I’m now writing a monthly piece for Practical eCommerce, and the experience has been refreshing. At ACCELERATE in Chicago earlier this year, April Wilson‘s winning Super ACCELERATE session focused on digital analytics for smaller companies. Her point was that a lot of the online conversation about “#measure” (or “#msure”) focuses on multi-billion dollar companies and the challenges they have with their Hadoop clusters, while there are millions of small- to medium-sized businesses who have very little time and very limited budgets who need some love from the digital analytics community. To that end, she proposed an #occupyanalytics movement — the “99%” of business owners who can get real value from digital analytics, but who can’t push work to a team of analysts they employ.

Practical eCommerce aims to provide useful information to small- to medium-sized businesses that have an eCommerce site. It’s refreshing to focus on that analytics for that target group!

My latest piece was an exploration of the different ways that managers of eCommerce sites running Google Analytics can start to get a sense of how much of their business can be linked to social media. It touches on some of the very basics — campaign tracking, referral traffic, and the like — but also dips into some of the new social media-oriented reporting in Google Analytics, as well as some of the basics of multi-channel funnels as they related to social media.And, of course, a nod to the value of voice of the customer data. Interested in more? You can read the full article on the Practical eCommerce site.