Ian McCaig

Ian leads all product marketing, communications and business operations at Qubit. Before Qubit Ian worked at Google for just under 5 years and in that time gained experience in marketing, product and sales development. Most recently Ian led Google’s business marketing team in the UK, helping customers and agencies understand how to get the most out of Google’s solutions such as Adwords, YouTube, Google Analytics and Google’s suite of insight tools. Previous to that Ian led the monetization of the Google Content Network across EMEA and helped develop the UK & Benelux sales strategy which went on to shape the global thinking about search. Prior to Google Ian worked in the Music Industry and for a leading FMCG company. Ian graduated from Bath University with a degree in Business Management.

Why discounts should always be seen as the last resort

Discounts and offers have been around since the beginning of retailing history. Giving the customer money off has always been seen as the ultimate marketing tool for increasing sales volume.

To date, the web hasn’t changed this: price competition is at a historic high and the rise of deals sites has institutionalised discounts as an accepted part of online retailing practice.

by Ian McCaig 13 May 2013 15:53pm 4 comments

The death of commerce?

Retail is undergoing a major shift. The long predicted move from high street to online is reaching what appears to be an endgame with major names disappearing from physical retail at an alarming pace.

Jessops, Comet, Blockbuster and HMV weren’t isolated examples of poorly run companies, they were the result of tectonic shift in the way that everyone shops.

by Ian McCaig 02 April 2013 09:27am 2 comments

The history of personalisation

Personalisation in retail is often seen as the latest development in online marketing but the practice itself is as old as the concept of retail.

From the time of the earliest shopkeepers, good retailers would recognise their customer and tailor their pitch according to what they knew about them.

by Ian McCaig 11 March 2013 10:42am 11 comments

CRO: data driven tests are 7.7 times more effective than UX tests

The 21st century marketer needs an extensive toolkit. As well as the ‘standard’ skills of creativity, organisation and management, these days they also need to be web literate, social media savvy and equipped with basic data science skills.

Amongst all of these areas of technology competence one that is growing in importance, but is perhaps still misunderstood, is website testing.

Testing is the new intuition in site development and optimisation. Rather than relying on hunches, the modern web marketer will test potential changes to their site before deploying them thus, we are led to believe, ensuring their efficacy.

However, if all changes are now tested, how come we don’t all have perfect sites? If testing only tells us the truth, how come we still sometimes go down dead ends?

The answer lies not necessarily in the tests, but in the ways that they’re applied. We’ve seen thousands of testing processes run across a huge variety of sites and what’s struck us is that the issues that led to unsuccessful tests were common across industries.

by Ian McCaig 21 December 2012 09:37am 15 comments

Web analytics: stuck in a world of reporting

Web analytics is now seen as a standard part of the site owner’s tool box and the data it provides has become a staple of web marketing.

However, the technology and approaches underpinning analytics are moving on, but the market is failing to keep up to speed with these changes.

by Ian McCaig 15 October 2012 10:01am 6 comments

Tag management: whose side are you on?

Tag management is rapidly becoming one of the must-haves for site owners. The ability to manage the ever-growing number of measurement and marketing tags on a website offers huge benefits to webmasters and web marketers alike.

However, there are two fundamentally different approaches to tag management and anyone looking to adopt the technology should be aware of the benefits and limitations of each.

by Ian McCaig 03 October 2012 11:38am 6 comments

Re-assessing the value of conversion rates

Whilst the e-commerce industry as a whole continues to grow at 20% per year, life for individual site owners doesn’t get any easier.

Whilst now levelling out, CPCs have seen heady growth over previous years, meaning that it’s more important than ever to secure a sale once you’ve enticed a user to your site.

However, at the same time there is a clear trend showing a decline in on-site conversion rates, meaning that more and more of your expensively-won traffic is simply visiting the site only to leave without purchasing.

by Ian McCaig 20 September 2012 10:48am 6 comments

Eight pitfalls to avoid when selecting a Tag Management System (TMS)

Lets face it, enterprises are just not as agile as smaller organisations, hence the reason for wanting a Tag Management Solution (TMS) in the first place.