ADVERTISING & MARKETING  The German newspaper Die Zeit and the EFF recently wrote about the German politician Malte Spitz from the Greens who procured and then published all the data that a local telco had been collecting on him by default over months. Apart from being a little scary privacy wise I thought this was just plain cool data and perfect to do a little data visualisation in Tableau with.
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SOCIAL MEDIA  The Open Graph is an open protocol for semantically labelling web content, but more importantly it provides the underlying logic for seamless integration into Facebook's social graph. Apart from additional insights and proper formatting on Facebook, a successful integration also supports organic search optimisation and enables companies to contact people on Facebook that like them.
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ADVERTISING & MARKETING  Advertising needs to be relevant to stimulate engagement and responses. In addition to re-targeting, which is used to display consumers highly targeted ads based on their past content consumption, marketers should also consider ad sequencing or in other words story telling.
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ADVERTISING & MARKETING  Thanks to Google we're all used to measuring campaigns on a 'last click gets all the credit' basis, however this method ignores all other touch points that a consumer might have responded to leading up to a conversion which also contributed to some extend, resulting in the undervaluation of certain media channels and ultimately the misallocation of marketing budgets.
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Christians reaction: As you can see online advertising expenditure has steadily increased over the past few years following a general usage trend and was actually the only channel with growth in 2009, however it still only reflects an average of 15% of overall advertising spend. Within online, search and directories are the key channels as one would expect but interestingly mobile reveals itself as somewhat hyped up given the the overall data download growth is still driven by fixed lines (mobile data download actually stagnated).

ACMA just released another amazing report called the The Communications Report which is basically a collection of interesting telecommunication statistics from various sources. It includes some really interesting gems on Australian advertising expenditure by channel and the growing importance of online among less thrilling numbers on carrier licenses and emergency calls.
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Christians reaction: Essentially Google is now providing marketers with the organic equivalent of AdWords data so download your paid search data from AdWords, your organic search data from Webmaster Tools and compare the two and I'm sure you will find some interesting insights that will allow you to optimise both your paid and organic search campaigns.

Exciting news for all data obsessed search marketers, Google just added page level data to its Webmaster Tools! Previously Google would only show you how your entire domain was ranking for organic search terms but now you can also see the same data for your top pages.
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Christians reaction: Screen shots and link to Gartner research on the actual blog post.

We had a pretty interesting presentation from Gomez yesterday on the impact of site performance on overall conversion which is backed up by a Gartner report earlier in the year called E-Commerce Websites: Features That Make Consumers Buy. According to the report page load speed is the 3rd most important influencing factor. "Historical Akamai research showed consumers abandoned pages if they took longer than seven seconds to load. Delay the presentation of the product information that the consumer is looking for, and you run the risk of losing not only the sale but your customer." Apart from the performance testing features, we also really liked the cross browser testing and preview functionality as well which allows you to generate JPGs showing how your website looks across various browsers and operasting systems as well as mobile devices. Have a look at the below screen shots for the Datalicious blog to see how the site renders on an iPhone, iPad and Blackberry as well as load times across the various Posterous elements.
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Christians reaction: Great summary of links on data visualisation best practice and how to get started!

We re declaring this week Infographics Week on The Learning Network because we know how important it is for students to be able to read and interpret visual representations of information and because The New York Times consistently creates useful and elegant examples that we think teachers across the curriculum should know about. Not only do charts, graphs and maps show up on standardized tests of all kinds, but whiteboard technology has made the graphic depiction of information that much more useful and ubiquitous in classrooms. We have a lot to say about this topic and scores of interesting examples to show you, so we re breaking it down over five days:
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Christians reaction: Interested in data and analytics? Want to learn more or just network with like-minded people? Worth coming along to this one.

The ADMA Analytics & Data Council invites you to discover just how advanced the Australian direct marketing industry is when it comes to analytics and investigate the importance of media attribution. When: 5.30-7.00pm, Tuesday 28 September Where: Level 2, City Hotel, cnr King & Kent Streets, Sydney RSVP: councils@adma.com.au
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