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Studies have shown that those who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them. Maybe it's because something written down will nag at you more - keeping it top of mind. But also likely is how establishing a goal - or end objective - gives what you do a sense of purpose. Having something clearly defined and written out holds you accountable. "Are we achieving this?" Yes or No. "If we're not achieving this yet, are we doing something to get us closer to achieving it?" Yes or No. Answering "No" twice means we're failing. Failing to achieve and failing to do better.

Online marketing is our area of focus and when given a limited marketing budget, online is where we'd choose to spend it. But that's not to say offline/traditional advertising campaigns are obsolete or don't produce a return. How much of a return isn't always clear, but with the ability to measure online engagement, we can start to get an idea. That is to say in 2010, most offline brand and promotional campaigns will have a great impact online. By using the proper methods and techniques, we can measure these online impacts, developing an understanding for how effective our offline campaigns really are.

During my many years in the marketing business and through my involvement with the American Marketing Association I've been exposed to several people from ad agencies. Nearly all are bright, motivated, talented people and the work they produce is often awesome. Their capabilities are broad but one area that's seldom an agency specialty is web analytics data, and unfortunately many don't utilize the power of this valuable resource.

iPhone, Incredibles, Smartphones, oh my! Smartphone gadgets seem to be one of the hottest items you can buy these days. Mobile internet searchers, social networking and location based games are all part of this shift to greater mobile usage.

I was recently browsing Slate.com when I saw a link to a slide show referencing Banksy and gave it a look. The page presents you with a link that pops up a slide show (figure 1). The navigation is simple for the slide show with standard text-based navigation at the bottom of the text. I was enjoying the pictures, scrolling through (figure 2), and then got to the 4th picture (figure 3).

Forrester Research recently published an article about the growth of web analytics stating that 74% of websites have some type of web analytics software installed on them. However, they also reported that (only!) slightly more than half of websites have customized their analytics software to track specific activities. This indicates a significant opportunity for many firms to improve their online marketing success.

We use BaseCamp from 37signals for general work time tracking, including project development. Over time there can be a large amount of data accumulated, and there is a nifty way it can be consolidated and used for project analysis. In essence, export the time data out of BaseCamp and use the power of Excel to make summaries and graphs. In this way, you can easily see items such as:

I came across Clicktale and thought they deserved a shout out so to speak based on my interactions with them. My personal reasons for having an interest in heatmaps is because I find it interesting how little users are really interested in when they visit any given website. There are some very interesting usability challenges you can find having examined some of the results of these tests. Some of what they do is already under the Analytics umbrella but some hotspots (scuse the pun) I think worth a mention are as follows: - See how far down visitors scroll and see where they abandon the page. - See where users click or move their mouse on the page. - See what parts of your forms people spend more time on or have more difficulty with. - See what content on your page users care less about. If we spend a little more time on this type of user interaction we might very well be able to identify some very pragmatic and beneficial insights.

In these lean times advertisers must ensure they get a good return on every advertising dollar spent. Print advertising is often the most difficult to evaluate impact but with a little thought, it becomes easy, especially if you are using your website the way you should.

Here's the scenario: You're using Google Analytics and have been assigned the task of separating a slew of different traffic sources. This includes PPC, Organic, Direct, and Referral. The first three are very straight forward: a new profile with a basic include filter. However for referral, you need to get more specific. In this case, you want to breakdown individual affiliate referral sites. Once you've done that, you want to categorize them based on Daily Deal sites, coupon sites, etc.