Blogs

CPPA Technical Perspective

Tuesday, Mar 2, 2021 by Damon CPPA, Privacy, Google Analytics

Canada’s privacy laws may be undergoing a major overhaul to resemble the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which provides some of the strongest protections of personal information. Bill C-11, currently in its Second Reading in parliament, would establish the Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA) and the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act, and would replace the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The bill is intended to protect personal information and people’s rights to their information.

Integrating Calendly with Google Analytics

Wednesday, Sep 23, 2020 by Damon Calendly, Zapier, Google Analytics

Calendly has a native Google Analytics integration and it is perfectly adequate for some uses. In my case, I’m using Calendly as my main source of lead generation on my website and as an analyst the default tracking is not sufficient because I want to look at my Calendly data as part of an integrated marketing plan whereas the native Calendly-GA integration is best suited to looking at Calendly in isolation.

Custom Branded Google Trends Charts With Python

Thursday, Aug 29, 2019 by Damon Google Trends, Python

We’re going to take an export of Google Trends data and then make a custom chart of that data in Python. Why would we want to do that? So that we can have complete control over the the presentation of the data. Instead of screenshotting or embedding Google-branded Trends data, we’ll make it match the branding of my blog. Hopefully, things will be clear enough for you to customize the colors and fonts for your brand.

Improve Your Data Quality With Human-Centered Process Design

Monday, Aug 19, 2019 by Damon Data Quality

The more I work with data the more I appreciate how valuable quality data is and how hard it can be for an organization to maintain quality. Data multiplies as we add new business technologies. Much of the data produced by technologies is of good quality if limited usefulness. More useful data comes from people. But asking people to produce data that is secondary to their reasons for interacting with a business technology is going to result in bad data.

US Population Data for Google Analytics

Wednesday, Mar 13, 2019 by Damon Google Analytics

Geography data import in Google Analytics is a lesser-used feature. In their docs, Google emphasizes the ability to create custom sales districts. While this is quite useful for the right type of business, you can also use geo-data import to augment your data. Please note, this covers how to format the data for Google. If you just want to import the data that I’ve formatted, skip to the end of this post, grab the CSV and follow the instructions in the last section.

Hackers' Guide to Speech to Text: Quick, Dirty, and Free

Tuesday, Nov 20, 2018 by Damon Watson

So you’ve got some audio that you want to turn into text? There are a lot of good, inexpensive options out there powered by machines, people, and a mix of the two. If you are working with text at scale, I recommend you pay for one of the many wonderful services or pay to have someone integrate machine-learning-powered speech-to-text with your workflows. However, if you’re just looking to transcribe an interview for something like a case study, testimonial, or qualitative feedback, you don’t have the budget to pass off this tedious work to someone else, and don’t have the patience to do everything yourself then this hacked together workflow will speed up the boring bits significantly.

Are you data driven? Or just numbers driven?

Thursday, Mar 1, 2018 by Damon Zapier

Data is important to modern marketing. When young marketing professionals ask what they should learn to get ahead, you are almost certain to hear data literacy as core skill for advancement. The Chief Martech 2017 Marketing Technology Landscape has over 5000 companies listed—up from 150 in just 2011. All of those add or use data in some way. Google Trends shows a steady increase in interest in “data-driven marketing” over the past decade.

The Numbers Lie

Saturday, Sep 23, 2017 by Damon testing

Business to business marketers have adopted consumer marketing practices like data-driven decision making and funnel-based conversion rate optimization. However, we haven’t properly taken into account fundamental differences between business and consumer marketing in adapting these practices. Misunderstanding the systems that generate business data, and how the systems that generates consumer data differ undermines the usefulness of our data. Making data-driven decisions and doing conversion rate optimization in these circumstances is dangerous.

The Role of Testing in B-to-B Marketing

Thursday, Apr 6, 2017 by Damon testing

Each little interaction in B-to-B marketing is a promise that the company makes to the prospective buyer. Every promise that is fulfilled builds trust with an individual and across an organization. The role of marketing in B-to-B is to build incremental trust ahead of and during a sales cycle by keeping promises: The snippet in the search results is a promise that your product (or podcast, or blog post) will help the buyer answer the problem that initiated the search.

Customer-Centric Data Collection Plan

Monday, Jul 11, 2016 by Damon marketing automation

Clearly something is not quite right with me because, unlike the vast, normal majority of the world, I get excited un-sexy details like form fields. Over the years, I’ve developed a preferred data collection plan that balances the data requirements of sales and marketing, optimizing conversion rates, and the communication preferences of visitors. This plan is the result of working with a number of companies that started out by collecting the information that the sales team wanted through marketing automation.

Constellation Approach to Business Technology

Tuesday, Mar 15, 2016 by Damon selecting applications

Self-driving cars promise to re-imagine the relationship between cities, people and transportation while Uber takes fat chunks out of the taxi industry. Newspapers struggle with relevance—the value of ad space having plummeted as the expense of publishing dropped to near zero. Investors stand strong behind a company like Amazon while years of losses stretch into decades out of hope that it will one day turn its status as the default place where people go to buy online into an avalanche of profits that bury past losses.

Twitter List Automation

Monday, Feb 15, 2016 by Damon Twitter, Zapier

Twitter lists are a feature that nearly every digital marketer has experimented with but few use for anything other than keeping track of a select group of influencers. Lists seem like they would be quite useful to sales reps and account managers trying to build relationships with prospects and accounts. In practice, this isn’t true. The percentage of people actively using Twitter is quite low. I would guess that perhaps 90 percent of prospects or accounts for most businesses won’t be using Twitter actively which makes for a lot of wasted time maintaining targeted lists.

Extract Email Domain with Zapier

Monday, Feb 1, 2016 by Damon marketing automation, CRM, Zapier

When you capture information online there is always a balance between asking for more information and making it as easy as possible for your visitors to complete their task. You want more information to help you decide what to do with the person but you also want to maximize the number of people who give you their contact information. In a B2B context, email addresses are king. Every form has an email field.

Automating Feedback and Reviews

Friday, Jan 15, 2016 by Damon CRM, Zapier, Typeform, MailChimp

Any business that develops a long relationship with their customers can and should automate feedback and review requests. Good candidates include virtually any service business: IT outsourcing marketing agencies :) construction contractors hotels cleaning services software as a service Basically, any business where you know the customer well enough to get their email. Why would you want to automate feedback and reviews? You want feedback because you want to improve your business.

Asking for Google Reviews

Tuesday, Dec 1, 2015 by Damon Reviews

Update Google has streamlined the review process since this was written. They now recommend that you look up your Place ID and link to https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=<place_id>. Original Article Getting reviews in Google helps improve your footprint in Google search results with review content and helps you get shown on Google Maps results. Reviews may even help improve your ranking. There are a lot of good reasons to get reviews on Google proper.

When to Use HTML and Plain Text Emails

Sunday, Nov 15, 2015 by Damon email

HTML emails are prettier than plain text. They require more expertise to produce than is seen in the average email user. As a result, business owners and managers are attracted to highly-designed HTML emails. But this barrier to entry often means that HTML emails are the wrong choice for communicating with customers and leads. When HTML is the Wrong Answer The main problem with highly-designed emails is that they don’t look like the kind of email you get from friends and colleagues.

Asking for Reviews: Is it Against the TOS

Sunday, Nov 1, 2015 by Damon Reviews

Offering an incentive for reviews puts you under truth in advertising laws in most countries but asking for reviews without any incentive is usually safe. If you are unsure about your country, it is best to consult a lawyer. But there’s another layer of possible restrictions than just the legal ones and that is each review site’s terms of service (TOS). For sites like Yelp, they have no business without their reviews and so they put alot of effort in to protecting the integrity of reviews.

Creative On Update Zapier Triggers

Thursday, Oct 15, 2015 by Damon Zapier

Zapier is limited by how the different CRM systems make your data available to other application. Zapier can only react to changes that are broadcast by the CRM (and then only after you give it permission). Hubspot CRM’s integration with Zapier, for example, is very flexible and intuitive with a New Contact Property Change trigger that lets you start a Zap any time any property you choose changes. Most CRM systems don’t work with Zapier so intuitively.

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