Reporting on click-throughs is an important way of determining how engaged your audience is, notes Andy Shore in an article at MarketingProfs. However, "a lot of email marketers throw around words and phrases such as 'Google Analytics,' 'tracking,' and 'metrics' without really knowing how to translate link reports into successful ... more

Scott Anthony recently spent a week visiting four Fortune 100 companies with combined revenues of $300 billion. And in each of his discussions he noticed a common theme: how to support innovation with data. "I was particularly struck by this question: 'How do I know when I have too much ... more

"[T]here's more to Twitter than amassing followers and broadcasting your latest news," writes Ryan Holmes at MarketingProfs. "The real-time conversations that fill the Twitterverse offer an abundance of market insight and unprecedented visibility into consumer sentiment." Here's how you can gather and use all that information: Track conversations about your brand—and ... more

"Numbers are the universal language of business," writes Bill Taylor at the Harvard Business Review. "We use them to … win approval for product introductions, to make the case for expanding into new markets or entering new categories. In other words, numbers, when used well, tell a compelling story." Taylor recently ... more

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Urbanspoon and hundreds of other social-networking sites, you have unprecedented, real-time access to the discussions your customers are having with their friends, colleagues, families and the world at large. For your company, this means amazing data is there for the taking. "Effective listening and ... more

"You are cranky, it's been a long day, you need to vent," writes Mack Collier at The Viral Garden. "So you write a nice stress-relieving post to your blog. Totally out of character with what you normally write, but you need the release." Of course, this is the post that ... more

"Like good little Reporting Squirrels we collect and stack metrics as if preparing for an imminent ice age," opines Avinash Kaushik at Occam's Razor, before quickly noting that it isn't a good thing. "Rather than being a blessing that stack becomes a burden because we live in times of bright ... more

"Have you ever been confused about how to use your website analytics and how to maximize the value you get from them?" asks Adrian Mott at the HubSpot blog. If so, he continues, you're not alone: "many Internet marketers are often baffled about how to best utilize the data they ... more

If you don't think of podcasting as a mobile medium, think again! Any users with MP3 players (including smartphones) can load podcasts onto their devices and listen to them anywhere—while sitting on the subway, jogging, walking the dog, you name it. Podcasts are inexpensive to produce, and once you've loaded one onto your server, you can ... more

"[I]n our quest for ever more hard problems to solve," says Avinash Kaushik at the Occam's Razor blog, "we forget that the number one goal of every website is not to suck. Especially at the really simple and basic things." To illustrate his point, he recounts a recent conference that ... more

"Say you want to find every page on your site that received zero visitors from organic search in the past 2 years," says Ian Lurie at the Conversation Marketing blog. "That's a useful statistic: Those pages may be invisible to search engines, or they may be really poorly optimized." You may ... more

Your own keyword analytics data is the most valuable marketing asset of your company, says WordStream’s Larry Kim in an article at MarketingProfs. The data contained in the keyword report from your Web-analytics application—which tells you how people are finding your site through paid and organic search—comprise a far more effective ... more

As subscriber engagement becomes a critical factor in the deliverability rates of email campaigns, removing inactive recipients from your list is more important than ever. To keep your list as clean as possible, "Mark" of the MailChimp blog recommends a three-message series that asks non-responsive subscribers if they still want ... more

We've written before about Anne Holland's addictive Which Test Won?—a site where readers compare marketing pieces from actual A/B tests and vote for the one they would guess is more effective. Often, visitors get it right. But in a recent comparison of two banner ads, they got it profoundly wrong. Both ... more

Write good content, you might assume, and the visitors will come. Or will they? "You'd better have more of a strategy than that," says Ian Lurie at the Conversation Marketing blog. "Ian's Cynical Version of the same rule is: 'Write the right good content, and they'll eventually show up.'" To determine ... more

On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your ability to measure the impact of your social-media initiatives? Be honest. Because if you're like the marketers who graded themselves for Emily Riley of Forrester Research, it's likely you see plenty of room for improvement. "The average grade ... more

When a visitor tries to access outdated content at your website—say, through an old bookmark—she'll land on a 404 page that explains that the page no longer exists. Most companies use these pages to steer users back to a site's active content. The 404 page at Mountain Equipment Co-op, for instance, ... more

Kevin Nalts, a marketing director who produces hi-lar-ious videos on YouTube under the handle nalts, once joked that after cutting a bazillion notches into his belt, he still has no idea what makes a viral hit with users. And that's the accepted wisdom: Creating a truly viral video—something people want to ... more

Speculate all you want about how successful an online marketing campaign has been. But once someone brings hard data to the table, all bets are off: The answers are plain to see. Surprisingly, however, the average company doesn't make marketing decisions based on data. Why? Some companies explain that they ... more

It's happening less often these days, but you probably still encounter executives or colleagues who have trouble wrapping their heads around newer technology—how something works, for instance, and what it can do for them. So if you find yourself trying to explain the ins and outs of Google Analytics to ... more

To be free or not to be free? That is the question many content providers are asking these days. Says SEO Book author Aaron Wall in a Search Engine Land article: "Free content can spread far and get many links, but it won't produce any revenue directly. If it is paid, ... more

"With free programs like Google Analytics," says Corte Swearingen in a post at the SmallBiz Marketing Tips blog, "acquiring data is not the issue—the challenge is finding a way to improve your bottom line using that data." Swearingen discussed the issue with Jason Burby, author of Actionable Web Analytics, and here ... more

Ever wonder how great search results end up that way? Well, in a recent post at the User Interface Engineering blog, Jared Spool says there are no shortcuts to search-result success. According to Spool, "There is no way you can produce a great search-results page [on your website] without spending ... more

Want to boost search results? Try benchmarking based on the latest trends, says Performics' Michael Kahn in a Chief Marketer article. An analysis by Performics of data from more than 200 paid-search programs uncovered some important shifts this past spring within many actively managed search campaigns; they could signal the ... more

When you have products or services that customers don't buy on a regular basis—for instance, big-screen televisions or luxury excursions on the Orient Express—targeted email offers based on previous purchases may not be the best way to determine what they want next. That's why Sean Duffy of the UK-based EmailCenter ... more