Why do we use Google Data Studio?

There is a long list of tools when speaking of data visualization. Now, more and more great data visualization tools are free and they are very simple to use and easy to access. The number of tools might even make us confused and struggled to pick one that we want. In order to know if Google Data Studio is the good fit for you, we should learn the characteristics of it for comparing with other tools. First, just to have a quick talk of data visualization. It is the process of taking a data set and visualizing it in a way that can be easily understood. Sometimes called data viz, data visualization can be something as simple as a bar chart generated from an Excel file, or as complex as an interactive multimedia experience. The best data visualizations are beautiful, informative, and responsive.

1.Create Beautiful Reports

Many companies, especially large corporation, has tons of data for their businesses and their clients. The data may be already well-organized but may not be visualized. There are people out there who have created entire businesses around making data consumable, easy to read, and simple to understand. Google Data Studio could definitely help simplified the process.

Although we can visual the data on Google Analytics ,it can be kind of tough and time consuming to create spreadsheets, analyze the data, and format in a way that makes sense to shareholders in the company.  As Data Studio is built for data visualization – making it intuitive and simple to pull information into beautiful, consumable reports. The tool gives you the ability to change colors, gradients, fonts, etc. In addition, Data Studio provides a lot of different professional templates which help to make a beautiful report. Furthermore, Data Studio provides different formats or ways, such as bar chart, line graphs, pie chart, to present all the data. 

2. Pull Data From Multiple Sources

It is very amazing that you are able to import data source to Data Studio from multiple sources – even to the same report! You may pull data from some Google products such as Google AdWords and Google Analytics.

As we know, we can own many different accounts under ONE google analytics account. For example, we can have three different online stores and create three different properties under ONE google analytics accounts. Besides, we could create more than one views under one property on Google Analytics. For example, we can have one view for filtered employees' IP address, one view for members, and one view for master (all visitors). I want to point out that in Data Studio, you are able to pull out data from these different sources for your report. When you are creating a report for an online store, you may need to compare data from members and non-members which need you to pull data from two views on Google Analytics and Data Studio makes you do that!

3. Share easily and in real time

No more needing to give or get access to Google Analytics and navigate the UI to get what you need. Because Data Studio reports operate like any document on Google Drive — permissions can be granted to anyone — it allows for collaboration. And, it gets the real time updates, people can see the changes or updates immediately.

4. It’s free

It is free of charge and easy to access. There are some restrictions for this tool. There is also a limit of 5 reports per account (that is, the email address associated with Data Studio). The good news is, there is a bit of a workaround here. Similar to tabs on Google Sheets, Data Studio allows for additional pages on each report you create.

 Reference:

https://www.clickinsight.ca/about/blog/7-reasons-data-studio-google-analytics

What is Google Data Studio?

Speaking of data visualization, we should also look into a comparatively new tool Google Data Studio among many great tools out there. In this post, let's see what Data Studio is.

Google Data Studio allows you to turn your analytics data into informational, easy-to-understand reports - such as charts, graphs and maps, through data visualization. You can easily customize your reports to suit difference needs. Compare to the visualization function in MS Excel, Google Data Studio is much more user friendly and looks much cooler.

Another cool thing about Google Data Studio, for marketing analyst, is that it can be linked to your Google Analytics account to obtain data about your websites or digital marketing campaigns directly from Google Analytics. This make analyzing marketing activities so much easier than in the past when you have to export the google analytics data and use 3^rd party software for analysis. Furthermore, you can also import your data from external source into Google Data Studio to create professional reports.

Reports in Google Data Studio are interactive and dynamic, so that when new data available from a linked source, reports can be updated automatically to provide a real-time report. Additionally, the reports can be shared easily under a controlled environment since it allows you to edit permission on the shared report for each individual, allowing them to read or edit.

Reference:http://searchengineland.com/google-data-studio-258871

The Trend of Digital Marketing in 2017

All the way long we have been discussing big data, data analytics, and data visualization which all about digital marketing. In the digital world, things changing and new things happening all the time. We are too busy to catch up all the new trends and sometimes may get confused. Therefore, it would be god to have an idea the big trend of digital marketing in this year.

1. Marketers will increasingly adopt machine learning and data science

Machine learning and data science provide marketers with the opportunity to increase productivity effectively, enabling them to focus on the overall strategy deployment and eliminating the time spent on day-to-day data analysis and data management. Adobe recently published Adobe Sensei. Adobe Sensei, built on Adobe Cloud Platform, is a new framework and intelligent service that combines artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning to dramatically improve the delivery of design and digital experience.

2. Videos will become dominant

Videos have been regarded as "the next big thing" over the past few years, but marketers have not yet fully understood how to use the video flexibly in marketing. Knowing how customers use video content and learning how to use video ads will provide key opportunities for marketers in 2017.

3. Content speed will become critical

High-speed and large-scale production of personalized and interactive content of the ability is the thing marketers should pay attention to. In order to do this, marketers need to bring into the customer's role, and deeply feel the experience provided by its brand. The customers interact with the brand from multiple touchpoints, so the marketers need to be aware of how these experiences affect the entire customers' consumption process.

4. Customer experience is the biggest driving force of digital transformation

The biggest driver of digital transformation is the establishment of a competitive advantage, and the core of which is the customer experience. Customer experience is a new indicator of the success or failure of the competition, it can distinguish through the digital transformation to promote their own brand and stagnation in the old business model of the brand. Today's digitized layouts are full of users who use multiple devices to interact with each other, including mobile phones, wearable devices, tablets, and even automotive dashboards, and people will want to use it when new products or new ideas are available , The increasing expectations of customers so that the brand must be customer experience for the core business.

5.2017 digital marketing first interaction

The new year's digital marketing trend is about to change, the past marketing, only the pursuit of the target audience design ads, and then put to the community, now only to consumers to see is not the best digital marketing, must also allow consumers to " Interact with you ", 2016 second half of the fame of advertising.

6. Content marketing is not extensive marketing

In the past, many of the products known as content marketing, are the name of the slogan of marketing, marketing and marketing of the real. Still to the brand point of view to send an ad text, this article can not get the favor of consumers. Those business owners who can not be rewarded in digital marketing should think about: "Are you interested in what consumers are writing about?" If you only introduce the brand, tell the selling point, and do not meet the needs of consumers, it is not content Marketing, and with the traditional advertising is no different.

Is Big Data Changing the game of Traditional Marketing?

In traditional marketing, we always were told about four Ps: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. But the world is changing so fast and we can see the way marketing has been changing rapidly as well. Like, we can see a lot of marketing has been moving online. Are the four Ps of marketing still working in the industry? How can we apply them in today digital marketing?

One of the biggest changes is the shifting customers online and they are able to interact with the companies. In the past, customers might just walk in the physical store, shop and leave. Now, company is able to track their online shopping behavior. The age of big data is providing the chance and leading the trend for business to transit the marketing. Big data enables "personalized marketing" to become the basic service.

 The traditional marketing, cannot do very detailed personal marketing and mostly focusing public marketing or group marketing. For example, traditional marketing based on consumer demand, and the market segmentation is for the different groups. For example, a sports shoes brand has seven market segments, and then with seven marketing activities, often have to spend a lot of manpower and resources. But with big data, the marketers can get every consumer's purchase time, purchase cycle, purchase characteristics to analyze their buying behavior and shopping experience. They can launch online marketing campaign which cost much less money and resources.

Everyone's buying behavior, consumption habits are not the same, but the traditional marketing because of the limitations of resources and manpower, therefore, often can only be with people to marketing, rather than marketing to meet people; when the business can only perform seven marketing activities. But when the marketing activities have the ability to become as many as 70,000, each consumer can be matched from 70,000 activities to the most suitable for these activities, and thus move the old marketing point of view, into a person to find activities, rather than activities find someone.

Marketing activities from groups to the individual, the market segment is getting smaller and smaller, or that each customer has become a focus on the market, marketing become personalized accompany by the age of big data.

The benefits of Big Data

We have talked about data scientist skill sets in digital marketing in an old blog and we realized that how importance and necessary big data and data analytics are in today world. Many people know it is indispensable for online marketing and good for business, but may not realize the benefits of using bid data specifically. I would like to share some of the benefits here. 

Big data analysis actually can make us of big data to increase customer participation. Marketers can improve it through consumer buying behavior, personal shopping experience and other information to gain more consumer interaction. For example, marketers can get data from Google Analytics to analyze their customers' buying behavior. They may know which customer segments are interested in their products most, which customer segments are buying their products most and most frequently, when and what time their customers are most active to browse their website and online store, where and what channels their customers and website visitors come from, how the website visitors are visiting and shopping on the website, etc.

Digital media marketing staff must consider all aspects of consumer information and behavior, to create a better consumer product experience. The use of data analysis help understand the purchase behaviors of consumers and to enhance customer participation through interaction, with the analysis of the information marketers can use data to quickly enter the next target market.

Getting these kinds of data, marketers are able to have more specific, personal and effective marketing campaigns to either potential customers or current customers. Brand marketing staff use data analysis to improve the marketing process of enterprise marketing. Big data analysis has become a new insight into market trends. In the past, digital marketing staff cannot track the consumer's shopping model, and now through the data analysis to become a new way to observe the market trend for the corporate brand in the target market to get the most response.

Why Analytics?

I think all of us cannot avoid analytics in this technology world nowadays and it's time to see analytics seriously. Analytics has been at the top of Gartner’s CIO technology priorities for decades.

Let's speak analytics in marketing field. The job of modern marketers is to optimize the whole system of touch points to maximize the flow of satisfied customers. And to do that, they rely on analytics, to guide the customer at each point – “you may be interested in these other products” or “here’s a discount if you purchase now.”

In the new world, it’s no longer about having a “customer process,” it’s about creating thousands or millions of personalized “processes” on the fly, based on the needs of each individual.

Because these new processes are analytics-powered, they can be much more agile and responsive to change – indeed, with new machine learning approaches, they can even update themselves, automatically adjusting to consumer behavior.

And this doesn’t just apply to marketing. We see the growth of similar on-the-fly processes in every other area of modern business, from production and logistics to finance and human resources.

Effectively creating and managing these kinds of flexible, on-the-fly processes is THE big new opportunity in digital business.

Reference:

http://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/03/analytics-is-the-most-important-business-process-in-your-organization.html

Big Data and Analytics in Different Industries

Travel

The travel industry has always depended on treating statistics to provide the best possible service. Using data to predict when people will travel, where and how means companies can provide the exact service their customers need at the best time and at the right price.

For example, a flight company can use historical data collected on customer journeys to predict demand for fares in different periods of time so that they know when the demand is higher and when is lower. They can set different prices depending on the predicted demand for fares. Predictive analytics can help you dig down into even greater detail and give you the edge over competitors in a tight market.

Insurance

The insurance industry has always depended on math to calculate insurance costs. However, this usually depended on the history of the client in particular and other internal data sources.

For instance, travel insurance would be calculated on risk based on accidents statistics, probability of death and injury history. However, by using more powerful data analytics tools you can incorporate an even wider array of sources to build an even more specific picture of risk-related to one customer in particular.

Energy
The energy industry needs to find a constant balance between providing the right amount of energy. Too much and you lose profit, too little supply and your customers will find another provider fast.

Most power plants have a fairly good idea of when demand is higher and lower. This is no secret, but using data insights can help make energy provisions even more efficient and significantly cut costs. Again, by studying historical demand, power plants can predict minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour energy demands depending on anything from the season to time of day, then use this to provide the exact quantity of energy required.

 

Education
Education is an enormous market in the world. Education can actually use data to help them provide better and more appropriate education to students, although many of them have not noticed or started doing by this way.

When students move from one classroom to another and meet different teachers throughout the day, it can be hard to keep track of an individual student’s progress. However, numerous apps are using data collected in school to provide teachers with a more unified insight into their students’ academic progress and allow them to spot problems and provide additional support when needed.

 

Telecoms
Telecom companies have access to a huge amount of customer data, and so by using tools to analyze this they can provide even more personalized services that users actually want.

In the past, providing telecoms was relatively straightforward – you connected a customer to the network and allowed them to contact their friends, relatives and business associates. However, with the emergence of the Internet and ever more devices for communicating, telecom providers need to offer much more diversity in the services they offer. Data analytics can help them with this by segmenting the market ever more accurately and providing the exact deals different customers will want.

 

Finance
Finance is all about numbers, but complex algorithms help inform and support trading decision. Algorithms can collect data from an ever wider number of success. By using live and historical is find new opportunities faster than humans can read and discover, and to gain a competitive edge.

 

Retail
No industry embodies the basic elements of supply and demand better than retail. Data has always been used to understand how customers are buying, but data analytics will help this become even more accurate.

Internet of Things shelf scanners are increasingly able to tell stores how empty or full their stocks are. Data analytics will then allow stores to always provide the exact amounts of product needed.

Reference:

https://www.infragistics.com/community/blogs/mobileman/archive/2016/09/08/top-10-industries-benefiting-the-most-from-data-analytics.aspx

SEO Tools

In a previous article, we talked about search engine optimization. We understand what it is and understand why companies like using it rather than using Paid Ad. In this article, we like to talk about what tools we can make good use of to do SEO more smartly!

Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine allows you to get historical archive of the Internet. You can see what a website used to look like. If there are some odd traffic changes after your website is updated, and you don’t have a site back-up available, you can investigate into the issue by the tool.

Moz
Moz is a suite of user-friendly inbound marketing tools. Moz can provide Open Site Explorer which is a backlink analysis tool with helpful metrics approximating link equity. Moz Local allows you see the state of a company’s local citations and is the first place you should go when you first start local SEO on a site. Mozbar is one of its tools, that is a Mozbar is a browser toolbar that lets you quickly get at Moz’s key features for the page you’re on. The SERP Overlay is part of the Mozbar and shows OSE metrics on individual search results.

Source:

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2017/01/17/2017-favorite-free-seo-tools/

Analyst and Data Scientist skill set in Digital Marketing

Accompanying the rapid development of technology and the data the past few years have brought, marketing is no longer like what it was in the past, and has become more digitized. Now, more and more companies are using data science to do the marketing or solve the marketing problems. And, more companies have different requirements for marketers from the past. They expect marketers not only familiar with digital tools, but also able to deal with Big Data. For examples, companies would expect marketers who understand websites, search engines, social media, and even better to know Google Analytics, or some analytics tools such as Tableau, or Data Miner. The tech-based economy is turning marketing industry into more analytical and more data science.

According to Forbes, there are 4 important digital skills all marketers should master in 2017:

1. Analytics

Consumer segmentation is an essential part of marketing, which help companies find out their target audience for different products or services. The very cornerstone of marketing as an industry is understanding the target audience in order to reach out to them effectively. In the modern world, that is best accomplished through collecting and analyzing data--often in large amounts. There are many data mining tools out there for digital marketers. For examples, SAS Data Miner is one of the data mining tools for digital marketers to have consumer segmentation.

Marketing analyst should have the knowledge of the analytics platforms they use. It should not only be dragging data to the software and have some graphs shown. They should be able to analyze the graphs they get and to get some answers they want to address by the tools. In addition, for e-commerce clients who may also request to get the result from digital marketers on their business key performance indexes. For instances, they may want to see how the digital marketers increase the unique visitors or how they increase the number of sign-up for newsletter.

2. SEO

Nowadays, Search Engines Optimization has become a very basic and popular skills for digital marketers. As you may notice that, a trend in the requirement listings of Digital Marketers SEO is always be included. That means many companies are now looking for people who know SEO when they hire marketers.

We all know that companies, especially big companies could pay for advertisements like Google AdWords, or pay for Google search result ranking. However, SEO is a desired skill because   organic search results have the potential to be much more powerful than paid ads, especially if they make it to the first page, and it’s been estimated that nearly 40% of customers find the company through search. Also, algorithms and best practices are constantly evolving and so SEO is one skill that requires consistent updating and refining. Because of this, many companies prefer to have a dedicated SEO expert (or a team of them) rather than more general marketing professionals who know some SEO.

3. HTML/CSS

Many marketing roles involve writing--whether it’s sales pages or blog posts. Being familiar with HTML at the very least will expedite the process of getting that content on the site and looking good. For examples, having the basics of HTML marketers can change a link color when needed or to resize a photo or video to fit within a blog frame. In addition, it makes cross-team communication much smoother: Marketers could be make conversations with IT teams so much easier if they understand more on coding.

4. WordPress (or related CMS)

Tying in with the above, blogging and publishing content is key for marketing. Therefore, as a marketer in 2017, knowing how to get around a content management system (CMS) is crucial.

WordPress is one of the largest--to the point where it actually runs 27% of entire internet (nearly 16 million sites)--so starting there is the best bet. The good news is once you understand how to get around one CMS, it’s not tricky to get around another.

References:

https://www.ama.org/publications/MarketingNews/Pages/data-science-latest-in-demand-skill-marketing.aspx

https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurencebradford/2017/01/16/7-important-digital-skills-all-marketers-should-master-in-2017/#7a3c339142c1