Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Google Analytics (GA) provides very powerful analytics tools right out of the box. However, most marketers are not familiar enough with what those tools can do, and are therefore not using them to their full advantage.

But to achieve true content marketing success, customizing GA to your hub architecture and business goals are essential first steps. Failure to do this results in not just bad data, which will impact your ability to strategize correctly, but will also make you miss out on one of the easiest and more impactful methods of tracking ROI metrics that your CMO will really respond to.

In this blog post, I’m going to break down your essential GA setup into two distinct sections:...

Pinterest isn’t just for sharing photos of delicious recipes or crafts anymore. Check out this infographic to see how retailers are driving traffic to their brick and mortar locations using Pinterest....

When it comes to social media, there is an ongoing focus on driving traffic to your digital home bases and outposts such as websites, blogs, and social networks. But how about using these channels to drive traffic to your physical store?

In a recent post on Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuel presents a series of data-driven Pinterest tactics that drive sales to brick and mortar retail locations. These findings are part of larger study, From Social to Sale: 8 Questions to Ask Your Customers, that offers some great insight on the factors that impact consumer social purchasing decisions.

This infographic summarizes the 5 key tactics that retailers can use to help drive in-store traffic....

Marketers have no shortage of metrics on their dashboards, but they are still often flying blind. Marketing visibility can be simultaneously clear and opaque. To paraphrase Coleridge, the state of marketing is “metrics, metrics everywhere, and not sure what to think.”

OverstateGate brought a colorful rise out of Branding Professor Mark Ritson:

“This little debacle once again confirms that nobody actually knows what the fuck is going on with digital media. Not media agencies, not big-spending clients and not armchair digital strategists. From the shadowy box of turds and spiders that is programmatic to the increasingly complex and deluded world of digital views, the idea that digital marketing is more analytical and attributable than other media is clearly horse shit. Sure, it has more numbers and many more metrics but that does not make it more accountable, it makes it less so.”

In general, marketers can’t always take metrics at face value. We have to get savvier and more sophisticated at questioning the numbers we use. We have to beware of faux metrics and fuzzy math....