Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

All sorts of agencies, social media technology companies, and analyst firms have hit on a lead generation gold mine: write a paper, conduct a webinar, or host an event that includes “ROI” and “social media” in any combination with any set of connecting articles and prepositions, and the masses will come! The beauty of B2B [...]

At least once a week in my role at Resource Interactive, I get asked some flavor of this basic question: “How do I measure the impact of my digital/social media investment?” It’s a fair question, but the answer (or, in some cases, the impetus for the question) is complicated and, often, is related to the [...]

Columbus Web Analytics Wednesday was last week — sponsored by Omniture, an Adobe company, and the topic wound up being “Facebook Measurement” (deck at the end of this post). For some reason, Monish Datta cropped up — prominently — in half of the pictures I took while floating around the room. In my never-ending quest [...]

Anyone who has been working with web analytics for more than a week or two has inevitably asked or been asked to explain why two different numbers that “should” match don’t: Banner ad clickthroughs reported by the ad server don’t match the clickthroughs reported by the web analytics tool Visits reported by one web analytics [...]

Earlier this week, I attended the Digital Media Measurement and Pricing Summit put on by The Strategy Institute and walked away with some real clarity about some realities of online marketing measurement. The conference, which was relatively small (less than 100 attendees) had a top-notch line-up, with presenters and panelists representing senior leadership at first-rate [...]

In my last post, one of the challenges I described was that it was impossible to get a good read on the number of impressions a brand was garnering from their fan page status updates — a status update on a fan page appears in the live feeds of the page’s fan…assuming the fan hasn’t [...]

If you are a marketer, Facebook is important — the number of active users of the site exceeds the population of the United States, and it’s growth is going to do nothing but increase. Check out the Facebook statistics page for a slew of numbers that are all…big. Because of the growth of Facebook as [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on dashboards — different dashboards for different purposes for different clients, with a heavy emphasis on making dashboards that can be efficiently updated. I’m finding that I keep coming back to two key principles: A dashboard, by definition, fits on a single page — this is [...]

I’m finding myself in a lot of conversations where I’m explaining the difference between “outputs” and “outcomes.” It’s a distinction that can go a long way when it comes to laying out a measurement strategy. It’s also a distinction that can seem incredibly academic and incredibly boring. To the unenlightened! Outputs are simply things that [...]

Put this down as one of my more tactical posts, brought on by a fit of lingering annoyance with the use (and by “use” I mean “grotesque misuse”) of trend indicators on reports and dashboards. The trouble is that trends are a trickier business than they seem at first blush, and, at the same time, [...]