"Forrester just recently published The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q4 2017?:

• Modern web analytics technologies now form the core of the digital intelligence stack. Today’s digital practitioners are using their web analytics systems for a lot more including: to aid behavioral targeting & personalization; manage their digital data; integrate it with testing; understand app engagement; and for cross-channel attribution (see Figure 1).
• Web analytics remains the single-most dominate digital intelligence technique. Almost three-quarters of respondents in Forrester’s Q2 2017 Global Digital Intelligence Platforms Forrester Wave™ Customer Reference Online Survey used web analytics from their DI platform providers. Web analytics adoption is significantly greater than the next three dominant digital intelligence techniques which were: application analytics (48%), interaction analytics (43%), and cross-channel attribution (41%).
• Web engagement is still critical to business success. Since the late 90’s, there has been significant shift of digital customer engagement beyond the browser & email (e.g. to mobile apps, social, kiosks and IoT). Yet the clear majority of active internet users still interact via browsers, which remains the most important digital channel for consumers to make online purchases."

If you are a marketer, whether at a marketing agency, a brand, or a company, or you're a marketing consultant, you no doubt are always looking for ways to get your clients or company a leg up on the competition. You have Google Analytics experts, dashboards, reports on demand, and more. GA has helped get you to where you are now.

You need answers to the deeper business questions that GA doesn't provide. To gain a comprehensive understanding of a brand's users, personas, and target audience, you need to become an adopter of the next generation of real-time, time-series analytics: behavioral analytics.

With behavioral analytics, you can track the entire user journey via a timeline of events. You see every action on every event you set up to track, whether 1,000 events or a million. These can be mouse hovers, email opens/clicks, CRM activity, and even offline sales. You see not only the actions but also the events between the actions. The moments. This is where you really get an all-encompassing picture of the user journey.

The Best Facebook Analytics Tools

TrackMaven

RavenTools

Cyfe

sociograph

Scoreboard Social

Grytics

SocialPilot

Qwaya

Sociamonials

Plumlytics Social

Keyhole.co

Peakfeed

Download the 2017 R2i Web Analytics Comparison Report and research eight of the industry’s leading web analytics systems. COMPARE PLATFORMS BY:
• Reporting & Features  • Usability • Integrations • Tag Management • Data Availability • And More

The patience for “spray-and-pray” emails is continuing to shrink, and sophisticated B2B buyers are increasingly expecting and demanding relevant and targeted messaging.

In EDRM’s Voice of the Customer research, 73% of the B2B customers surveyed agreed, “For brands or vendors to successfully engage me, they must have a deep understanding of my needs.”  The research also showed 66% said they “expect all of [their] interactions with brands or vendors to be personalized.”

Fortunately for B2B marketers, new advancements in real-time data analytics, AI and machine learning are making advanced segmentation and personalization possible, even across complex industries and buying groups.

Digital analytics projects are ever changing and dynamic. These characteristics make project management for digital analytics challenging and unique; they are also a key reason why agile methods are appropriate.

The idea of a traditional digital analytics project management is pretty much the same as the Waterfall methodology for software development:

Gather Business Requirements from our stakeholders to define the KPI, metrics and dimension.
Start tagging the website and collecting the required information.
Build reports and do some analysis using those metrics and dimensions. In order, to improve our KPIs. In other words, dive in the depth of an ocean of data to find the rare gem and email or present it with the report as an insight in order to drive actions.

The metric you may not have heard of is click to open rate (CTOR) which essentially measures the effectiveness of the content of your email. It is calculated by the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens.

Using our ongoing example 100 clicks / 180 opens (multiplied by 100 for a percent) = 55%. As with all other email metrics, this can fluctuate based on how awesome your content is. A good CTOR will vary between 20 – 30%.

The redesigned Facebook Analytics is one of the most significant updates since the massive algorithm change. Now let’s look at how to navigate the analytics interface to find the information that matters most to you.

#1: Access Your Facebook Analytics

#2: Review Activity Reports

#3: Use Facebook Analytics Data to Inform Your Campaigns

Digital analytics are playing an increasingly important role in helping to drive digital transformation programmes, according to new research published this week by Econsultancy and Lynchpin.

For analytics, a full-stack system has to include its own user interface, query engine, persistence and data ingest framework. That is, it has to include functionality for every service on the backend but also have the frontend user interface that makes it usable.
The key here is that good full-stack analytics solutions should be flexible enough to allow you to really get into answering questions with your data. You should be able to do more than just set a few parameters on a funnel, like some out-of-the-box solutions. You should be able to create the metrics you need easily within your analytics interface.
Full-stack analytics also need to be able to scale to your needs with ease. Any good full-stack solution should be able to handle however much data your product and users can throw at it. Having the capacity to scale is crucial for any full-stack solution.

Have you ever stood on the shoulders of giants to see further?

I do every chance I get, at least metaphorically.  It’s one reason I’ve been so successful and productive.  Why reinvent the wheel if you can have a chance to learn how the giants do it?

Content marketing should engage, educate, or entertain, but more importantly, should elicit action. This is what separates content marketing from content publishing.

The goal is not to be good at content, but to be good at business using content. If your content marketing works, it should affect your audience enough to prompt a business-specific behavior. These behavioral actions are the conversions that we need to track in order to see that our content has moved a reader beyond just engagement.

Many desired conversions can be as high-value as lead generation, product purchases, or requests for information. But they can also come in the form of engagement micro-conversions – sharing content, engaging with additional content, exploring your site deeper. What matters is that there are always things you want your reader to do, even if only to continue reading. 

1. Tableau

2. Cyfe – An all-in-one dashboard to conquer the many moving pieces of your marketing activity.

3. Inspeclet – Make more informed marketing decisions by breaking down user behavior.

4. w3Counter – Emphasizing the importance of real-time data from real-time visitors.

5. Mixpanel – The perfect platform for monitoring mobile marketing.

6. Hotjar – How heatmaps help marketers make crucial decisions.

7. Brand24 – Keeping an eye on buzz for socially-driven brands.

8. GetResponse – Why automated marketing deserves a keen attention to detail.

9. Smart Insights RACE – A practical reporting dashboard that harnesses the power of Google.

10. Google Analytics – The classic standard for analytics still holds its own for modern marketers.

1. Optimize CX: 
NPS tracked across the customer journey highlights the areas which are not valued by customers (which otherwise you thought was valuable). Hence, understanding the drivers of NPS, from customer perspective, helps in prioritizing the CX and hence optimize cost.
2. Overall Health Check:
NPS mapped across the customer journey helps organizations get a bird’s eye view of their entire operation.This helps to compare performance of processes and understand which process could be the weakest link.
3. Touchpoint specific feedback:
NPS mapped across the journey will highlight challenges specific to each step of the customer lifecycle. With techniques such as advanced text analytics, it is possible to get to the root of specific problems at each stage quickly.
4. Quicker Close Looping:
If there is a problem with a specific process, NPS mapped across the customer journey helps to close loop it faster without delay or impacting other processes. 
5. Bridge gaps between different department:
NPS across the customer journey helps to bridge any gap between these departments and strengthen synergies.

• Combine an enterprise-wide analytics strategy with resources for individual business units
• Bring together business and technical people to define high-value analytics initiatives and develop project road maps
• Delineate clear milestones and track KPIs based on business requirements, then continuously measure the success of analytics investments
• Choose integrated analytics platforms that address local and enterprise-wide requirements versus collections of point solutions
• Evaluate the cost-savings and advanced capabilities possible with cloud-based analytics options

To build a strategy around your analytics (instead of the reverse), follow these tips:

• Learn to live with being wrong. Part of letting the data drive your strategy is letting go of initiatives that simply don’t move the needle (or move the needle enough to justify the investment).
• Approach data from a number of angles. There are likely a number of ways to interpret your marketing data, so bring in a partner or a few to help make sense of it all and ensure you aren’t missing any key perspectives.
• Test, and test some more. Marketing analytics give you a picture of how things are – to find out how things could be, you’ll need to test your tactics and theories.
• Above all, listen. At the end of the day, the number one mistake you can make is to ignore what all of your valuable analytics are telling you. Let the data speak for itself, and listen.