There’s an urban legend from several different colleges about how a school didn’t pave sidewalks in the first year of its new construction. The school simply let students wear paths in the grass and then paved over where they walked later, in order to create a campus that felt the most natural. While apocryphal, the…
About once per marketing conference, someone on stage derisively remarks about certain metrics as vanity metrics: Twitter followers don’t matter. Facebook Likes are unimportant. Website visits don’t mean anything. Who cares who re-Pinned you? Now, imagine for a moment you owned a coffee shop. Inside you served the world’s best coffee, hand-picked single estate reserve…
Do your marketing ROI calculations sync up with the reality of your company’s bottom line? Or have you put together an ROI calculation and found your net revenue projections falling short? Chances are, you’re missing some key ingredients in the calculation of ROI, especially on the I part, investment. Recall that ROI is a simple…
Here’s a mystery for you to solve. This is my website’s traffic from Sunday, May 3, 2015: Here’s my traffic from Sunday, May 10, 2015: What do you see as the difference? The standout should be the top line, direct/none. Direct/none is Google’s attribution of any traffic source that it can’t identify. What called my…
While sifting through my daily social reporting for both SHIFT and myself, this webinar I did with the AMA and Aquent on measuring your content marketing came up. It’s from January 2014, but much of it is still relevant. Enjoy! If you can’t see anything, you can watch it here. Transcript: Good morning or good…
One of the ways you can measure goals and goal values in Google Analytics (or any marketing analytics system) is through cost equivalence. This is the least best way to measure the impact of your marketing, but in some cases, it’s better than nothing. What is cost equivalence? Cost equivalence is giving a goal the…
Join me on Tuesday, April 21 at 2 PM Eastern Time for a webinar about how to use Google Analytics for public relations and communications. Public relations is notorious for being difficult to measure. That said, it’s not impossible to measure, and tools like Google Analytics can be a powerful ally for understanding the impact…
Which web pages are your most popular? Which tweets are your most popular? How do you know which content to reshare? These are not infrequent questions asked by content marketers. How do you decide what’s popular? One of the simplest methods is to use quartiles. If you’re unfamiliar with quartiles, they are a basic statistical…
In the last post, I emphasized picking your marketing strengths and putting your focus behind a chosen few methods. This is leveraging opportunity cost, the cost of doing one thing and not doing something else. Every choice in life has an opportunity cost: When you eat at restaurant X, you’re not eating at restaurant Y…
