Analyst Insights

PPC campaigns can under-perform for a variety of reasons. Below are three frequent reasons many SMBs do not realize the full benefits of their PPC campaigns.

Philosophy can be described as the study of what ought to happen. This of course is different than what does happen. This struggle between ought and is has consumed the greatest minds, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Descartes and Russell. I will not even begin to touch on the metaphysical, the deontological, or the normative theories of the human experience. But I do want to briefly outline a personal philosophy on analytics in business, or what ought to be in the decision-making framework for every business. Here are the basic tenets.

Living Social and Groupon, the two largest deal sites have been piling up the losses. After rapid growth that fueled intense investment, the weakness of their email discount-dependent business model have become apparent, which has prompted a race to diversify into more traditional eCommerce offerings.

If you are an owner of an SMB then you probably have a good understanding of your expenses. But have you taken a deep dive into your expense to find opportunities to lower costs and improve profitability? Analyzing your expenses is a great exercise that can uncover insights about your business’ cost structure. Here are 5 areas that may be prime for a more thorough cost analysis.

As I have discussed in prior posts regarding the pitfalls of PPC campaigns and niche digital marketing, landing page optimization is perhaps the best way to increase success events while improving efficiency through higher conversion. However, the story does not end there. An overlooked optimization opportunity lies after the click on the confirmation page.

Much ado is being made in the marketing community about sales attribution. Historically, it has been common practice to use one-touch models such as first-touch and last-touch to attribute sales to marketing activity. Although these models are correct in the sense that the marketing activity led to a sale, it does not mean that it was the sole catalyst. Making this assumption can lead to sub-optimal decisions when it comes time to allocating resources.

”Mobilocaltext” Continues

The trend towards mobile, local and contextual that we have observed in 2012 will continue if not accelerate in 2013. Consumers are wanting convenient and personalized experiences. Mobile usage is accelerating, search engines are prioritizing and promoting local listings to provide more relevant content, and advertising is becoming more and more seamless with building excellent customer experiences, not just content. So make your website mobile-friendly, setup your Google+ Local listing, and find contextual advertising partners.

In case you are not aware, Congress in recent months has been turning up the heat on what it calls “data brokers”, or companies that aggregate, analyze and sell data. In July, Congress sent letters to 9 large firms, including credit agencies Experian and Equifax and Intelius.

Predicting behavior is the “white whale” of every business leader responsible for business development and customer acquisition. The field of data analysis offers numerous techniques and methods to help business leaders in these efforts, yet for those without the experience and/or resources this can be a daunting task. In this article I want to discuss one technique that can support the efforts of any business, small and large: logistic regression.

Any small business leader wanting to implement a dashboard can find dozens of examples via a simple Google search. While many of these dashboards may be gorgeous representations of data with fancy looking charts like gauges, when I look at them it is not clear to me what conclusions I should draw from them. If I am a leader of a business then I want to know how the business is doing and what we need to do to get better. My philosophy is that standard periodic business reports should tell a story about the business. This means knowing not only the “what” but the “why” and the “how” as well.