Marketing Week hosted the Data Storytelling conference in September, which attracted a large crowd of likeminded professionals from across both marketing and data fields.
The agenda was positioned to explain the concept of mobilising data through building greater understanding of the customer and then exploiting insights using informed campaigns.
It was a brave ambition that covered a wide gulf of technologies and opportunities.
The effects of Econsultancy’s site change are still only just becoming known six months on.
This is what we have learned so far…
Regular visitors to our site, particularly our subscribers, will probably have come across the survey we’re running with ForeSee.
We consider customer experience to be an essential part of modern marketing that correlates with commercial success.
So prior to some fairly big changes to our current site, we wanted to see how our visitors considered us to be performing on that scale. (Plus we couldn’t resist the opportunity to put some tech to the test!)
Benchmarking, for those that were in the know, was once a fantastic feature of Google Analytics.
Discontinued in 2011, and then followed by the removal of Adplanner the following year, meant it became a lot harder to contextualise the great work marketers were doing and get valuable market information.
Alternatives for benchmarking have always been available, based on toolbar tracking or proprietary stats vendors for example, but those that used Google Analytics benchmarking reports loved the feature for its simplicity, the fact that it was perceived to be well informed, and of course it was free.
Well, as announced on the Google Analytics blog today, this ever popular feature has been revived.
For those that opt in to anonymously share their data, version one of the new implementation is being rolled out to all Google Analytics Universal users, with promises of much more to come in the future.
Launched during the Google Analytics’ partner summit, Google has taken a fairly huge step in customer understanding by releasing ‘Enhanced Ecommerce’ functionality across the platform.
This latest update is a major change to specifically understand customer behaviour and the effectiveness of merchandising efforts, away from attempting to understand products within GA using transactional data alone and covers a number of new opportunities.
The changes include a series of funnel based reports, widening of the use of the Product ID dimension and Google Tag Manager support for the new functionality, all available through any standard GA account (Universal Analytics only).
Once established, analytics data quality tends to be taken for granted. The site is tagged, the filters applied and the data is flowing in.
Battling the metrics then begins and the mind wanders off from auditing the data, but nothing can ruin your new staggering insight quicker than that dawning realisation that the data is flawed.
So many elements can affect the data flow. Sites change, pages are renamed, structures altered, processes amended, tags change, offices can change physical locations.
All can cause issues with implementations that may even have not been configured correctly in the first place.