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Moneyball is a popular movie out these days and it is a true story about how the Oakland A’s baseball team (and it’s GM) has to re-assemble the team and finds all of baseball's conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, the team's GM and a partner use statistical data to analyze and place value on players who the scouts say are flawed but the data says they have the ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. These new methods challenge traditional approaches to the game and the GM is scourned because they claim he is tearing out the heart and soul of the game. When you couple the premise of this movie with Wanamaker's famous quote - "I know half my advertising works, I just don't know which half" - one can't help but embrace the advantages of using the right web analytics data to optimize marketing campaigns.

It's time to get more serious about mobile. Projections have smartphone and tablet purchases outselling computers in 2011. Google predicts more searches will be done from mobile device than desktop devices by the end of 2012. People are viewing your website from a mobile device as we speak. What do you do, where do you look and what do you need to know about how the new wave of mobile activity is affecting your website and your ability to sell online?

Today, the Google Analytics team officially launched Right Now - a real time tracking feature that shows you what's happening on your site Right Now. You can read the official announcement here.

I'm often invited into companies to consult with them about online marketing and their new website. It happens often - a firm gets a new website developed by another company and we are invited to discuss online marketing strategy. The chief marketing person might say something like, "We just developed a new website and now we need to do something with it. What do you suggest?" Having experienced this very scenario several times, we've developed 3 very powerful questions to begin to shape a comprehensive, long term online marketing plan. Ready - here they are:

Google Analytics continues to add value to it's ever-improving platform - recently announcing a new tag that will allow you to track social media "shares" from your website into Google Analytics reports. Read more here.

This is the beginning of a series of blog posts that focuses on going back to the basics of digital marketing. In this post, I want to highlight some of the web analytics do's and don'ts when it comes to metrics. There are dozens and dozens of different metrics available to us, enabling us to evaluate the performance of a website. Some of these metrics aren't nearly as valuable as we think they are while others that hold the keys to success are often ignored completely.

Going through some of the finer points in Google Analytics - Conversion University caused me to ask "why don't more people embrace the richness of web analytics data?" I think about some of our clients and many people I run in to who are struggling to be effective marketers and then I look at the power of the data you can get from Google Analytics. I just shake my head in amazement that more aren't embracing the data.

2010 was an exciting year in the world of online marketing. The Bing and Yahoo search alliance, Google Instant, new mobile devices and even a major motion picture about the rise of a social network. While it's hard to tell what the next year holds, I don't think anything is slowing down - in fact, I see momentum building even more and more.

Having led the development of hundreds of websites, landing pages, online display ads and the like, I always find the challenge between creativity and achieving conversions to be one of the most critical elements to online success. After all, finding the optimal balance between creativity and good usability is what separates “the men from the boys” when it comes to effective web design and development. We experienced a recent example of this and here’s the story.

Over the past couple of months, Google has made it clear it's taking local search seriously. In essence, they have reconfigured the search result page and algorithm so organic and local listings become integrated. Studies suggest websites that implemented best practice SEO tactics weren't largely affected by this change, as local optimization was likely already a part of the overall optimization strategy. In fact, it's been shown that sites that already had strong organic and local optimization saw their overall positions increase. Conversely, sites without a local optimization campaign that implemented grey and black-hat techniques (in other words, simply gaming the Google algorithm based on the most recent exploits) have or will soon experience an overall decrease in visibility and ultimately traffic.