Facebook surveyed users on promotional posts.

On January 15, Facebook users are going to see a cleaned-up newsfeed with less clutter and more controls for promotional posts. Facebook decided to make these changes after surveying users and learning they want less promotional content and more stories from friends and posts from pages they opted in to see.

Facebook decided to crack down on:Read full post...

Please take “hit” out of your vocabulary when you’re asking about campaign performance. We never measure by hits, but instead a variety of other metrics.

In the world of analytics, there’s this one, single dirty word that never fails to grate on an analyst’s nerves: “hit.”

As in:

“How many hits did we get?”

“Did we get any hits on our landing page?”

“Can you check the hits for me on that campaign?”

I’ll let you in on a secret: There’s no such thing as a hit. There are clicks, visits, visitors and pageviews, and each of those are different measurements.

Clicks indicate how many people have clicked on an ad. A user can click on an ad multiple times, but only be counted as one visitor. Similarly, a user can click on an ad just once and come back to the website in multiple visits. Usually, we only measure clicks when we’re analyzing ad performance. The number of clicks per the number of impressions equals the click-through rate (CTR).Read full post...

For years we’ve been studying Millennials. We know their mindset, values and technographics. We know where to find them online and offline. We know the best ways marketing can gain their brand loyalty and how to entice them to become advocates for our brands.

Except, most Millennials are now 18 to 34 years old. Millennials are aging, and so is the way we market to them. A new marketing demographic is emerging: Post-Millennials.

Take a look at these facts from The Beloit Mindset List of the Class of 2017:

• Eminem and LL Cool J could show up at parents’ weekend.
• As they started to crawl, so did the news across the bottom of the television screen.
• Their parents have always bemoaned the passing of precocious little Calvin and sarcastic stuffy Hobbes.
• As they slept safely in their cribs, the Oklahoma City bomber and the Unabomber were doing their deadly work.
• Their parents’ car CD player is soooooo ancient and embarrassing.
• Bill Maher has always been politically incorrect.

As Post-Millennials emerge as the next big demographic, so do the online platforms we can find them on. Here are a few to keep on your radar.Read full post...

Bench the benchmark, set a target.

Last June, Bank of America’s Small Business Community asked me about setting benchmarks for digital campaigns. There’s no denying benchmarks have a lot of value. We use them to see how our campaigns perform based on the industry standard. Having a hard and fast number definitely draws the line in the sand between what is considered “good performance” and “bad performance.”

But a benchmark is just a number. As much as we want to match our number to someone else’s number, and label it “good” or “bad,” a benchmark can only tell a small part of the story.

Digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all discipline. One percentage number is not going to determine if the campaign passes or fails. What if we drive only a small number of visitors to our site, but they are extremely engaged, spending ten minutes viewing multiple pages of content? What if those few visitors become ten strong leads or convert into hundreds of purchases?Read full post...

Google Analytics is a data source powerhouse. It can measure almost everything, so it can be pretty overwhelming. Here are a few key metrics any small business, blogger or marketer just starting out should focus on.

Where is my target audience?

In Google Analytics, if you look at your demographics by location, you can get a picture-perfect view of where in the world your audience is coming from. You can break this down by country, state, region and even city.Read full post...