How To Take Your Marketing Analytics To The Next Dimension — Literally
As digital marketing becomes increasingly complex, "dimensions," and how to analyze them, are becoming a key skill for marketing analysts. Columnist Kohki Yamaguchi explains why.
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Kohki Yamaguchi's latest articles
7 Limitations Of Big Data In Marketing Analytics
Big data -- the cutting edge of modern marketing or an overhyped buzzword? Columnist Kohki Yamaguchi dives in to some of the limitations of user-centered data.
The Marketing Analytics Practice Is Evolving: How Can You Adapt?
As the saying goes, the only thing that is constant is change. But in digital marketing today, change is not only constant but also rapid and all-inclusive, and applies not only to marketing practice but also the practitioners. The past few years have given rise to marketing technologists: those who are equally adept at marketing […]
Think Cross-Channel For Your Holiday Paid Search Campaign
You've got your holiday SEM strategy all laid out, but are you thinking cross-channel? Columnist Kohki Yamaguchi provides a guide for taking that next step.
3 Challenges Of Attribution Modeling: The Bad, The Bad And The Ugly
Any method of attribution has its strengths and drawbacks. Contributor Kohki Yamaguchi outlines factors every marketer should be aware of.
Pay Per What? Choosing Pricing Models In Digital Advertising
How to determine which of the many different digital advertising pricing models makes the most sense for your business.
5 Simple Steps For Defining Uber-KPIs For Multiple Objectives
Nowadays, marketing channels no longer map easily to a single objective. Display continues to evolve on all fronts, covering everything from premium inventory to highly-focused retargeting ads. With the addition of custom audiences and FBX, Facebook is becoming viable for direct response in addition to awareness and advocacy. Now even paid search, the quintessential direct […]
20 Reasons Why Social Analytics Is A Nightmare — And What To Do About It
Social media managers and analysts have one of the toughest jobs in digital marketing today. Imagine trying to be an expert in content marketing, acquisition and retention marketing, brand management, word-of-mouth, customer advocacy, paid media, reputation management and viral marketing — all across five different media channels and dozens of accounts. This is a day […]
The Secret Sauce Of Marketing Analytics: The 5W1H Framework
Today, I am going to reveal my secret sauce for marketing analytics. This simple method is so powerful that anyone can start applying it today to any sort of descriptive analysis, and it will start producing results from day one. What’s better, this method does not require any sort of prior knowledge or skill set […]
3 Steps To Get Started With Cross-Channel Analysis
We are currently living through a Cambrian-level explosion of marketing channels. It seems like there is a new channel or device popping up every year, each with a new set of metrics, media and strategies. In the future, each marketing manager or analyst will be responsible for managing media across a greater number of different […]
A Concise Overview Of Cross-Channel Marketing Models
For several decades, modeling cross-channel marketing impact was synonymous with marketing mix (“top-down”) models. However, with the increase in cross-channel tracking and computational power, new breeds of marketing attribution (“bottom-up”) and other alternative models have appeared in recent years. Although these models all seek to quantify the relative impact of different media channels, they are […]
Marketers: The Busier Things Are, The Less You Should Be Testing
Any experienced A/B or multivariate tester has probably encountered a situation similar to the following: You are put in charge of testing a new design on the company website. You set up the test with your testing platform, making sure that visitors are randomly assigned to the old and new experiences. A few days later, […]
9 Questions To Ask When Reading A Digital Marketing Case Study
The digital marketing landscape is moving faster than ever before, with dozens of new tools, platforms, and advertising media coming into existence every year. When making a decision to adopt one tool over another or making an entrance into a new market, the case study oftentimes becomes an important factor in whether the trigger is […]
Using Proxy Metrics As KPIs? Learn The Myths & Limitations
There are various marketing channels today, some more suited for building awareness and brand equity while others are better for direct response. However, the reason marketers invest in any given marketing channel is the belief that it will eventually lead to revenue gains, whether in the short or long term. In an ideal world, we […]
Quantifying The Reach-Efficiency Tradeoff In Facebook Advertising
Any marketer that has tried running paid advertising campaigns on Facebook knows it is one of the most complex auction-based ad marketplaces that exist today. Constantly moving targets, rapid ad fatigue, and lack of transparency around the effects of bids and budgets on performance make it difficult to optimize these campaigns. However, sophisticated optimization strategies […]
The Digital Marketing Analysis Tree: Understanding Root Causes
I recently read an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review about how data-driven individuals think and act. Some of the key traits described in the article apply not only to researchers, but to anyone involved in analysis and decision making. According to the author, data-driven individuals: Make decisions at the lowest possible level Bring […]
4 Must-Know Facts On Product Listing Ad Mechanics
Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs) have rapidly gained market share since being introduced last year, and PLAs are now well established as an integral part of retail marketers’ pay-per-click (PPC) strategies. This rapid growth has been fueled in part by the improved performance of PLAs over traditional text ads. However, the increased spend has also […]
Google’s Quality Score Change: What Marketers Need To Know
Last week, Google announced changes in the way Quality Score is reported in AdWords. As stated in Google’s official AdWords blog, the update changes the way each keyword’s 1-10 numeric Quality Score is reported. Quality Score is a metric in paid search that represents the relevancy of an ad with respect to the search query, […]
3 Advanced Tips For Bid Adjustments In Google Enhanced Campaigns
Google’s introduction of Enhanced Campaigns is one of the most significant structural modifications to occur in the history of paid search. With the end of migration scheduled for July 22, marketers are scrambling to figure out “what works” on the new campaign format. A key point of change in Enhanced Campaigns is the expanded use […]
Leveraging Advertising Data For Behavioral Insights
With marketing becoming increasingly programmatic, it is important to leverage every possible metric that can provide insights into customer behavior. For digital marketers, this usually means analyzing site traffic data; but, advertising data can also be used to great value in behavioral analytics. In this article, I show one example of this type of analysis […]
5 Surprising Facts On Quality Score Change
In the paid search world, ad rank and average cost per click (CPC) are determined by three factors: your own bid (max CPC), your competitors’ bids, and a numeric representation of ad relevance known as quality score. This quality score acts as a modifier, making it possible for an ad with higher “quality” to outrank […]
Key Learnings On The PLA Marketplace
Google’s switch to an all-paid shopping search experience, featuring Product Listing Ads (PLAs), was the single largest change to the retail paid search landscape last year, and the offering continues to evolve as the official release of PLAs on smartphones was announced last month. PLAs are not only a new ad format but also a […]
How Google’s Enhanced Campaigns Affect Your Ad Scheduling Strategy
Before getting into ad scheduling strategies for Google’s Enhanced Campaigns, let’s review Paid Search Trends for March. CPCs remained relatively flat month-over-month with little movement. Retail CPCs showed a slight decline for Google, showing relative softness compared to last year. It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary dip or a long-term indicator. […]
Product Listing Ads Remain Strong – Paid Search Trends For February 2013
Cost-Per-Clicks (CPC) fell across the board month-over-month, as is typical for February, resulting in a 5% lower CPC for Google and 3% lower for Yahoo!-Bing, compared to January. Year-over-year (YoY), retail CPCs are stronger on Google, partially due to rising CPCs on Product Listing Ads (PLAs), ending at a 5% YoY gain for Google and […]
Google’s CPC Drop Bottoms Out? — Paid Search Trends For January 2013
This is the first installment of a regular column following cost-per-click (CPC) trends in search marketing. We will focus primarily on the US market, but we’ll also take a regular look at international markets, as well as providing additional insights into segments that appear to be significant short-term trend drivers. Google’s CPC drop has finally […]