Since digital marketing is so well established, integrated into the marketing activities of most companies today, it is inevitable that we will question. What's next? "What's the next big thing" is the question I'm asked most often. You may have noticed the recent comment pieces on post-digital marketing in New Media Age such as that by Mark Cridge and Mark Walley which proclaim we are in a "post-digital" world since digital has become a mainstream activity of traditional agencies. I side with Michael Nutley of NMA who argues that the danger in a post-digital mindset is that digital is just treated as another channel and it's not placed at the core of thinking and it's unique attributes exploited. Many succesful campaigns show the need for specialists in social media, search and mobile marketing for instance.

Recommended post-digital world presentation

The excellent presentation/book I have embedded below on the post-digital concept by…

Miles Bennett, CEO of web analytics consultancy Numberminds is a web analytics specialist who helps companies improve their reporting and analysis capabilities so they can get better results from their web marketing. They has helped many of the UK and European retail financial services sites set up and get value from their web analytics solutions. These brands include Unilever, Barclaycard, Barclays Bank, Mint Credit Card, Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Abbey.com, Lombard Direct, Ulster Bank and Coutts. I've known Miles for a few years now and he is a regular speaker and acquaintance from the London Marketing Optimization Summits (www.emetrics.org and www.searchenginestrategies.com).  Since he sees many of the barriers and problems companies face in implementing web analytics he's in a great position to advise on how to avoid these problems by getting web analytics implementations right first time. Q1. Looking at the big picture of digital marketing reporting and performance improvement, what…

I've used the sensationalist headline to highlight the importance of tagging on the accuracy of tracking visitor volume and user experience, since this is potentially overlooked by many site owners. If the title was just about tagging methodology maybe you wouldn't be reading this! This post summarises the implications of tagging method on 1. Monitoring and improving site page download speed (latency). 2. Selecting the correct position in a page to embed campaign tracking and web analytics tags. The 20% figure for improvement in pageviews is based on new research on page download speeds (latency) by tagging solutions provider Tagman which compared tagging locations for two sites. The research found that moving the Google Analytics tag from the standard position at the bottom of the page to the less common position at the top of the page would increase page views by 20% since fewer people would bale out/bounce because of slow loading pages. The page…

Post updated from August 2009 to include major changes that Google makes which will affect the way businesses rank within the natural listings of the search engines. For 6 of the main updates from Google earlier in 2009, see my post: Google SEO updates H1 2009.

August - Google Caffeine preview live

Category: Index inclusion What is it? According to the official Google notification of this update, Caffeine is not intended as a major update to the way Google ranks sites for search queries, rather it's an update to the indexing and retrieval architecture to "let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions". (more…)…