Ever since Google Analytics was introduced in 2006 people began an obsession with "what" happened on their website. They could understand that a certain number of visitors came to the website, that so many of them used the internal search, and that so many clicked here versus there.
Good Copywriters Are ... "What makes for good online copywriting?" Both marketers and copywriters have their reasons for asking this question. "Can you recommend a good online copywriter?" Ah. Unfortunately we have considerably fewer answers to that one (although we wish we were busting at the seams with them).
You may be in a test cell right this moment. Go to Amazon.com, search for a book and look at their add to cart button, ready to buy area. Is the background of the box white or blue? Amazon is doing a significant test to their add to cart button and the area surrounding it, [...]
The closer you look, the less you see... Caught up in the day-to-day rhythm of business we rarely take the time to zoom out and see the big picture. Google search seems like magic and it only gets more magical. Let's take a look at magic. Your brain, mine too, tricks you.
The social and mobile revolution is about data. It is the enormous volume, real-time velocity and variety of data from disparate sources that is causing indigestion issues for most business' corporate metabolisms. It's not a publishing revolution! The disruption caused by social and mobile technologies is not entirely about how the voice of every customer [...]
"An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage." - Jack Welch Fifteen years of working with many organizations (it is an impressive list) has taught us most organizations have not yet achieved a point where marketing analytics is like financial reporting: simplified; fairly universal; with a [...]
In the near future you will use voice commands to ask for actionable stories to be related to you from raw data. It sounds like Star Trek but it's months away, not years. Today is the start of IBM's SmarterCommerce Global Summit 2013. As part of the program IBM invited several industry influencers to attend the [...]
Every company has to make choices when it comes to how it markets and sells, and, in some cases, who it is and what it sells. In an email exchange, Tom Grimes, the owner of a Culligan dealership in Amarillo, TX and a brilliant friend, shared with me what he's thinking about in terms of [...]
People do spend some time tidying up their websites and marketing efforts. Yet, there always seems to be a few things they forget to clean up. Since it's spring, here is a checklist for you to start getting your site in order: 1. Clean up your lists.
If you do business, online or traditional business, I hope you took the time to read Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos' 2013 shareholder letter. In it he shares this tidbit: "Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being [...]
"Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that's the way to answer them - not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort - buyers of your products." "Scientific Advertising" was published in 1923 by Claude Hopkins, who began to evangelize the need [...]
Here's the punchline; The role of today's leadership is to "remove the speed bumps in the experimenters' way!" ~ Scott Cook, co-founder and Chairman of Intuit Nobody worth arguing with argues whether search, social, and mobile technologies have impacted customers' minds and changed buying behavior over the last five years.
While the one constant in business is change, the one variable that has greatly accelerated-due to mobile and social-is the velocity of change. This is why we now hear so much about the importance of real-time marketing, agile marketing, or the need for a fast corporate metabolism.
I just finished reading this article about an EBay study that questions the value of Google's main Adwords service. I've been really impressed with eBay's performance as of late, especially their mobile efforts. But, I am concerned how this news will be interpreted by others.
Last week, my partner and brother, Jeffrey and I were doing an in-house training for a large B2B marketing team. At the end of our training, we had them review a bunch of landing pages across the web to see how they could apply what they learned over the two day training.
With news that Facebook gift sales and revenue are off to a rough start, they are starting to show how desperate they are for people to start buying gifts. Have you noticed their latest offer of desperation (Get $3 off your gift of $5 or more): Maybe they didn't think people could see that they [...]
When I studied the data and made an intuitive prediction that 80 percent of PPC professionals would be replaced by an algorithm in the next three years, my brother Jeffrey and I expected some resistance. We were extremely surprised at the misunderstandings that arose.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked readers how they would optimize the following Hulu.com mobile landing page that I saw when I searched for Hulu on my iPhone's browser. Obviously, there was an issue with the image loading, but that might not be the only problem on this mobile landing page.
Last week, I explained how 80% of PPC professionals will be replaced by an algorithm. However, deeper in to my article I also mentioned that "many of the "web analysts" who only function as data reporters without adding much business value" will also be replaced by technologies like NarrativeScience and Arria.
You're fired, laid-off, downsized, terminated, made redundant, rightsized, pursuing other opportunities, discharged, dismissed, pink-slipped. Search Engine Marketing professionals are becoming redundant, replaced by technology, so they should prepare themselves to hear those words. In the next 3 years, 80% of PPC professionals will be replaced by an algorithm.
My cable contract just ended, so I have been thinking about how little actual cable TV my family watches. I was wondering if we could do with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu. I had some time waiting to pickup my kids from school, so while I was parked in the car, I decided I [...]
I began writing this column on marketing optimization in 2001; yet this morning, 12 years later, I find myself in LA to train a well-known company that wants to start "crushing it" by developing an optimization culture, rarer than running a few tests a month.
Last week, an article in TechCrunch offered an opinion on "Why We Need to Kill Big Data." Perhaps it was inspired by this tweet that was embedded in the article: "I hate the term 'big data'. Its all just data. Someday we'll all just call it data - but for now it's big."
Google+ may be growing, but anyone who spends time on it wishes it had more engagement with their connections and more content being shared. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Why is this happening? It is not just lack of people, it is the lack of integration with the content marketing ecosystem.
In my last column, I shared recent research about how CEOs have lost trust in CMOs' ability to be focused on business performance. Hopefully, when asked how your company currently measures its digital initiatives you don't get an answer like this (LOL, well done Adobe): Seriously, the issue is that most analytics frameworks don't tie [...]
