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When you look at an eroded beach, what does the legacy of the sand tell you? It tells you about how water and wind have shaped the beach. You can see where waves have crashed on the shore. You can see where runoff has eaten away at dunes. You can see where reed grasses have maintained their tenuous grasp on the land against wind and surf. You can see seasons and years written on the beach… but no handful of sand alone will tell you that story.

If you go tracking an animal in the forest, what does the forest tell you? One or two footprints can’t tell much of a story, but a trail certainly can. The spacing between the tracks can indicate speed. The depth of one foot over another can indicate injury. The changes in distances show whether the animal was increasing or decreasing speed. The pauses and double-backs show when the animal detected a possible threat. These are the stories that the trail as a whole tells you.

Like the beach and the forest, what is powerful about reading your marketing analytics isn’t any one data point or even a couple of them. It’s the big picture, the trends, the series as they flow together and interact that tells the story about your marketing efforts. To be sure, there are times when it’s necessary to inspect at the tiniest levels how one particular mechanism is working. On the whole, however, your marketing will benefit more from you looking at it holistically. Did organic search traffic increase when your paid ad budget increased? Did your email list boost your social marketing? Only by examining your marketing analytics with an eye for the ecosystem as a whole can you truly capture the impact of everything you’re doing.

Here’s a simple exercise you can try. In your web analytics, identify the four major classes of traffic – direct, referral, search, campaign – and zoom out to see the year to date.

What patterns do you see? Do you see rhythms as a B2B or B2C website does? Do you see cyclical trends? Do you see countercyclical trends and non-intuitive trends? Do you see anomalies and outliers that need greater scrutiny? What does looking at the big picture tell you?

Treat your marketing analytics as the trails in the forest or patterns in the sand that they are. Look for the patterns and the stories that they tell; only then will you be able to make strategic, big picture decisions about what is or is not working.

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by Mike Moran

We’ve all seen that look on the face of the boss. It says, “What on earth are you talking about?” Sometimes that look is something we deserve to see, because we really don’t know what we are doing, but often, it’s because we just have something to say that the boss doesn’t understand. Recently, a client asked me how she can wipe that look off the her CMO’s face every time she starts talking about measuring Web conversions and offline conversions. Her boss waves these ideas away, saying he only wants to measure brand awareness. What can you do in this situation?

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I recently heard someone refer to metrics like Twitter followers or Facebook fans as fluff metrics or vanity metrics, as though they were intrinsically bad.

Let’s clear something up. There are no “bad” metrics. There are metrics for which you currently have bad data. That’s correctable.

There are also metrics that do not fit in the story you are trying to tell with your data.

A paladin in shining armor has no place in a science fiction movie (unless you’re talking WoW: Burning Crusade), but that doesn’t make that character bad, just one that doesn’t fit in the story you want to tell.

Are you telling a story about conversion of non-social channels? Then your story doesn’t need Twitter followers or Facebook fans in it.

On the other hand, if you’re telling a story about the path from member of the general public to customer via social channels and you omit those metrics, then your story is woefully incomplete and is made worse by your omission based on a mistaken belief that those metrics are inherently bad.

Avoid judging a metric as bad. Instead, focus on story you want to tell with your data.

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Over two days last week, I enjoyed spending time with the WhatCounts team at their Digital Marketing Summit. One of the most striking things I noticed in the questions asked during my session on Google Analytics was that the nature of questions had changed.

Two years ago, even a year ago, people were asking about basic metrics and measurements, from audience numbers to rudimentary conversion tracking. This past event, marketers indicated by their questions that they are being held accountable for much more sophisticated tracking, from longitudinal customer information to sophisticated cross-channel tracking and indirect conversion.

This is a welcome change! These kinds of questions indicate a level of sophistication in this particular audience (and I’ve worked with this audience for over three years, back when it was still the Blue Sky Factory audience) and a level of awareness of what is possible, even if the questioners weren’t necessarily able to do the technical implementation themselves.

An increased level of sophistication in what is being asked of marketers also means that there will be some shaking out of practitioners, a thinning of the field. If more marketers are being held accountable for complete funnel metrics (not just top or bottom), then those folks who position themselves beyond what they’re capable of may find themselves unable to meet what is being asked of them.

The challenge is on, the heat is on for us to understand marketing metrics better, develop better methods, and ultimately generate better results.

What’s been your experience in people’s questions about analytics?

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A question came up yesterday in discussion with a friend about how all of the digital marketing analytics books seem to cater to the beginner level crowds, and they wanted to know where the advanced analytics books are. In the same vein as where the advanced conferences are, there are no super advanced analytics books for a few reasons.

1. Most advanced analytics needs are highly customized. Think of it like becoming a connoisseur of something. Once you get past the basics, your needs and wants are tailored specifically to you. Everyone’s got a favorite beer or coffee or wine or sushi or fried chicken or… you get the idea. There’s something unique about your favorites that other similar preparations simply can’t mirror.

2. Most advanced analytics solutions don’t come from packaged tools. Instead, the advanced analytics stuff comes from raw mathematical ideas and formulae that aren’t bundled up into existing tools. Running an oscillating indicator or a moving average indicator isn’t something you’re ever going to find in a stock, off-the-shelf marketing analytics package, and that’s okay. It’s not about the tools anyway…

3. Most advanced analytics power isn’t about tools or technology, but about how to think and, as Tom Webster often says, how to tell a story with the data you have. Seeing a 12/26 moving average converge is important, but if you don’t know what it means and you don’t know what to do next, then that particular tool is a hindrance, not a help. To reach this point, you need a lot of experience in your career, you need a lot of experience looking at what the data tells you, and you need a lot of experience running campaigns and testing things to find out what works to fix or improve things when you see a known, recognizable pattern in the data. There is no packaged solution, no book, no course that will ever substitute for this hard-earned experience.

With that in mind, I do want to give a plug for Chuck Hemann and Ken Burbary’s latest book on Digital Marketing Analytics, which is a nice tour of the many tools and basics you need for getting started in collecting and understanding your marketing data.

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Measuring PR and earned media has always been something of a challenge in the past, but thanks to digital marketing and metrics tools, it’s easier today to find the impact of PR, even with businesses that have significant offline components. In this series on the SHIFT blog, we’re looking at 7 different ways to see how PR is improving the performance of your digital marketing and sales programs for organizations of all kinds. Take a look at the whole series, just finished today:

1. Sales/business goals
2. Marketing metrics
3. Social media
4. Search marketing
5. Paid advertising
6. Primary research
7. Standard media metrics
8. Analysis and conclusion

Be sure to subscribe to the SHIFT newsletter for roundups of all the blog posts there.

Measuring PR and earned media has always been something of a challenge in the past, but thanks to digital marketing and metrics tools, it’s easier today to find the impact of PR, even with businesses that have significant offline components. In this series on the SHIFT blog, we’re looking at 7 different ways to see how PR is improving the performance of your digital marketing and sales programs for organizations of all kinds. Take a look at parts 1-4:

1. Sales/business goals
2. Marketing metrics
3. Social media
4. Search marketing

Be sure to subscribe to the SHIFT newsletter for roundups of all the blog posts there.

Stand Out Social Marketing starts a little slow, but if you stick with it you’ll be rewarded with truly actionable insight that can help your whole company become more social.

This new book comes from Mike Lewis, who is head of marketing at Awareness Networks, a personal friend and one of the nicest guys I know. Stand Out builds on the premise that a great online presence is a function of distinctive content delivered through multiple channels with the assumption that interactions with constituents are part of the process. The book’s initial focus on social listening tactics is somewhat incongruous in that context, but it gets rolling as Lewis moves along.

There have been plenty of books about social media marketing written by people (like me) who don’t do much of it. What makes Stand Out such a stand out is that Lewis not only brings years of field experience to the topic but also insight gleaned from hundreds of customer experiences.

This book is worth its cover price for chapter 4 alone. In it, Lewis sets out practical guidelines for getting the most out of social media interactions based upon real data from real campaigns. Lewis has the benefit of being able to tap into the knowledge that huge brands like Major League Baseball have gained from analyzing millions of customer reactions, and some of the insights are fascinating. For example:

–People post more content to social channels on Friday than any other day of the week, but Thursdays have significantly higher interaction rates.

–Nearly 100% of interactions around content posted to Facebook and Twitter occurs during the first 10 days, but only 34% of interactions around YouTube and WordPress content happens during that time. This means that content posted to these channels should be created differently depending on when people are most likely to discover it.

–Content published to three or more social channels generates about 30% more engagement than content posted to a single social channel.

This is what I call really actionable information. It will immediately change some of your tactics – and for the better.

In addition to  statistics like these, Lewis offers practical advice buttressed by concrete examples. For example, “Content should be focused on the needs of your prospects and customers – not on you, your company or your product.” While experienced social marketers may think this advice is obvious, it’s stunning how few marketers think this way.

Stand Out also has several excellent case studies from both B2C and B2B businesses that dramatize the advantages of engaging in conversation rather than spewing messages. An accompanying website provides bonus information that builds on many of the points raised in the book.

A metrics section near the end introduces some new measurement tactics that were unfamiliar to me but which provide a solid foundation for understanding reach and effectiveness. It goes well beyond fans or followers to include factors like SEO effectiveness, interactions, activity and even customer service. These are useful ideas to internalize in making a comprehensive ROI evaluation.

It’s hard to think of a social media marketing angle that hasn’t already been covered by some other text. Mike Lewis manages to find one.

I have recently had the pleasure to interview several CMO’s and CIO’s, including the CMO’s at SAP, Macy’s and Aon and the CIO for the US GSA, and the VP of innovation at IBM. You can listen to the podcasts on the CMO 2.0 site and the CIO 2.0 site.

Here are some common themes that seem to emerge when talking to CIO’s and CMO’s:

1. Companies with strong shared beliefs and values do not have to compensate for local cultures — for them, the work culture trumps the local culture.
2. All CMO’s and CIO’s who I have recently interviewed think that understanding employee culture is an important aspect of their success. Many CMO’s are also starting to pay more attention to consumer cultures.
3. Most CMO’s who I recently interviewed are trying to humanize their brands by having people whose job is not marketing or sales to engage with their customers.
4. Most CMO’s who I recently interviewed are trying to promote global brands while staying locally relevant.
5. Every single CMO and CIO who I interviewed is metrics-driven.

If you have suggestions for other CMO’s or CIO’s to interview, please let me know.

The sophistication with which companies analyze their natural search visibility and the metrics they use to do so can vary widely up and down the spectrum. There is often little correlation between how sophisticated a company is in other areas of their online business and their level of…



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