Analytics Blog Posts

Analytics

This is an excerpt from a forthcoming analytics e-book from Portent entitled Finding Cross-Channel Opportunity Gaps & Closing Them. Ever wonder how effective (or ineffective) your marketing channels are today? Do you get the feeling your paid initiatives are wasteful? Do you have a hunch your content calendar isn’t getting you anywhere organically? Do you… Read More

Analytics

Let’s be honest, Google Tag Manager can be difficult to understand. I remember the first time I tried to set up GTM. I thought it would be like any other Google product I worked with in the past —straightforward and intuitive. Oh boy was I wrong! In what became a cautionary tale, long before Portent… Read More

Analytics

What’s a good conversion rate? I get this question a lot, and not just about conversion rates. I always say “better than what you have now.” That earns me a glare that could sterilize cockroaches. At the same time, I shove toothpicks into my toes to dull the sharp pain this question causes in my… Read More

Analytics

What would ya say, that ya do here? If the answer is online marketing in any way, shape or form, you know the importance of having analytics configured correctly on your site. If you need help convincing anyone, take them over to Portent’s handy Marketing Stack Explainer. But wait, there’s more! Whether you’re in direct… Read More

Analytics

This is a companion blog post for my talk at MozCon Local next Tuesday on Powerful Ranking Reports using Google Data Studio. I won’t go into nuts and bolts here — I’ll save that for those who can make it out to the show. But I will go into the new frontier for ranking data… Read More

Analytics

Data is great……sometimes. Data can also be maddening and make you want to go all Office Space on the nearest printer. These days businesses have an abundance of data at their fingertips. That makes knowing how to sift through information an essential part of every marketer’s existence. Personally, Google Analytics (GA) has been making my… Read More

Analytics

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. The name is a holdover from back in the day before Google Analytics (GA) was around. Urchin was a web analytics program acquired by Google back in 2005, which marked the beginning of GA. UTM codes are simple snippets of code appended to the end of URLs that communicate… Read More

Analytics

Imagine your company being truly data driven. What does that look like? Your teams getting the right data they need at the right times to tailor their campaigns to key audiences. Your data platforms talking to each other and getting critical pieces of information integrated. Your marketing strategy being based on actual customer behaviors and… Read More

Analytics

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get all of your Google AdWords e-commerce data in one easy-to-read dashboard? Using custom dashboards in Google Analytics, you can! Creating these custom dashboards from the ground up can be a time-consuming and frustrating process if you don’t know what you’re doing. Lucky for you, we have a… Read More

Analytics

Thanks to everybody who attended my talk at SMX West on closed-loop analytics! It covered enriching your web analytics data with customer information from your CRM or marketing automation platforms. A Quick Closed-Loop Analytics Primer I did a quick whiteboard interview with Colin Parker, Director of Marketing at Portent. We covered the benefits to investing… Read More

Analytics

This is the last ‘here is what I presented’ links for a while, I promise. I just did this presentation at MarketingProfs B2B Forum (a conference I highly recommend, by the way). Here’s the deck: ROI Rage: Tying KPIs to Marketing Strategy and Tactics from Ian Lurie The Capybara are back!!! The links Google Analytics… Read More

Analytics

Now is the perfect time to learn more about website tag management. Google Analytics (GA) Academy recently released their new Google Tag Manager (GTM) Fundamentals course, an excellent way for anyone to learn more about using this free tool. Why should I care about understanding tag management? Don’t Care. Take me to the guide, man.… Read More

Analytics

This morning, I gave a webinar to Moz fans (a Mozinar, if you will) on a concept troubling a lot of B2B marketers today: truly “closed loop reporting” between analytics and customer relationship management platforms. Tracking the B2B Customer Lifecycle I talked through an ideal integration in true Moz fashion, with a whiteboard: I mentioned… Read More

Analytics

Ever have one of those days where you’re digging through Google Analytics (GA) and you say to yourself “What the f*@$ is this s%$#!?!?” Yeah – me too. Don’t get me wrong – I love GA. It’s way easier to navigate than most of the other analytics platforms out there. But just like its users, GA… Read More

Analytics

Anybody who’s been in this business for a while knows their ABCs: Acquisition Behavior Conversion It’s built into Google Analytics, for God’s sake: And it’s a tried and true methodology for measuring. Problem is, we’re measuring to take action. If the lifecycle begins and ends with acquisition and conversion, we’re missing a lot of workflow… Read More