Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog

Part VI: ANALYTICS

By Annie Cushing

The thrust of analytics isn't data; it's improvement. Improvement just starts with data because you can't improve what you don't measure.

But measurement alone isn't going to lead to improvement—or any action at all. The road to business hell is paved with good data.

The key is marrying sound measurement methodologies with thorough analysis and tying all of that glorious data and those keen insights back to an organization's business objectives.

So Part VI focuses on both prongs of that fork: setting up reporting systems that will collect the data for analysis at a later juncture, and honing in on the truly actionable insights.

Having started off college as a biochemistry major, I still have a strong inclination toward scientific processes. So what we're going to do in this intro is look at a handful of marketing conundrums currently being mulled over by entirely fictional people and businesses. Hey, it's the closest I could come to forming a hypothesis to test in a Petri dish! We'll dissect the process of how to separate the signal from the noise in data sets accessible to marketers.

Ecommerce Budget Allocation Decision

Anita has an ecommerce shoe store and a handful of trusted drop-shipping companies that keep her supplied with the latest fashions. Her cousin Monica took a social media strategies class in college, and at Monica's urging, she signed the store up for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and has hired a couple of college students ...