Email Marketing – The Ride Is About To Get Bumpier.

Posted by Annalivia Ford on March 13, 2012

A few years ago, in a different life, I was privileged to work with the folks that first developed reputation engines for spam filtering. I spent 2 years before we rolled it out banging on the drum, warning marketers that Reputation Was Coming And It Would Change Everything. When it did finally arrive, it did… change everything, very fast, and most email marketers were left scrambling to adapt or have their email programs fail. For

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Google Making Search More Secure

Posted by Lee Isensee on October 18, 2011

Today, Google announced… that marketers will no longer be able to analyze Google clicked natural search terms for any user who is logged into one of their many solutions; mail, photos, blogs, documents, etc. The search term of these authenticated user clicks will be encrypted. To enable the encryption, Google will redirect users to a secure (HTTPS) version of their site.
We applaud Google for wanting to make the user experience safer.
The IBM Enterprise

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2011 Holiday Readiness (Part 3) – A different picture emerges for the UK…

Posted by Lee Isensee on September 01, 2011

IBM recently published an online retail readiness report for the UK, similar to the one for North America…. While there is just as big of a push at the end of the year with big promotional days like Mega Monday (Cyber Monday in the US), the report brought to light some different trends that have been emerging so far this year.
The 2010 Christmas season was successful for online retailers in the UK with

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2011 Holiday Readiness (Part 2) – Be real…

Posted by Lee Isensee on July 20, 2011

Last time, we discussed where to start in terms of a social and mobile strategy for the holidays. Now, let’s take it a step further and talk about real life examples.
Typically visitors to a mobile site or visitors to your site coming from mobile devices have a particular purpose in mind – checking a balance at a bank, comparing prices of products, or my personal favorite, ordering a pizza. There’s a pizza chain that…

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Three Great “Coming-Togethers” with the new IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Suite

Posted by Akin Arikan on July 15, 2011

Exciting news for our IBM Unica NetInsight OnDemand customers and really all marketers: IBM today announced the new IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Suite which accomplishes three great “coming-togethers”.  Namely, the following:
1.   Combines the Best of IBM Coremetrics and IBM Unica NetInsight OnDemand…
Since IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics and Unica our web analytics teams have been merged together like a deck of cards to make the best use of the combined development and best practices

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2011 Holiday Readiness (Part 1) – You must be this tall for the ride. . .

Posted by Lee Isensee on July 07, 2011

The economic roller coaster still seems to be in full effect, but the 2010 holiday season provided some hope for online retailers and the recently released IBM Coremetrics 4th Annual North America Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report… shared even more good news as we start the approach into the 2011 holiday season.
This year’s holiday guide provided numerous insights, but there were just a few trends that stood out that I think are worth exploring

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Seeking a Strategic Framework for Digital Marketing

Posted by Akin Arikan on October 15, 2010

At the new DigitalMarketingOne (a community site for digital marketers), our Founders Council is exploring strategic frameworks for digital marketing.
Marketing does so many things though and does them so differently at different companies. How do we put all that into a framework that makes sense to marketing leaders?
Luckily, many clever people have thought about that before.
Starting from a Strategic Framework for Marketing in General
The Strategic Marketing Framework presented on MindofMarketing.net… (see below)

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How to Build the Business Case for Behavioral Targeting?

Posted by Akin Arikan on August 06, 2010

It is often said that building (or proving) the business case for (site-side) behavioral targeting has been a lot harder than justifying an investment in more straightforward site optimization techniques such as A/B testing.
As a result, you can read independent industry analyst reports observing that some applications that can do testing and targeting (hint, hint) are a lot more frequently used for just testing rather than targeting today.

This doesn’t need to …

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Geeks vs Nerds – Or – A Good Analyst is Hard to Find

Posted by Akin Arikan on June 28, 2010

At the end of a long day during Unica’s marketing conference in 2008 one of our customers and I were discussing whether it is better to be a nerd or a geek.
Tough question it seemed.
But luckily, in Sept. 2009 the brilliant Venn diagram below started zipping all over blogs on the Internet. The beauty of Venn diagrams is that they can make things very clear to see. No question anymore which is better.…

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Farewell to Coremetrics and Web Analytics as you knew it

Posted by Akin Arikan on June 15, 2010

Congratulations to our colleagues at Coremetrics who have been such an important part of the web analytics industry for the past decade.
Web analytics are a critical component of something bigger…
In 2006, Unica’s acquisition of a web analytics vendor illustrated Unica’s long held vision that web analytics are critical to the marketing process and must be a core capability of the enterprise marketing suite.
In 2009, the viability of standalone web analytics as a

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Thursday, June 10th: Radian6 and Unica Web Seminar on Social Media Analytics

Posted by Akin Arikan on June 07, 2010

The title of this Thursday’s joint webcast with Radian6 …might as well have been: “Bringing order to the wild west of social media through analytics”. Or “The sherriffs are riding into social media marketing high noon”.
All kidding aside, neither web analytics nor social media monitoring alone can do today’s social web justice. So, we are very lucky to have Lauren from Radian6 as our featured presenter in this Thursday’s WAA, educational webcast series (sponsored

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Don’t miss this webinar: Web analytics for driving your entire business (not just your website)

Posted by Akin Arikan on December 08, 2009

This Thursday, Angie Brown from Elsevier is presenting live in a webinar within the Web Analytics Association’s webcast series….  She is going to share some very clever examples of her web analytics work at the publishing giant.
I had the chance to listen to Angie’s presentation live at Unica’s annual customer conference earlier this year in Paris. Her anecdotes about using web analytics to inform offline and other strategies showcase that the insights go

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A Wizard for Paid Search (PPC) Optimization

Posted by Akin Arikan on December 02, 2009

This wizard is for any marketer looking to get more results from their search engine pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns (and who isn’t?).
It walks the analyst through a series of steps for increasing results, e.g. by eliminating wasted spending, identifying missed opportunities, improving the persuasion process, or optimizing budget allocation.

Click here to start the wizard

Click here for a bird’s eye view summary flow chart…

The wizard is the second example of an expert system

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A Wizard for Web Analysts

Posted by Akin Arikan on November 05, 2009

Modern web analytics solutions… can answer almost any question. But until recently, practitioners had been left to their own devices when it came to figuring out what series of questions to ask. So, each practitioner has had to reinvent “analysis” on their own.
Lots of books and helpful consultants are available to educate practitioners on how to do that. But that doesn’t make it less silly that thousands and thousands of analysts have had to

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