• The Multichannel Analytics Team?
    Companies that derive revenue from multiple channels often have two analyst teams: the "database marketing team" and the "Web analysis team." These groups tend not to communicate. In some companies, however, these teams are merging to form the "multichannel analytics team." This specialized team analyzes, reports, and evaluates both Web data and offline data -- often in coordination with the "business intelligence team." The emergence of this new team structure makes sense for companies that are shifting their offline business models to become more online-centric, and thus want to understand value-generating connections among channels.
  • The Only Column On Engagement You'll Need To Read All Day
    One thing you have to say about the bride magazines (Brides, Modern Bride, etc.): before any of us, they had a profound understanding of the value of an engaged audience.Don't worry, I won't keep this conceit up all column. I just wanted to ease you into yet another essay on engagement, that ephemeral quality that all of us in the media business pursue doggedly, even as none of us really, truly, know exactly what it is (save for the bridal magazines -- and hey, my veil is off to them.)
  • GoogleClick: Opportunity For Web Site Analytic Packages?
    I recently saw "Apocalypto," Mel Gibson's controversial movie that theorizes the downfall of the Mayan empire (no, I am not about to predict the downfall of Google). But I did wonder whether or not the players in GoogleClick, and all of us in the audience, were somehow focused on the big issues (competitive balance, shift in power in display advertising, privacy concerns) while a different threat slowly and quietly approaches the arena. If this threat emerges, it could lead to big change in the world of analytics.
  • Media Recession? Probably Not...
    In January, I wrote in this space about the talk of a media recession and discussed that media cost projections tended to be limited to old media that are not growing. My premise at that time was twofold: 1) that new media need to be included in the indices; and 2) that a third party such as eMarketer should be looked at for these predictions, as the agencies that tend to make them are overly embedded in the TV marketplace and not as invested in digital media and emerging technologies.
  • Tough Times Call for Tough Measures
    A recent survey of 684 b-to-b marketers revealed marketing budgets are cutting print dollars (45.3% are looking at print spending cuts) and boosting online dollars (48.5% are increasing online spending). Yes, in these difficult times, money is flowing to the online world. That's great! But it's not the whole story.
  • Modern Targeting: Who Needs Audience Measurement Anyway?
    I didn't get to a lot of the content at the 4As conference last week -- the conference is far too fertile a ground for meetings, both scheduled and impromptu. But like most of the attendees, I made sure to catch Tim Armstrong's presentation. In this session Armstrong showed a lot of cool-looking charts and graphs from a proposed dashboard for tracking, monitoring and managing advertising both on- and offline. As I thought about the session afterwards, from an admittedly jaundiced perspective, my overriding takeaway was that Google was moving to a place where the distinction between the advertising media, …
  • Using Custom Events To Measure Interactivity
    The insertion of an Easter egg into a virally shared widget is just one more way to re-energize the content and extend the life of distributed content on social networks, start pages and blogs. However, measuring these strategies is not as easy as just publishing a Web page to your site with a page tag baked in. Widgets, Ajax applications and other applications that do not fire off a new page view require the use of custom event tagging. This is critical to understanding how visitors are interacting with your on- or off-domain content.
  • The Assist: Revolution or Quagmire?
    I am a basketball fan, even if the New York Knicks are trying to make me quit. One of their problems is that they are last in the league in assists, defined by the NBA as "the principal pass that contributes directly to a score." For those that may not know, the concept of "assists" in digital marketing is starting to gain steam. This concept could lead into one of the biggest debates in the industry.
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