Signals from the Field

I had the opportunity to speak this week in front of several richmond business owners and managers. The topic of the talk was around web analytics and online trends. It was my hope to simplify the topic of web analytics into something actionable. To do this, it was necessary to over come the biggest burden faced by web analytics: the over-abundance of metrics and reports. Google Analytics alone gives you access to nearly 300 different metrics and dimensions, wrapped into over 80 different standard reports.

I over heard a couple of guys chatting about the never ending battle of the Content Management Systems and thought I'd make a quick post. I wonder does it ultimately boil down to this, or is there more to it than meets the eye?

Social media marketing has so many new and emerging opportunities. One of the most popular these days are the daily deal sites - Groupon and Living Social being the most prominent. However, there are more deal sites popping up all the time targeting more niche spaces. These properties have brought many great deals to consumers, including me, but are they working for the merchants? This post provides some suggestions about how to make one element of social media marketing, the daily deal sites, work financially for the business.

This is the beginning of a series of blog posts that focuses on going back to the basics of digital marketing. In this post, I want to highlight some of the web analytics do's and don'ts when it comes to metrics. There are dozens and dozens of different metrics available to us, enabling us to evaluate the performance of a website. Some of these metrics aren't nearly as valuable as we think they are while others that hold the keys to success are often ignored completely.

Money may not buy happiness, but beauty buys both money and happiness, says a study published online recently that gauged happiness and attractiveness among more than 25,000 people worldwide. This recent study was conducted about how beauty affects happiness and prosperity. This really caught my eye and after reading it, I was fascinated. The researchers concluded that “better-looking people generally earn more money and marry those who are better-looking and higher-earning.” They went on to report that “the top 15% of people ranked by looks are more than 10% happier than those ranked in the bottom 10%.” Remember, these are results from a study, not my personal opinion. Thank God because I'm clearly not the most attractive person around!

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