There are so many screens, features, tools, filters, searches, etc. For the heavy data cruncher, it’s always nice to have a set of shortcuts for quick execution of common tasks. In case you couldn’t find it on the Google Analytics Blog, we laid them out for you.
Here are a list of keyboard shortcuts in Google Analytics:
Date Range Shortcuts
d t
Set date range to TODAY
d y
Set date range to YESTERDAY
d w
Set date range to LAST WEEK
d m
Set date range to LAST MONTH
d c
Toggle date comparison mode (to the previous period of whatever you are looking at. Example, if you’re looking at 6 days, this will compare it to the 6 days before it)
d x
Toggle date comparison mode (to the previous year of the period you are looking at)
Application Shortcuts
?
Open keyboard shortcut help
h
Search help center
a
open account panel
shift + a
Go to account list
s /
Search reports
shift + d
Go to the default dashboard of the current profile
Some of them not working? If you’re a genius like me, it’s probably because you pressed one of the keys on accident and it took you to the search box. Make sure you are out of the search box when you try these.
Do You See What I See?
As an analytics consultant, it’s important – strike that – mission critical, to make sure you understand how your customer uses data. Sometimes we have a tendency to assume our clients look at and interpret data the same way we do. Nothing could be further from the truth. All customers look at data differently, and uncover insights that we might consider surprising or unexpected. We owe it to our customers to ask the right questions and best understand not only what’s being measured and reported on, but how that data is being consumed and interpreted.
reCAPTCHA = evil A recent experience highlighted the importance of understanding how a customer looks at data.
I received a request from a customer asking me to QA some Google Analytics tracking code that had been deployed to a page. In order to test this scenario, I needed to go to the page, fill out a form and submit. If all went well in my testing, I would see a hit sent to Google Analytics via my HTTP header monitoring tool.
Seems straightforward and easy enough right? Sure… except that I wasn’t able to submit the form. Huh??? Yeah you read that right – I wasn’t able to complete and submit the form. Not once, not twice, but 30 times I tried and failed! What in the darkest depths of Middle Earth (Yes, I loved The Hobbit, and watched it recently, as you might guess), would cause this issue, you ask? The culprit was that most dreaded of all online phenomena – the reCAPTCHA!
First, let me state my complete and utter disdain for reCAPTCHA. I hate it, and consider it amongst the darkest of evils on this planet. Why do I hate reCAPTCHA so much? That’s easy I certainly understand the benefits gained by reCAPTCHA. It blocks spam form submissions and only allows legitimate human submissions. Yadda yadda yadda I’ve heard it all. Still hate it! Some of those alphanumeric combinations are so out of this world that no human could ever read them.
reCAPTCHA is a marketer’s worst nightmare. Web forms are sort of like Cookie Monster “More cookies…more cookies!”. All they want is for users to fill them out. Cookie Monster is cute, and simply wants more cookies. Sure, he leaves a mess of crumbs behind, but I’ve never heard him complain about the quality of the cookies he consumes.
reCAPTCHA takes an innocent, unassuming, cute and cuddly puppet like Cookie Monster and turns him into…the Soup Nazi! For those of you who didn’t catch the reference, or were deprived of the wonders of Seinfeld, check out this link to learn more. The Soup Nazi makes you stand in line (quietly), and only gives you a very measured amount of soup. Don’t you dare look at him the wrong way, or “No Soup for you” will echo in your ear drums. The mere presence of the Soup Nazi strikes fear into the hearts of the most brave of people, and renders them the likeness of jello – jittery and paranoid. reCAPTCHA has the same impact on web forms by making conversion significantly more complicated, and frustrating the user beyond compare.
reCAPTCHA sits at the forefront of the classic battle between IT and Marketing. Both sides have valid arguments as to it’s usefulness, and as much as I dislike it, reCAPTCHA obviously does filter out spam. At what cost though? Are legitimate customers jumping ship out of sheer frustration? Let’s see what the data has to say…
Data’s Turn to Talk
When I was unable to complete the form, I started thinking how this must be affecting other users. Surely, this must be giving other users the same headache it gave me. Luckily we were tracking all sorts of details about the form, so the answer was in the data. Time to dive in
In this type of analysis, it would be good to look at:
Percentage of users running into reCAPTCHA errors
How many users are receiving multiple reCAPTCHA errors?
Here’s what I found: (all data referenced below is for a period of one month)
# of times the form was viewed:
2,174,325
# of times the form was submitted:
241,803
Unique # of times a recaptcha error occurred:
184,318
# of times multiple recaptcha’s were encountered:
270,969
What stands out from looking at the data above? 1. There were more reCAPTCHA errors (270,969) than submissions (241,803)!!! That means the problem is very widespread, and means that a majority of people are running into this problem. In fact many are hitting multiple reCAPTCHA errors. 2. 76% of form submissions resulted in reCAPTCHA errors!!! This was nothing short of shocking for me. 76%??? That’s insanely high! I happily wrote an email to my customer, full of excitement at what I’d found. I received a prompt reply thanking me for the analysis. The marketing team was also flabbergasted by these results and understandably wanted the reCAPTCHA removed.
Wait…A Different Perspective?
A few days later I received a call from an IT manager in the same organization. First he asked to verify how I had come up with this data. Upon confirming its validity, he also thanked me and said this data was immensely useful for them. He then went on to point out that their reCAPTCHA error rates are inline with industry standards and he wanted to make this a monthly report that he could trend with the intent of making sure the rate isn’t going down. Not going down??? What? You see he was in IT, and his focus was to make sure the reCAPTCHA was doing what it’s designed to do. The harder it is to read those ridiculous patterns, the more effectively it must be working. I thought they would be motivated to remove the reCAPTCHA, and instead they want to make it harder!!!
Always understand how your client will use data. It’s of critical importance and helps you provide meaningful insight, and ensure that data is actually being used to impact the business.
Thoughts, comments? I’d love to hear your perspective!
Update 1/23/2012 – As the commenters have pointed out you will need to delete the analytics.dat file from the program download in order to authenticate successfully. Will update blog post/files soon.
As the year closes, I wanted to make you aware of a feature in Google Analytics that has amazing potential. This will tie in with all of your New Year resolutions around making better marketing decisions. In October at the Google Analytics Certified Partner Summit we attended, Google announced the new cost data upload feature. For the first time we can measure the return on investment for all of our paid advertising campaigns. You can segment and dive into this data to find what aspects of each paid traffic source or the overall campaign are under or over performing and optimize accordingly. This feature allows you to upload non-AdWords cost data for Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn and any of your other paid traffic sources. What we are trying to create is the report below:
You can now make decisions on your marketing campaigns based on ROI inside of Google Analytics! It is very apparent in the above report that we need to reevaluate or do optimization for the cnn.com campaign, since we are making less than what we are spending with an ROI of -1.43%. This is the type of insight I want to help you find.
Use This Program or an API?
The first thing you should do is check to see whether the traffic source you want to upload cost data from has an API. Many popular services like Facebook and Bing have an API that you can leverage to save you a significant amount of time and effort. E-Nor has leveraged this with many of our clients like OEMPCWorld. If your source has an API, you can use a tool like ShufflePoint In2GA and work with them to establish the connection. This connection will upload all of your historical cost data as well as upload your new cost data each day. This means you don’t have to do anything on your end outside of creating/paying for an account with ShufflePoint.
It is very likely that you will also have sources that don’t have an API. This could be affiliate networks, banner ads, e-mail lists, and the like. You could also decide you don’t want to pay someone to establish an API connection, so the following instructions could apply to Facebook and Bing as well. The instructions below will allow you to upload cost data from any .csv files on a Mac to Google Analytics. These files can be created in Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, iWork, or any of your favorite spreadsheet tools. I tried to make these as detailed and easy to understand as I could, so that anyone could use it. The best part about this tool is that it is free and will be a great way to end the year or kick off the new year with new insights.
Disclaimer: These instructions are for Mac only. If you are familiar with programming languages, getting it to work on Windows shouldn’t be difficult. I can also not be responsible if anything breaks or your computer explodes, this is a free tool after all =)
Here are the six steps:
1. Create Project and Obtain OAuth 2.0 Client ID
a. Go to Google API’s page and click the blue “Create project…” button
b. Slide “Analytics API” to On
c. Agree to the terms of service
d. Click on “API Access” in the left navigation
e. Click the blue “Create an OAuth 2.0 client ID…” button
f. Fill in “Product name” field with “Cost Data Upload Program”. Leave rest of form blank and click grey “Next” button.
g. For Application Type select “Installed application” radio button. Leave installed application type defaulted to “Other.” Click grey “Create client ID” button.
h. Find and click the “Download JSON” link in the Client ID for installed applications section on the right side of page
2. Download and Install Cost Data Program
a. Place the downloaded “clients_secrets.json” file from step 1h on your desktop.
b. Download the “e-nor cost data upload program” to your desktop. Select file then download to download entire zip, instead of each file individually.
c. Unzip the download and make sure it is on your desktop.
d. Drag the “clients_secrets.json” file (step 1h and 2a) from your desktop into the unzipped “e-nor_costdataupload” folder (step 10-11) on your desktop. Select “Replace” when prompted. e. Login to Google Analytics and go to the profile you want to upload data to
f. Click “Admin” Button in top-righthand corner
g. Record the provided Property ID: UA-XXXXX-XX
h. Click “Custom Definitions” Tab
i. Click “New Custom Data Sources (Beta)” Button
j. Enter a name, description and select profiles to send data to and click “create”
k. Record the UID
l. Open the “e-nor_costdataupload” folder and open the “upload_csv_file.py” file
m. Scroll to the bottom and replace the accountId, webPropertyId and CustomDataSourceID with what you recorded in steps 2g and 2k. The accountId is the same as the webPropertyId, just with the beginning and end removed. If you recorded UA-123456-1 in steps 2g. You will put UA-123456-1 as the webPropertyId and 123456 as the accountId.
n. Save and close the files
3. Installing Google Analytics API files through Easy Install
a. Download the Easy Install files here and place file on desktop
b. Click spotlight in top right hand corner of your Mac and type in “Terminal” and open it.
c. In Terminal type or paste: cd Desktop
d. Type or paste: sudo sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg
e. Enter your password and you should see the below message if successful
f. In terminal type or paste: sudo easy_install –upgrade google-api-python-client
g. If successful you will see this message
4. Creating Cost Data Files
There are 17 different dimensions and metrics you can upload, but only 5 are required: cost, impressions, clicks, source and medium. In the e-nor_costdataupload/October-Cost-Data folder you can find examples of the fields and formatting that is required or view the image below.
You will need to create a file per day for your cost data. If you want to upload the month of November you will have one file per day of data. You can create this using your favorite spreadsheet software (Excel, iWork, Google Docs, etc). The only requirement is they have to be saved as “Comma Separated Values” which are the .csv file extension. There are templates/examples in the cost data program provided.
5. Uploading Cost Data
You will now be uploading a cost data file. You need to first create and save the file as explained in step 4. We will now upload one day of data using the following command: ./upload_csv_file.py {yyyy-mm-dd} ~{cost-file-location}
If we are trying to upload the example files included with the program we would enter the following in terminal:
a. Open Terminal and type or paste: cd Desktop/e-nor_costdataupload
b. ./upload_csv_file.py 2012-11-01 ~/Desktop/e-nor_costdataupload/October-Cost-Data/2012-11-01.csv
6. Viewing Cost Data in Google Analytics
This is the hardest part of all! You will need to be patient and wait for up to 12 hours to see the cost data appear in Google Analytics. In my experience on average it took about 30 minutes. You will find it in the Traffic Sources Section as “Cost Analysis”. You can also create custom reports to add in metrics such as revenue, transaction and to apply various advanced segments or filters.
Closing Thoughts
I love this new feature, but as you can tell if you aren’t leveraging an API tool it can be quite a bit of work to get the data into Google Analytics. Two improvements I have planned are first to have a way to batch upload buckets of files at one time and also for a script in Excel to create multiple files from a master spreadsheet based on date. Ideally, I would like to be able to create one spreadsheet with all of the dates/data I need and have the program parse and upload it from memory. The source code for the program is given to you, so I encourage one of you to do it and let me test it =)
We have been hard at work over the past few months doing what we can to share analytics tips, best practices and the latest from the trenches relevant to the measurement industry and those on their road to becoming analysis ninjas . We have had the pleasure of connecting with some influential media outlets and thought it would be beneficial to share some of our recent published pieces with our blog followers. Feel free to click through these links to review the entire piece.
Take a Moment to Get Feras’s M.O.
E-Nor’s Co-Founder and Principal Consultant, Feras Alhlou was recently featured on MO.com, a website highlighting entrepreneurs from all industries and all around the world. This online publication examines what makes entrepreneurs tick and shares with readers their habits, strategies and business philosophies. Feras’s feature begins with a quote that encapsulates his drive to make E-Nor successful, “Delivering and measuring results, then sharing those results with our clients, along with demonstrating the positive impact on their bottom line was (and still is) very satisfying to me.”
Web Marketing Today
A lot of what E-Nor does day-in and day-out is focused on web marketing today. So what better place to provide editorial content then a publication titled just that! Web Marketing Today provides articles, video and webinars on current industry-related topics such as Advertising, Analytics & Testing, Lead Generation and more. E-Nor contributes material relevant to our analytics consulting services that Web Marketing Today’s readers are interested in learning more about. Check out Analytics in an Hour, our four-part series on Understanding Google Analytics, Google Analytics Real Time: Instant Analysis and our most recent article, Using Google’s In-Page Analytics.
E-Nor on the Google Analytics Blog! Campaignalyzer and Cost Data Import!
The competition was fierce, but CampaignAlyzer, a web-based solution that acts as a central repository platform where organizations can store their marketing campaign values in one database, caught the love of the audience and social world! The application streamlines campaign tagging into a process that is efficient, timely, accurate, adaptive, value-added and business critical.
Cost Data Import- Ever wanted to measure return on investment from multiple digital channels? Import data from multiple channels and review them in a custom report for cost analysis of traffic sources. See how all your digital marketing channels are performing compared to each other, so you can make better decisions about your marketing programs. E-Nor was featured on the Google Analytics Blog as a partner who implemented the cost data import successfully for a client (OEMPCWorld).
Timely Analytics for the Holiday
The PR team at E-Nor always tries to keep content timely and current, which is why we released an article just this week on Data Analytics for a Profitable Holiday Season through Independent Retailer’s online publication. This article provides valuable information to retail store owners and marketing managers on what and how to measure digital data just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We shared tips, suggestions and resources to ensure you have a profitable holiday season.
Talk About Analytics
Feras spoke on a number of different occasions this fall, one of which was at the Conversion Conference last month in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. As a speaker at the event, Feras touched on the topic of Big Data’s Perfect Storm: Actionable Customer Insights from the Cloud. Here, conference attendees learned about the “magic powers” of Big Data and data integration to provide the 360 view of customers and stitching data from multiple sources (campaign costs, CRM, web analytics data) to produce insights on reducing lead acquisition costs and overall cost per qualified lead.
E-Nor was featured on PUNCH Media & Marketing Made Easy radio show 1220 a.m. KDOW, The Wall Street Business Network, where Feras spoke on the topic of Web Analytics & Marketing Optimization. Listeners gained knowledge on measuring online marketing activities with email marketing campaigns, website offers and social media measurement. (Archived episodes aired October 6, 2012.)
Disparate data sources are common and problematic when trying to integrate and analyze all relevant marketing and business metrics into an impactful executive dashboard that trends data over time and gives insight to the client. In order to help combat an issue such as this, and as just announced on the official Google Analytics blog, E-Nor recently participated in early beta with the Google Analytics team and our partners at ShufflePoint, which developed the feature In2GA on their existing platform.
Fig 1: Client’s Adwords Data and Date have been blurred out.
E-Nor brought long-time client OEMPCWorld into this exciting development to help them overcome the stumbling blocks of varying data sources. OEMPCWorld Founder and President Michael Rosito shared:
“Using the ‘In2GA’ cost data import tool from Shufflepoint, enables E-Nor to analyze the performance of our paid search channel more efficiently.This translates into quicker insights comparing campaign metrics, ad effectiveness, and keyword performance at one glance instead of logging into multiple systems. Any application or feature that streamlines data collection for analysis, ultimately impacting the bottom line positively, is welcomed. Thanks for the continued innovations and look forward to more.”
In2GA is an extension to the ShufflePoint report automation platform which supports automated, scheduled transfer of ad performance metrics from ad platforms such as Bing Ads and Facebook into Google Analytics via the Cost Data Import feature. This awesome new capability was just announced at the Google Analytics Partner Summit yesterday. It will be rolled out over the next month.
Today, marketers are relying on multiple channels to convey and monitor their marketing efforts. With the introduction of Universal Analytics, the task of measuring these efforts is made simple. Now, you have the ability to see the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, sales, retention, etc. in one program, thus giving you a more clear insight into customer experiences.
Universal Analytics is offered through the new Google Analytics Measurement Protocol. This new protocol allows you to send your own digital customer data directly to your Google Analytics account, and shows how users interact with your brand through various platforms like laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. It also accepts the integration of mobile data from Google’s already developed Mobile App Analytics tool. Another benefit of Universal Analytics is the ability for cross-channel measurement that lets you sync your own data from various marketing channels, thus showing the relationship between the channels that drive conversions and sales. You too can customize the metrics you want leveraging this data integration and develop key reports from this data.
Beyond The Web (and Mobile and Social) Analytics Capabilities:
Much simplified code and usage of client-side cookies
Transition from session based measurement to true visitor measurement
Ability to upload your own user ID data (e.g. from CRM systems)
Custom Dimensions: ability to upload and associate external data with your GA data
Want more information and benefits of Universal Analytics? We have been beta testing some of these features, so
let us know and will be happy to discuss how we can help you leverage these capabilities to impact your business.
And stay tuned to the E-Nor blog for more information about this and other Google Analytics announcements coming this week!
Last evening wasn’t just the evening of the first presidential debate of the 2012 election, it was also the first-ever GAUGE Hacknight & Google Analytics Application Showcase at the Boston 2012 GAUGE conference.
We were honored to present our campaign tagging application, named “CampaignAlyzer”, in the event along with other great companies and products and we were humbled to have taken home the Audiences’ Choice Award!
Our Marketing Analyst, Charles Farina, did a great job presenting and demoing the tool to the conference audience whom generously granted us their trust at the end of the presentations.
About CampaignAlyzer:
CampaignAlyzer is a web-based application that acts as a central repository platform where organizations can store their marketing campaign values in one database. Marketing agencies and digital marketers across an organization now have the ability to collaborate in tagging various online and offline campaigns, and ensure consistency in their campaign tagging.
Main Features:
Bulk Campaign Management: Ability to import and export campaigns from and into Excel, CSV and tab delimited files
Attribution Model: CampaignAlyzer provides the option to attribute the online conversions to the very first campaign or the most recent one
Analytics-Tool Agnostic: This application has the flexibility to use any campaign tracking variables in addition to the default Google Analytics UTM parameters
URL Shortener: CampaignAlyzer utilizes the Google URL shortening service goo.gl for easy URL sharing and distribution across social media and other marketing channels
Role-Based Access: CampaignAlyzer allows account owners and administrators to easily set up any number of users and grant them the account access privileges desired. Users are either 1) administrators who have full access to all campaigns and account settings 2) editors who can add, remove and edit campaigns or 3) read-only users who can simply view reports.
Easy Access: We understand that users of CampaignAlyzer are power users of Google Analytics and they already have a Google account to sign in to their Analytics Account. We also understand that they might not be interested in adding a new username and password to their already long list of account login credentials. Keeping this in mind, we have designed the app to allow users to sign in to CampaignAlyzer using their existing Google accounts.
Google has done it again! They’ve added yet another product to their already outstanding digital marketing suite. Introducing Google Tag Manager, a new powerful tool that allows you to deploy marketing tags onto your website in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks. And E-Nor is on the forefront of this exciting program, being one of the Google Analytics Certified Partners who are approved Google Tag Manager Specialists. Our staff has gone through rigorous testing and review to earn this certification, and be able to provide this highly beneficial tool to our clients.
Tag Management Systems (TMSs)
As most of you are already aware, Tag Management Systems (TMSs) provide an easier way to implement tags throughout a website. Rather than hassling the IT department to add specific tags in either HTML or Javascript (which we all know can take days, weeks, even potentially longer depending on how often you pester your IT personnel ), it can be done by adding a small snippet of code to your website. The Google Tag Manager admin interface automates the placement and management of digital marketing vendor tags, thus making the process more efficient, saving both time and money.
Google and Third-party Tags
The Google Tag Manager program supports a variety of Google and third-party tracking of marketing and management tags, which provides accurate and dependable data you can trust. Currently, the following tags are supported:
Google Analytics
Adwords conversion tracking
Adwords Remarketing
Doubleclick
Custom Image
Custom HTML
While new predefined tag types will be added, the custom tags above allow admins to include additional javascript tags from other tools as well.
It allows users to run campaigns on their schedule, is easily adaptable to current digital marketing tools and gives you confidence in the data you are gathering online. Google Tag Manager is fast and reliable, intuitive and is easy to use.
E-Nor Offers Google Tag Manager Consulting
E-Nor is already a certified partner with a number of Google Analytics products, and the new offering of Google Tag Manager is just another way we will help our clients get the most out of their digital marketing. E-Nor will develop the planning, process and strategy needed to properly deploy the Google Tag Manager tool. By utilizing our years of analytics expertise, complemented by our new status as a Google Tag Manager specialists, it shows that E-Nor continues to diversify service offerings to enhance our client’s agility in effectively measuring and improving digital marketing campaigns. This unique combination demonstrates our commitment to staying on the leading edge of industry advancements, and we are excited to offer this new service.
E-Nor is expanding! We are pleased to announce the opening of our newest office in Tampa, Florida. Starting this week, our new location will service the analytics and marketing optimization needs of E-Nor’s clients in the Tampa Bay area and Southeastern United States region. Operations will be led by Principal Partner, Bilal Saleh. We recently sat down for a Q&A session with Bilal, and wanted to share this exciting news with our customers, friends and community.
Q: Tell us a little bit about your background.
A: Well, I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the chance to work on cutting-edge technologies with the brightest engineering minds in the industry. I am also fortunate to have worked with visionary marketers pushing disruptive services and business models.
My career began as a software engineer developing chip-level communication protocols for one of the early voice response systems in the industry. I then progressed through various leadership roles including engineering management, business unit head, and then general manager. I established a business unit responsible for engineering, marketing and selling a service delivery platform for developing, deploying and managing mobile applications, which was a major shift in my career. That’s when I started my MBA at Kellogg. At that time, I handled B2B and C2C marketing, business intelligence, data-driven product positioning and pricing, and the mobile applications eco system. I also created business models for service providers and app developers to monetize mobile applications and content, and handled sales funnel management – lead generation, tracking, and nurturing in an extremely complex and competitive telecom environment.
Q: You have been granted three US patents, that’s quite impressive, what did it take?
A: Being a part of a team solving problems at the industry level and shaping the global standards puts you in a unique position that really gravitates you towards innovation. I remember my first patent: I was working late with a colleague, drafting a proposal for one of the T1P1 standards groups and we came up with a simple solution to a complex problem without adding complexity to the network. After brainstorming the solution on the whiteboard, we both looked at each other and said, “This is a patentable idea!” We stayed up all night and drafted the patent application which was granted in less than a year.
Going through the patent filing process is exciting. We had to sell the idea to an internal committee consisting of some of the brightest engineering minds, marketers and, of course, patent lawyers. That was a humbling experience for me.
Q: You have traveled the globe consulting and advising some of the most well-known brands. This is a clear benefit to E-Nor’s customers, share a little of your global experience?
A: Remember, when you are a young and enthusiastic software developer, your world evolves around solving technical problems. When you leave the lab and start talking to customers and listening to their pain points, you quickly realize that technology is just one piece of the puzzle and you start to understand the big picture. Your mindset changes and you start seeing technology as an enabler used by business leaders to achieve economical value for their shareholders.
The fact that I worked with some top global brands/tier-1 service providers to solve business problems using technology, and was exposed to a mix of culturally- and technologically-diverse customers was a big plus. That exposure not only enriched and shaped my view of the role of technology in achieving business goals, but also helped me understand and appreciate my customers’ pain points and focused my energy on developing business solutions. This shift in thinking and mindset forced me to be even more analytical and data-driven, not only from an engineering perspective, but also from a marketing and business intelligence perspective, where deriving insight from all the data one has is a critical factor for success. I think this particular aspect of my experience will enable me to understand our customers’ business objectives and pain points, and to develop practical solutions that achieve measurable results.
Q: What is your vision for the Florida office?
A: E-Nor is a trusted consultant throughout California and beyond. I hope to be able to leverage the company’s expertise and brand, and expand it to the business community in the Tampa Bay area and the whole Southeast. I plan to grow our healthcare and tourism segments, oh, and beat the California office in YoY growth!
Q: As one of the pioneers in the mobile industry, where do you see mobile going?
A: There are a number of studies projecting that the mobile device will become the number one device for accessing the web. Putting this in perspective, and in the context of global brands that are not confined to any specific geographies, you can quickly realize that the volume and variety of data these devices will generate is mind boggling. Being a veteran of the mobile industry and having helped global service providers in developing their mobile applications strategies and business models gives me the ability to look at mobile data in a more meaningful way. For instance, understanding how the location of a consumer influences his/her browsing behavior and purchasing decisions gives a deeper insight into his/her needs and intents. Browsing on a small screen and using touch instead of clicks also influences a user’s web interaction behavior. Understanding these subtleties in user behavior and their impacts on buying decisions will be a fascinating and exciting problem for marketers to solve. We need to be able to decipher “big data” and make sense out of what consumers are looking for.
Q: You have adopted the E-Nor analytics framework and are helping businesses in Florida leverage data to make better business decisions. What are the major marketing and analytics needs you encounter when working with businesses?
A: Businesses need to be discovering how much valuable and insightful data they have at their disposal and figure out to how to leverage it to make more educated decisions. They should replace the guesswork with a data-driven understanding of their customer’s behavior, which ultimately leads to better marketing and business decisions. Business leaders should also develop an understanding of what they are doing well or not so well , i.e. why they are spending too much money on marketing but not realizing great returns. Basically. just help them know what they do not know when it comes to digital analytics!
Q: On the personal side, Feras said that you do two hours of cardio every morning… is that true?!
A: Well, that must have come from Feras, he is raising the bar! I think he is referring to my challenge to my 20-year-old nephew 10 years ago, to do two hours of cardio and burn 20 calories a minute. I do not recall who won the challenge!
Seriously though, starting my day at the gym gives me the energy and the focus I need throughout the day. My 30-minute cardio is the best time to organize my thoughts and plan my day.
Thank you Bilal for this interview, and welcome on board!! For more information on E-Nor’s Southeastern U.S. market, contact Bilal Saleh at (408) 988-0003 ext. 210 or Bilal(at)E-Nor(dot)com.
Normally a new chapter of an organization takes some time (years in some cases) to catch up and be able to compete with other established chapters within the organization. Nevertheless, there is an exception to this rule and that’s if the new chapter was established in the Bay Area — you would have to expect the best no matter how big or small the event is and no matter where the bar was set by the other sister chapters.
Yesterday, the digital marketing and digital analytics industry experienced a state-of-the-art symposium organized by local DAA members (forming the soon to be the official DAA San Francisco chapter). The symposium was titled “What’s Next? – The Future of Digital Analytics” and was attended by almost 200 professionals who had the opportunity to listen and engage with 18 top-industry leaders.
For those of you who missed it, here are some highlights of the event:
<Session 1> Localization, Social Media & Mobile </Session 1>
My favorite presentation was by Jarah Euston of Flurry who delivered an awesome talk about the use of mobile apps in our daily life and how marketers through mobile devices can deeply understand their consumer’s behavior.
<Session 2> Big Data </Session 2>
The 7 Myths of Big Data:
<Session 3> Career Development in Digital Analytics </Session 3>
…and before we leave we have to take an E-Nor group picture
Thank you!
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the planning team and the DAA staff for the efforts they put into planning the event. While I might not be aware of the amount of time they spent to make this event a successful one, every attendee (including myself) can tell from the end result that a lot of sacrifice was put forth to make this happen.
A recent experience highlighted the importance of understanding how a customer looks at data. 
I certainly understand the benefits gained by reCAPTCHA. It blocks spam form submissions and only allows legitimate human submissions. Yadda yadda yadda 
reCAPTCHA is a marketer’s worst nightmare. Web forms are sort of like Cookie Monster “More cookies…more cookies!”. All they want is for users to fill them out. Cookie Monster is cute, and simply wants more cookies. Sure, he leaves a mess of crumbs behind, but I’ve never heard him complain about the quality of the cookies he consumes.
reCAPTCHA takes an innocent, unassuming, cute and cuddly puppet like Cookie Monster and turns him into…the Soup Nazi! For those of you who didn’t catch the reference, or were deprived of the wonders of Seinfeld, 
Last evening wasn’t just the evening of the first presidential debate of the 2012 election, it was also the first-ever 
