• How can we help you?

    If you’re here, based on our analytics, it’s for one of two reasons: You found some old posts we wrote about Excel nearly 10 years ago or you need help unlocking the value of your investment in Google or Adobe Analytics. For the former, we hope the content we have proves helpful, and for the…

  • The 80/20 Rule for Analytics Teams

    I had the pleasure last week of visiting with one of Analytics Demystified’s longest-standing and, at least from a digital analytical perspective, most successful clients. The team has grown tremendously over the years in terms of size and, more importantly, stature within the broader multi-channel business and has become one of the most productive and…

  • Onsite Search Term Exit Rates [Adobe SiteCatalyst]

    Recently, I have had a few clients ask me the following question: How can I determine which onsite search terms have the highest exit rate on the search results page? This question also appeared on the Adobe Analytics message board. While it is easy to see how often visitors exit from your search results page,…

  • 10 Things You Should ALWAYS Do (or Not Do) in Excel

    It was a fairly innocuous vent-via-Twitter tweet last week that inspired this post: I was surprised by the Twitter conversation it started, with several people noting that they had no idea you could simple turn off the gridlines. There was only one vigorous defender of the all-white fill: Michele Kiss pointed out that, for both…

  • A Useful Framework for Social Media "Engagements"

    Whether you have a single toe dipped in the waters of social media analytics or are fully submerged and drowning, you’ve almost certainly grappled with “engagement.” This post isn’t going to answer the question “Is engagement ROI?” Nor is it going to answer the question, “How do I make the link from engagement to ROI?”…

  • It’s not about “Big Data”, it’s about the “RIGHT data”

    Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have heard (and perhaps grown tired) of the buzzword “big data.” But in attempts to chase the “next shiny thing”, companies may focus too much on “big data” rather than the “right data.” True, “big data” is absolutely “a thing.” There are certainly companies successfully crunching massive…

  • The Dirtiest Word in Analytics Is Interesting

    There are few sentence openers that set off analytics alarm bells for me more than: “It would be interesting to see…” That phrase gives me a 15-minute cardio workout without needing to get up from my chair. Really. (Well. Almost. I definitely have developed a physiological reaction to the phrase — elevated heart rate, burning sensation…

  • Time for Tag Management Vendors to Grow Up

    As I have written before, Analytics Demystified are big fans of Tag Management Systems, and I believe we are at the point where our entire client base is either on TMS or will be in the very near future. The advantages of TMS, especially when coupled with solid governance and the right resources managing the…

  • Black Friday Analytics

    So it’s that time of year again when commercialism runs rampant, people spend with reckless abandon, and at any moment there could be fisticuffs at your local Wal-Mart. But alas, this is Holiday Season in America, so be joyous about it! I’ve been watching online spending trends for the past decade and most recently tying…

  • What Marketing/Analytics Can Learn from Mythbusters

    Earlier this month, I gave a presentation at the Columbus Web Group meetup that I titled Mythbusters: Analytics Edition. The more I worked on the presentation — beating the same drums and mounting the same soapboxes I’ve mounted for years — the more I realized that the Discovery Channel show is actually a pretty useful…

  • Excel: Charting Averages without Adding Columns

    I was recently building out a pretty involved dashboard where, ultimately, I had about 50 different metrics that were available through various drilldowns in Excel. Beyond just the number of metrics (from multiple data sources), I wanted users of the dashboard to be able to select the report timeframe, whether to display the data trended…