A new report reviewing how we use data to take business decisions
One of my passions within digital marketing has always been around improving online activities using the data available on online customer interactions. It's why we're called Smart Insights and a lot of our posts and guides show how to make the most of this data by asking the right questions to improve performance and take the right investment decisions.
But this focus on data-driven improvement is a mindset and not one that everyone in marketing holds; it's not necessarily why they went into marketing as a career or they feel they must rely more on intuition and gut feel.
This infographic based on research from Nesta from their useful report, Rise of the Datavores, shows that Datacores are surprisingly rare. I wondered how this compared to Smart Insights readers, so please let us know in this poll.
How…
Using the Geckoboard Business Dashboard for marketing
Value rating: [rating=4]
Recommended link: http://www.geckoboard.com/
Update - see Geckofuel
Since we published the post we have had some feedback that Geckoboard looks useful, but doesn't support social follower counts. Well it does, but by this separate additional (free) service Geockofuel. Geckoboard supports any custom data feeds in an XML format and offers many ways of then displaying that feed. The Geckofuel site has prebuilt some of these for additional services including Facebook and Twitter. You can see that you could also use this for your custom reporting.
Our commentary
We're seeing a new class of business or marketing dashboard now which are distinct from the web analytics systems like Google Analytics, Adobe/Omniture Site Catalyst and IBM Coremetrics.
These dashboards use the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces for automated data exchange) from different systems to integrate data from different systems. This makes…
The pace of development of new software to help digital marketers measure, manage and improve through 2009 has been incredible.
There has also been no shortage of statistics about how consumer search and socialise online.
This page shows the most popular types of software and statistics according to the "voice of the crowd" - that's use you - I have featured these tools and software in my Twitter - partly to be useful and partly just so I can remember the developments without doing a full blog post.
This top 10 list is ordered according to how many people have clicked through from Twitter to my directory created with Mediwiki - you can also view the full list of software tools and statistics for digital marketers.
Social Media Usage Statistics…
Miles Bennett, CEO of web analytics consultancy Numberminds is a web analytics specialist who helps companies improve their reporting and analysis capabilities so they can get better results from their web marketing. They has helped many of the UK and European retail financial services sites set up and get value from their web analytics solutions. These brands include Unilever, Barclaycard, Barclays Bank, Mint Credit Card, Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Abbey.com, Lombard Direct, Ulster Bank and Coutts.
I've known Miles for a few years now and he is a regular speaker and acquaintance from the London Marketing Optimization Summits (www.emetrics.org and www.searchenginestrategies.com). Since he sees many of the barriers and problems companies face in implementing web analytics he's in a great position to advise on how to avoid these problems by getting web analytics implementations right first time.
Q1. Looking at the big picture of digital marketing reporting and performance improvement, what…
