Insights from Nebo

It’s no secret that we have a vast amount of information at our fingertips. Marketers can craft detailed campaigns all without conducting a single customer interview (I don’t suggest doing it, but hey, it can happen).

As a marketer, I think it’s pretty neat. I geek out whenever Google Analytics gives me another way to learn more about a target audience. It only makes my content that much better.

And as a “digital native” consumer, I don’t really think about it much. I don’t surf the web and freak about the information I’m giving. As long as you don’t ask for my social or credit card number at random, I’m pretty much good.

Then I stumbled upon this read from Inbound. Essentially, it’s a bit of a “the sky is falling” to marketers who are obsessed with data (AKA all of us). It’s also bound to give you the heebie jeebies in that little “consumer” part of your brain that thinks, “Wait. Are marketers really that creepy?”

No, we’re not. At least, we shouldn’t be.

This summer, I ran the Peachtree Road Race 10k in 1:03:55.

Some of you may think I am an occasional runner. Others, that I was just doing the race for fun without concern for time. But what conclusions can you actually draw from this?

None — because you didn’t know about external factors. You didn’t know that I started in Wave U and had to weave through crowds of walkers. You didn’t know that it was 95 degrees already when the race started at 9 a.m., and that the humidity warning was high. You didn’t know I had taken an energy gel right before the race, skipped the beer at the Mellow Mushroom tent, and seriously needed new running shoes. You didn’t know I ran a marathon a year ago in 3:55:46.

You didn’t know any of this information. So with only one piece of data — my race time — you actually don’t get a full picture of my race or my capabilities.

Picture this: you’re diving into Google Analytics to check out just how much your marketing efforts have paid off this month.

Conversions are up and goals are doing well, but wait…what’s with that weird spike in traffic?

You know it’s not seasonal. In fact, as you dig a bit deeper, you realize you’re looking at sharebuttons.xyz, a traffic source you’re in no way familiar with. Which is odd, considering it drove over 60k visits last month.

Congratulations. You’ve just been hit with referral spam.

There are three types of people in the world: those who hate Excel, those who really hate Excel and those who realize you can run the world if you're an Excel master.

Once upon a time, in a millennium long long ago, Nintendo ruled the land and America was a Pokénation. Back then, kids used to make fun of me for my buckteeth and Pikachu blankets, and my mom used to fight me for the Gameboy Color so that she could play Pokémon Pinball until her hands were sore at night. Those were the days.

Despite that I was the avidest of Pokémon trainers in my childhood, I never thought that adorable idiot animals that can only say their own names would make a major comeback. But lo and behold, the Pokéssaince is in full bloom, but this time, it isn’t Nintendo that we owe our thanks to.

Niantic Inc. is the company that’s inspiring a nation to get out there, stare at their phones and bump into walls. It’s the name that popped up as I booted up Pokémon Go for the first time last Saturday. As a Poképurist, I was immediately skeptical upon seeing the foreign balloon-boat-neutron logo.

Who were these strangers, and what were they doing with my Pokeymen?

Although my digital marketing career started on the “driving website traffic” side of the equation (a noble task, to be sure!), over the past few years, my passion and attention has shifted to a “get more traffic to convert” viewpoint. (I outlined the reasons for my change in focus in an earlier post, Why More Traffic Is The Lazy Marketer’s Answer.)

In the process of building out a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) team and evangelizing CRO to anyone who will listen, I’ve noticed some common mistakes that confront marketers who are just dipping their toes into the waters of optimization and testing.