digitalCMO.com

Here, You can Have your Website and Marketing Back

Yesterday, PaidContent broke the news of GSI's acquisition of ClearSaleing. The former is a ~ten year old company that started out building storefronts and providing fulfillment for sports retailers, then evolved into somewhat of a performance-based media agency. The latter is a new venture-backed dashboard for engagement mapping. Writ large, it's a good example of the movement away from media buying/management (a low growth opportunity) to the provision of holistic actionable insights, where...

Rollerbabes, or The Diminishing Marginal Utility of Social Connections

Mashable reported on SecondMarket's users' picks for the top ten private companies (list below). SecondMarket allows investors to buy and sell shares of privately held companies. Interesting analysis:  take 2 of the 10 out of the list - SecondMarket itself (no surprise); and Bloom (an energy company) - and you get 8 businesses built on connecting with others - via collaborative filtering or through direct connections - over: music (Pandora), games (Zynga), classifieds (Craigslist), local rati...

Four Digital Marketing Predictions for 2011

Not quite relevant to digital marketing, but we are expecting our third boy in February. What is related to digital marketing is that I crammed in a bunch of late November/ December meetings with agencies, advertisers, and media specialty companies before going under house arrest.  Having visited six cities in five weeks, I spoke with folks across the digital marketing world who, already having made decisions around the holiday season, were focused on 2011 execution. I did not hear any surprises...

Beware the Wounded Dog

Happy New Year. It’s harder than I expected to come back to a neglected blog.  I haven’t posted since May of last year, when I wrote on conversion attribution. The longer I wait, the harder it gets – I think I was waiting for that great flash of an idea for a luminary post that would justify the 6 month wait. Well, this ain’t it.  But here it goes. Beware the Wounded Dog This has been on my mind for a while:  how to recognize – and avoid – the Wounded Dog at work.  As unpleasant as t...

LVIMA Presentation 5/27

Thanks LVIMA and Shawn Rorick for the wonderful event. (*note: I just revised the .ppt to account for lack of animation on SlideShare.) Here is a copy of the presentation. Feel free to link to it (although the animation online doesn't work.) If you would like a copy of the original file,  please leave me a comment with your name, email, and company in the comments section of this post. Comments always appreciated. h

Facebook Analytics or Facebook Insights?

I just viewed a Facebook Insights video tutorial on John Haydon's Social Marketing for Non Profits site.  With a calm Mr. Rogers-like voice,  he does a great job illustrating the level of analytics and insights available to those who buy ads or create pages on FB. I recommend it for folks who are in the business of media analytics and were not aware of this (like me). Left me wondering how long until Facebook launches a web analytics application (like Y! or G Analytics) which allows marketers...

Will Ad Verification Tools Go Away?

To be clear, this is a real question, rather than a rhetorical "would those ad verification tools just @#$& go away!" These tools (such as AdXpose and DoubleVerify)  perform what seems to be a necessary service: to alert advertisers when their display ads appear in a way that breaches the explicit or implict contract with the publisher or network: below the fold; to the incorrect user segment; in the wrong geographic area, within questionable content. Like the "click fraud" exposés (a...

Digital Sausage (for Managers)

Good digital marketers know to value  output over the input. As a matter of fact, the input “hits” is a term that got the industry so much trouble that we don’t even call it that any more when we talk about impressions. Impressions, clicks, conversion rate, average sales amount, lifetime value of a customer are all inputs that go into the most important output: profitable revenue (ROI).  [Note, this can be over time (LTV) or transactional]. This accountability for output vs. input is not news...

Cookie Window Pain

In the past month I have hear two very different approaches to cookie window, both delivered with equal amounts of hubris: 1. First is "we set our cookie windows to one day...and that is what we pay on" 2. Second is "we want a perpetual cookie." The first statement can lead to trouble because multiple touchpoints often contribute to an action, especially when richer-media and social media engagements are used. The second statement can also lead to trouble unless advanced analytics ar...

Like Data for Chocolate

In my career, and often at home, I use data to answer key questions:  At work: "how much should we charge...how should we allocate resources...what is the right incentive compensation plan...how do we measure the financial impact?" are some examples. At home: "should I buy or lease...should I clean my own gutters...should we get a season ski pass"? These questions are pretty straight forward, and I know that for many of you, upon reading these questions, you immediately see the Excel formu...