‘Tis the season where marketers and analysts need to look back on the year in order to help prepare us for success in 2014. There were a myriad of significant changes in the digital marketing and web analytics spectrum, and we did our best to keep our readers informed with a constant barage of content. In our opinion, the 5 posts below were the most impactful.
1) Is my Google Analytics Data Accurate? (and Part Two)
Working for a data-centric company, our top priority before we begin any work internally or for clients is simple: is the data we’re looking at accurate? How can we decide marketing decision A is better than marketing decision B if we don’t have accurate data to back up our hypothesis? The two-part blog series “Is my Google Analytics Data Accurate?” defines a number of tools and best practices to help get you on track and keep you there.
2) Why Enterprise Analytics Architecture is so Important
Advanced digital analytics has led to amazing insights and helped businesses across the globe take their marketing efforts to new levels, with data backing the decision-making process. After helping multiple enterprise-level organizations set up their analytics architecture across hundreds of global sites, we summarized the top best practices to consider in this blog post.
3) 7 Habits of Highly Effective Analysts
Put rather bluntly: we don’t take our brilliant web analytics team for granted. There are several traits a highly effective analyst must have in order to succeed at their job. In this blog post, we describe the top seven, such as “thinking like an executive” and “focus on measuring the moments of truth.” For the other five you better click the link above, and don’t be like the guy below.
4) Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics Premium for Enterprises
This post discusses how a large organization can implement Google Analytics Premium to track all their web properties using Google Tag Manager. For you analogy-lovers, you’ll learn how a Google Tag Manager container is like Major League Baseball, consisting of multiple teams (tags) under one organization (container). Confused? Just read the post!
5) The Rabbi, Big Data, and the value of Web Analytics
Who knew the value of web analytics and big data could be described using an anecdote about a rabbi, a doctor and some chickens? Michael Loban somehow pulls it off in this blog post. Sometimes, stakeholders in organizations have incorrect expectations for what analytics will help them accomplish. It’s important they look beyond the marketing fluff about data and see data for what it truly is – a way to diagnose issues with your website, and prevent marketers from guessing where time and money is most effectively spent.
Hopefully this quick refresher on some our top blog posts was helpful. In the coming weeks, look forward to “5 Google Analytics Changes we Loved the Most from 2013” and “Bold Predictions for 2014 Web Analytics.”
Stay tuned!
