Is Google Analytics Finally Removing Event Spam?

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google analytics logo

When I went to the events section one of my client’s Google Analytics. I received the following notification.

google analytics event notification for event spam

This report has been filtered to include only data where there are values for “Event Label” dimension.”

Does this mean they are finally getting a handle on removing event spam. We’ve been fighting with it for months maybe even years. It would be great if Google finally found a way to remove it.

What is “event spam?”   With Google Analytics you can add code to your site so that you can track things such as clicks to play a video, view an image gallery, click on a link to an external site and more. There are unfortunately rogue sites of developers that add code to their site and steal analytics code from other sites so that strange things like, “For event management use spammersdomain.com.”

Typically this has to be filtered out in the Google Analytics dashboard, but it appears the new filter applied by Google does this for you.

Nice! Thanks Google.