Analytics

When we sat down to write Khan Academy’s company values in 2010, “shipping beats perfection” flew out of Sal’s mouth before our butts hit the chairs.

Recently I was asked by a friend who wanted to learn more about how to use data and tools in their marketing analytics. Here are the key things I told him to get to started with data-driven marketing analytics.

Learn the concepts and methods for creating economic and business value with digital analytics, mobile analytics, web analytics, and market research and social media data. In Digital Analytics Primer , pioneering expert Judah Phillips introduces the concepts, terms, and methods that comprise the science and art of digital analysis for web, site, social, video, and other types of quantitative and qualitative data. Business readers—from new practitioners to experienced executives—who want to understand how digital analytics can be used to reduce costs and increase profitable revenue throughout the business should read this book. Phillips delivers a comprehensive review of the core concepts, vocabulary, and frameworks, including analytical methods and tools that can help you successfully integrate analytical processes, technology, and people into all aspects of business operations. This unbiased and product-independent primer draws from the author's extensive experience doing and managing analytics in this field.

When it comes to gathering visitor information, GA can’t collect or change data on visits that have already happened, which means time spent waiting to add or correct certain settings is data lost or damaged. Getting a jump start on collecting the right data is the first step to using that data for successful conversion measurement and tracking.

Some of you out there may find this Google Analytics feature overview to be mostly review. That’s awesome! That means you’re really taking ownership of your data. However, if you’ve never used any of these features, only experimented with them a little, or aren’t sure you’re using them correctly, you should read on.

Improve your Analytics skills with free online courses from Google.

Semantic markup and structured data, tools that were once a secret weapon of cutting edge marketers, are fast becoming requirements for modern SEO. Algorithm updates like Hummingbird and ever-evolving features like the Knowledge Graph have made this stuff mission critical for many of SwellPath’s clients.

A few months ago I saw this goofy looking kid getting his articles ranked high on two of my favorite marketing sites Inbound.org and Growthhackers. His name was Nate Desmond and what he was writing about was extremely impressive. Funny enough on his site was a link to hire him, I did part-time.

Since then he’s been impressively helping the AppSumo team with our latest product, SumoMe.com. He showed me a few weeks ago how he can simply scrape any website to get insanely actionable data. I forced him to teach it to you below, enjoy!

R is an open-source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics which has been described as: “The single most important tool for computational statistics.”

In other words, when you want to mine data, R helps you do it and allows you to present your findings in an attractive visual.