Whether you’re using Google Analytics, marketing automation, social media, or any quantifiable metric, one of the simplest, yet most beneficial questions you can ask is: What does the top quartile have in common? Here’s an example. Look at your Google Analytics for the last quarter, half year, or year by going into Behavior > Site…
One of the most insidious mis-uses of statistics I’ve seen recently was a citation about the effectiveness of video in marketing. The original statistic in question read along the lines of: “73% of marketers surveyed believe that video was more impactful than other marketing methods for lead conversion” When recited, the marketer I was speaking…
When it comes to displaying data in an informative way, there are good ways and bad ways to do it. Bad ways obscure our ability to understand what happened. Good ways showcase the most important points. Today’s Chart Crime is the multiple pie chart crime. Recall that the purpose of a pie chart is to…
I love a good dashboard. The challenge of assembling one, of unifying data sources, of cleaning, transforming, and showcasing your data is fun. (This version of fun is why no one invites me to parties.) Despite all this, most of the dashboards I have seen in my career are useless. In fact, they are worse…
Marketers are abuzz with polls on Twitter. To quote The Flash’s Harrison Wells… I do caution restraint. Here’s why: Twitter polls are no more scientific or representative than sending out an email to your mailing list. Additionally, Twitter does not provide any kind of data which can be used for weighting. Let’s look at an…
Don’t measure what you won’t change. This is my central message of a talk I gave at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum on social media analytics. We’ve got tons of social media data, more than ever. We can download analytics from most social media platforms in excruciating detail. Yes, Facebook actually gives you 10+ tabs of…
Disclosure: IBM sponsored my attendance at their Analytics For All event. I had the privilege recently to attend the 1st birthday of IBM’s Watson Analytics at their Analytics for All conference, which was a terrific event showcasing how the tool has progressed over a year. One phrase stuck in my mind, however, that I want…
