Whether it’s mobile marketing, conversion rate optimization (CRO) or how to get the biggest bang for buck from paid search activities, a wealth of ideas exist if we know where to look.

These 9 digital marketing blogs continuously up-the-game by sharing proven techniques to jump-start website performance.

Content Marketing Institute

The Content Marketing Institute publishes new content daily. Its authors have a razor-sharp eye toward what works in content marketing. What I like most about the blog is that each post has plenty of examples (most with images from campaigns or sites that are actively marketing) and focused suggestions for what can make a website great.
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/blog/

Moz

Moz was founded back in 2004 by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig and has become synonymous with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Though Fishkin left Moz in 2018, the Moz blog continues to be a valuable resource for marketers. Most recently I’ve been interested in the blog’s exploration of how SEO and CRO can play nice together.
https://moz.com/blog

Convince and Convert

The thing I love most about this blog, is that it explores digital marketing as related to building great narratives – word of mouth marketing, building social proof and, amongst other things, how to know if you’re chatting to a human or robot. The blog is not afraid of tending toward the explorative and is the better for it.
https://www.convinceandconvert.com/blog/

Occam’s Razor

Avinash Kaushik is the author of the blog, Occams Razor. Closely connected with digital analytics and marketing, this site has some deep dives into many of the subjects that marketers either care deeply about or are confused by. One of my personal favorites is Kaishnik’s article on digital marketing attribution models, which includes a detailed look at the benefits and downsides of each model.
https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

Sumo

Sumo, as a company, is all about eCommerce growth. So it’s little surprise that their blog contains highly specific articles about how to increase conversion of online shopping carts. I quite enjoyed their write up of where to use power words in creative assets to improve conversions.  This blog is great for marketers running online shopping assets.
https://sumo.com/stories

Copyblogger

Brian Clark started copyblogger in 2006 and it quickly become an essential resource for digital copywriters. The advice on Copyblogger helps marketers make their content more visible on search engines, create successful openings for blog posts, as well as overcome obstacles that stand in the way of their creativity.
https://www.copyblogger.com/

Contently

Contently’s blog is aptly called ‘The Content Strategist’. While the blog focuses on what it takes to build great content, it also explores strategy, transformation and ROI as highly related themes. It’s a great resource to tap into and I particularly enjoyed the insights shared by long-time Editor In Chief, Joe Lazauska, about how Contently grew its audience from 14,000 to 400,000 readers.
https://contently.com/strategist/

Econsultancy

Econsultancy has developed a strong reputation for creating and sharing well researched data about how digital marketing is changing the landscape. In one of my first internet marketing roles I remember discovering Econsultancy. Then, the data made my job as a digital marketer that little bit simpler. Today the blog still focuses on very relevant and current issues, though I do find some of the deeper analytical content sits behind the paywall for paying subscribers. Nevertheless it is still an excellent read.
https://econsultancy.com/blog/

Seth Godin

Godin’s blog is about online marketing, and then again it isn’t. He is a master of the thought-provoking, short post, on all subjects from using social media better, through to what makes us happy. I go to Seth’s blog for the random, the profound and the immensely useful and so far have not been disappointed. It is a great place to visit for fresh thinking.
https://seths.blog/

Your Go-To Digital Marketing Blogs?

Do you have other digital marketing blogs that you refer to as a digital marketer?  If so, I’d love to hear…please consider sharing a comment below.

The post 9 Digital Marketing Blogs For Every Marketer’s Toolkit appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Today with sophisticated web analytics, we can measure almost everything that happens. From the paid search link a customer clicked to reach our website, to the detailed pathways the visitor navigated before adding the product to the shopping cart, digital analytics create new opportunities for insight.

Regardless of the level of sophistication of digital analytics tools, these 6 keys are ones I use across every digital project. Though analytics tools change, these principles are timeless. I’ve used them for intranets, for websites, and for successful Mobile Apps.

1. Record everything

You can never record too much data. So from the start you should aim to capture all the essential measures for your website or mobile app. Page Title, Section of Site, Visits, Unique Visitors, Time on Page….all of the standard measures could be important. Whether you eventually use all of these measures or not, if you aim to capture everything up front, this will be the historical reservoir of data for you to draw upon in the future. And you never know when you will have very specific questions to ask of your data.

2. Take time up front to plan your measurement strategy

Too often digital analytics is the very last area that’s considered in a project. This is too late. I’ve seen many projects change direction, just because a bright spark asked at the start of the project, ‘how will we measure success?’ Inevitably, this simple question forces businesses to answer other important questions, like ‘what is important for us to measure’, ‘what would be the baseline of our measures’, and ‘how will we setup systems to capture these measures’. These are all important questions, and its far easier to plan a digital analytics strategy when we have answers for these questions up-front.

As an example, for a recent project we wanted to measure the activations and deactivation of a particular online service. When we looked at this, this required some custom analytics. If we hadn’t looked at this at the start of the project, we may not have captured one of the most important metrics for our work.

3. Measure the key conversion points

For any online initiative to be successful, it has to produce an outcome. This is usually measured in terms of ‘key conversion points’.

A key conversion point is simply the final outcome that represents success for the specific online site.

In eCommerce, this is the ‘number of products added to a shopping cart’ and ‘successful checkouts’. In financial services, this is the number of ‘started online applications’ and ‘completed online applications’. If you’re running an editorial site, this might be the ‘number of times an article’ was viewed within a period.

Every successful online business will have a list of its key conversion points, and will have metrics that track these measures overtime.

4. Track the contributing points

If key conversion points are the final outcomes you’re seeking, there will be other pages and tools on your website that contribute to these.

Sometimes these are referred to as ‘contributing points’. Examples of contributing points could be:

• home pages
• product pages
• special offers (either in terms of pages or on-site advertisements)
• tools (eg. calculators, comparison pages)
• pricing pages
• testimonials

Because these types of pages have an influence on whether a prospect decides to pursue an outcome (eg. adding a product to a shopping cart), it’s important to also track the impact of these pages on key conversion points.

This provides an overall measure of effectiveness of your site’s performance.

For example, if one page receives a bulk of website traffic, but only contributes to a key conversion point 1% of the time, there’s a good chance that page isn’t doing its job and either may not be required or needs to be improved.

5. Get above it and look at the trends

It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day data for a website. There are so many measures on the surface that seem important to watch. Now and then it’s good to get above the detail of data, and look at the longer term trends of site statistics.

There are two metrics to always track. First, trended volume of key conversion points over time. Second, the overall site conversion (represented as ‘number of key conversion points’ aganst ‘overall site visits’). The first measure will tell you whether your desired outcome is growing. The second measure will tell you whether your site is becoming increasingly effective at creating conversion results.

6. Measure, refine, and measure again

The techniques above will give you a measure for your site’s performance. These will tell you if your site is performing well within any given period, or requires improvement.

As with all business growth activities, it’s important to watch these measures while you’re launching activities in the market to grow your business.

By keeping a watch on both – your site performance and in-market activities – you’ll be able to see whether there are specific activities that create superior performance for your site. You can also continue to refine elements on your site to see if this changes performance.

The post 6 Keys to Digital Analytics Missed by Many Businesses appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.