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Gartner identifies top trends in data and analytics for 2025 – and AI takes the lead

April 3, 2025 No Comments

Data and analytics leaders should take these nine trends into consideration in their strategies for the upcoming year.

Data is at the heart of most organizations, fuelling everyday business functions. To help digital leaders better prepare their data and analytics (D&A) strategies, Gartner has identified the top D&A trends for 2025.

“D&A is going from the domain of the few, to ubiquity. At the same time D&A leaders are under pressure not to do more with less, but to do a lot more with a lot more, and that can be even more challenging because the stakes are being raised,” said Gareth Herschel, VP analyst at Gartner. “There are certain trends that will help D&A leaders meet the pressures, expectations and demands they are facing.”

Out of the nine trends Gartner identified, unsurprisingly, AI-related technologies made up more than half of the list, including the biggest AI trend of the time — agents. Agentic AI has begun permeating every business sector, with organizations finding ways to implement the autonomous assistance that AI agents offer.

Gartner advised D&A leaders to use agents to access and share their organization’s data across applications. The analyst also recommended that D&A leaders use AI agents to automate closed-loop business outcomes, where data-driven insights continuously inform and optimize decisions.

When generative AI first became mainstream, the focus for many D&A leaders and their organizations was developing and implementing large language models (LLMs).

However, greater emphasis has since been placed on the value of small language models (SLMs). These small models are lightweight, tailored, cheaper, and faster to train, which is better for specific use cases. As a result, Gartner advised D&A leaders to consider SLMs for more accurate and contextually appropriate AI outputs.

As there are so many different tools that D&A leaders can use, Gartner also recommended composite AI, which is the process of leveraging multiple AI techniques to increase technological effectiveness. This approach means exploring technology beyond generative AI and LLMs to take a deeper look at related disciplines, such as machine learning and data science.

Some of the trends that Gartner identified are indirectly related to AI. For example, the analyst encouraged using synthetic data to supplement areas where insight is missing or incomplete. This approach is especially valuable when using data for AI initiatives, as these projects require organized, complete data foundations for training and deployment. Another advantage of synthetic data is that it can replace sensitive data, prioritizing privacy, which is especially important for AI.

Building on this conception, Gartner identified metadata management solutions as an imperative trend, advising organizations to implement tools that automate finding and analysing metadata. The analyst said various metadata types, including technical and business metadata, can then be used for data catalogues, data lineage, and AI-driven use cases. In its multimodal data fabric trend, Gartner advised collecting and analysing information at the metadata stage of the data pipeline.

Other key trends highlighted by Gartner include decision intelligence platforms, which help organizations shift from simply using data to making smarter, decision-focused strategies. The analyst said this shift is critical to success.

Gartner also pointed to highly consumable data products as a trend, emphasizing the need for organizations to create useful, reusable data products that different teams can access to optimize and improve business-critical use cases over time.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images/Eugene Mymrin

By Sabrina Ortiz,

Sourced from ZDNET

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5 Must-Have Group of Tools for Every Business and SEO Specialist in 2023

July 13, 2023 No Comments

By Joseph Chukwube

As the digital landscape evolves, so do the tools and strategies needed to make businesses succeed online. Search Engine Optimization itself, as a business marketing strategy, has had its ‘death’ declared so many times because it felt like it was no longer relevant. Yet, it’s still here, more strongly than before.

More so, consider the AI revolution that’s currently taking place. Does that mean you should throw away all your old tools and start using AI for everything? It would have been cool if it were that easy.

However, managing a business is not. And search engine optimization is not easy either. That’s why we have reviewed five different categories of tools that your business must invest in to hit your SEO goals and enhance your presence online. Beginner or expert, these tools will make your life easier and your results better.

Keyword Research

Paying for Google Search ads is the fastest way to appear on top of the search engine’s results for relevant queries (if you have enough money). However, the most valuable way to get to the top and remain there is by organically matching the content on your website to the most common terms searched by users.

Data from keyword research tools are organized into lists of the most common keywords relevant to your website. Hence, they are great resources for finding new content ideas, connecting with your audience, and improving traffic.

When choosing a tool for keyword research, you should be okay with free tools such as Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner. However, they each have their limitations. Google Trends is geared toward general knowledge and shows you nothing besides trendiness. Google Keyword Planner, on the other hand, lies within the Google Ads system and is geared towards paid ads, rather than organic search.

As far as free tools go, you can’t do much more than data coming from Google itself. But paid tools take you steps further with improved results, clear insights, and seamless automation. Popular paid tools such as Ahrefs and Moz sit on the high end, costing upwards of $100 for subscriptions. More affordable ones include the Eye10 Keyword Planner, which starts at $39 and includes everything you should expect from a keyword tool: ideas and suggestions, monthly search volume, difficulty level, and the ability to export results.

Analytics

Search engines have an incentive to ensure that their top search results are relevant to the user. But this is not a static process and several (hundreds of) factors come into play.

When your business relies heavily on traffic coming from search engines, you can’t help the occasional jolting feeling when the search engine updates its algorithm such that your efforts seem obsolete. At other times, your efforts are indeed obsolete and you must have been doing something wrong once you notice that your ranking and traffic have taken a hit.

The point here is that, as far as SEO goes, there is always something to improve upon. Always. And how would you know that if you don’t have the right tool to analyze what’s happening? Sometimes, the website itself is the problem; at other times, user behavior may be shifting towards what your website is not yet optimized for. Still, search algorithms may just be doing their thing and it’s affecting you negatively.

Google is, by far, the most popular search engine. So, its Search Console tool is, without a doubt, the best free tool for monitoring your site’s presence in search results. It helps you troubleshoot any issues you might have and ultimately make informed decisions to enhance your website presence.

Content Creation

Everywhere you turn, there is a proliferation of blogs, podcasts, newsletters, videos, webinars, etc. Basically, it’s the content creation revolution and there is an emerging work field of ‘creators’, professionals who apply their creativity in crafting digital content that resonates with their audience.

The most popular creators are individuals, such as MrBeast and Khaby Lame but many businesses have found themselves increasingly locked into content creation because it is a great way to market their brands. Whether it’s a blog or a newsletter, ebooks, or whitepapers, creating content is the order of the day. What you should be thinking about is how to make it better. And there is a solid toolkit for that.

For creating written content, Grammarly is the defacto spelling and grammar checker although others such as the Hemingway Editor and ProWritingAid are excellent alternatives. Canva leads in the graphic design aspect as a highly user-friendly tool for creating social media posts, videos, infographics, presentations, and much more.

Capcut, Descript, Audacity, Buzzsprout, YouTube Studio, etc. are useful for editing, preparing, and distributing your video and audio content for your audience. And any collaborative task manager or workspace tool will help you easily manage your content calendar.

Link Building

Link building is a top-three tactic for getting ahead in SEO. Over the years, Google has developed an immense capacity at detecting and penalizing websites determined to manipulate its algorithm via unethical practices such as link farming and link spamming. The best way to build links today is to earn the backlinks as well as the authority that comes with them.

Ethical link-building opportunities abound but going at it manually can be daunting and frustrating, given the tough competition in the industry. Even something as ‘simple’ as requesting a guest blogging opportunity requires that several moving parts are working without friction. First, you have to publish linkable content, then conduct outreaches, optimize your links and anchors, find broken links and unlinked brand mentions, and monitor competitors. The whole time, you still have to track the effectiveness of your link-building efforts.

As far as link building is concerned, there is no all-in-one tool. It is more likely that you’d be using a combination of various tools to achieve different purposes. For finding link opportunities, SEMrush and Ahrefs offer very useful features. Pitchbox, Buzzstream, and JustReachOut help you to reach out to and collaborate with influencers. Eye10 Backlink Monitor is great for analyzing your backlinks to determine their impact and find issues.

Social Media Management

For many customers today, especially those of the younger generation, a business that lacks a social media presence is as good as not existing. Businesses have responded likewise, by not just establishing their presence on social media but assigning whole teams to control the narrative about their business online.

But social media is not just a PR or a communications tool; it boosts your SEO too when managed strategically. For instance, sharing links to your website increases brand exposure and provides extensive content distribution. Social media might not be an element of SEO ranking, but its benefit such as enhancing your brand recognition and reputation online can contribute immensely to your website traffic.

The entire cycle of creating, publishing, and monitoring content on social media requires strategic workflows, and there are tools that would help you save time and make it less overwhelming, particularly through automation. Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social help you manage several social media accounts in one platform, including scheduling your posts and accessing comprehensive analytics data. And for building simple landing pages, Linktree is hands-down the most popular tool.

Conclusion

Staying ahead of the competition in a field like SEO takes a lot of hard work. Plus, sustainability is hardly guaranteed; one wrong turn and your website and business are sinking. But these tools can help you to stay afloat when used properly. These are the aspects of SEO you should focus the most of your attention upon.

By Joseph Chukwube

Entrepreneur, Online Marketing Consultant

I’m a Professional Content Writer and Marketer, SEO and PR Expert. I’m the Founder of Digitage and Startup Growth Guide, results-driven marketing agencies. To create content and and improve your brand awareness, get in touch at [email protected]

Sourced from readwrite

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State of Search: Top SEO Strategies for 2023

April 13, 2023 No Comments

By Michelle Hawley

Stay up-to-date on the latest in search engine optimization. Learn about SEO strategies, best practices and the latest updates to Google’s ranking factors.

The Gist

SEO best practices still matter. To show up in search engine results pages (SERPs), following search engine optimization (SEO) best practices is necessary.
Still Google’s world. Google dominates the global search engine market with 84% market share, making it crucial to consider in an SEO strategy.
High-quality content. On-page SEO involves optimizing visible elements such as content, which should be relevant and high-quality, with expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) guidelines in mind.

When someone wants to search for a product, look at videos or read about a topic, they go directly to their preferred search engine. And if you want to show up in said search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll need to follow search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.

As we delve into best practices as of February 2023, our primary focus will be on Google. Why? Because it has dominated the global search engine market since its inception in 1997.

As of December 2022, Google held 84% of the search engine market — with runner-up Bing claiming nearly 9%.

The necessity of considering Google in an SEO strategy, whether for a single blog post or entire website.

Google doesn’t share its search volume data. But experts around the web estimate the search engine sees anywhere from 40,000 to 99,000 search queries every second. For one day, that could amount to more than 8.5 billion searches.

SEO, which companies use to maximize content marketing efforts, ultimately breaks down into three categories:

On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Technical SEO

Let’s take a look at some core components of these three categories and how SEO professionals can aim to follow best practices.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO, also called on-site SEO, refers to the optimization of elements that you can see on-page, such as:

Content

Content is at the core of on-page SEO, and it’s what many people focus on when first optimizing their SEO strategy.

Relevance and quality are more important than any other Google ranking factor.

Google actively penalizes thin content that offers little to no value to searchers. While in the past it used to consider pages as a whole, it now looks at and ranks subsections within pages to match queries.

When you’re working on your content creation strategy or overall SEO strategy, consider these questions to determine if you’re headed in the right direction:

Do you have a target audience in mind that will find your content useful if they come directly to you?
Does your content demonstrate expertise that comes from firsthand experience?
After reading your content, will someone feel they’ve learned enough about the topic?

If you’ve answered yes to these three questions, you’re on the right track.

Some content worst practices to stay away from include:

Creating content specifically to attract people from search engines
Utilizing extensive automation to produce lots of content on a variety of topics
Summarizing what other content creators have said without adding additional value
Writing to meet a particular word count or because you’ve heard Google’s algorithm prefers a specific word count (it doesn’t)
Creating content that promises to answer a question that has no answer (for example, suggesting you know the release date of a movie that has no confirmed release date)

E-A-T Guidelines

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This concept became a core part of Google’s algorithm in August of 2019 and continues to play a significant role today in evaluating content.

In Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, E-A-T specifically refers to:

The expertise of the creator of the main content
The authoritativeness of the creator of the main content, the main content itself and the website
The trustworthiness of the creator of the main content, the main content itself and the website

E-A-T plays a part in websites of all types, including gossip columns, satire websites, forums and Q&A pages. How a website meets E-A-T guidelines will depend on the type of website. Some topics or industries will require less formal expertise than others.

For example, a news website with high E-A-T articles will convey journalistic integrity, contain factually accurate information and utilize robust policies and review processes with included sources.

A site containing scientific topics, on the other hand, should be created by people or organizations with the appropriate scientific knowledge or expertise and represent established scientific consensus.

When it comes to establishing E-A-T for your content, think about the page’s topic and what expertise is needed to achieve the purpose of that page.

Search Queries

Search queries are the words and phrases people use when using search engines or smart assistants. These words and phrases shift based on the search intent — the “why” behind the action.

Types of search intent include:

Informational: The searcher is looking for information, wants to answer a question or learn how to do something. The best way to target an information query is to develop high-quality, SEO-focused content that provides helpful and relevant information to the user. Position yourself as a source of information people can trust.
Navigational: The searcher is looking for a particular website or page. For example, they might type “YouTube” or “LinkedIn.” You can’t typically target navigational queries unless you own the specific website or page the person is looking for. But you can make sure you claim the top results spot for your brand’s own navigational query.
Transactional: With this search intent, the user wants to make a purchase. The query might include a brand, product or service name or a generic item, such as “coffee maker.” You can target these search queries with optimized product or service pages. You can also use pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to target these search terms.

By understanding search intent — which might include keyword research to best understand which words the target audience uses — companies can better craft content to meet needs and win more readers.

Links

You should include two types of links within your website or web page content: internal and external.

Internal links redirect to another page or piece of content on your website. For example, on an article about the latest chatbot trends, you might link to a related article about how chatbot technology works.

External links direct readers to a page that is not yours. These links should be highly relevant webpages or sites with high expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T).

Link building is also important — getting other websites to link back to your website or piece of content. These links signal to Google that your website is valuable enough to earn a citation, allowing content to rise in search rankings. We’ll talk more on these later, in off-page SEO strategies.

Visuals

Visuals (videos, gifs, pictures, infographics, etc.) are a large part of online content.

If you plan to use visuals on your site or pages, you’ll want to ensure that they’re:

Large and high quality (beware of large image file sizes, however, which can cause slow loading)
Relevant to the content
Shareable
Placed high on the page
Have a relevant file name
Have alt text, which aids visually impaired users

If you’re using video content, include a video transcript. Not only will a transcript make your content more accessible, but it will also make videos more “scrapable” by search engine bots.

Meta Title & Meta Description

Your meta title (the alternative title that shows up on Google) tells search engines and searchers what your content is about and what keywords to focus on. This title should be relevant to your content, include at least one word or phrase from your keyword research and be no longer than 60 characters.

Search engines don’t factor meta descriptions into your ranking — but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

The meta description is the ideal place to let Google and searchers know what your page is about. As a result, you’ll see higher click-through rates.

URL & Slug

Including your keyword within the slug of the URL — the last part of the URL that identifies the unique page — is a small bonus to SEO. However, if you can’t do so in a sensible way, it won’t be a big hit against you.

Ensure that your slug matches the title of your content. For example, if your blog post is about customer experience, your URL might be: www.yourwebsite.com/blog/all-about-customer-experience

Another thing to keep in mind is that shorter URLs receive high click-through rates than longer ones. A shorter URL comes across as more trustworthy and authoritative to users.

Other best practices for URLs include:

Avoid using dates in your slugs (for example: “2022-customer-experience-best-practices”
Use the hyphen between words in your slugs

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to optimization strategies that don’t involve the content on your website. Some of the most vital off-page SEO tactics include:

Link Building

As mentioned above, earning backlinks from other authoritative sites can position your website or web page as trustworthy and increase your rankings on Google.

You don’t want to get backlinks from any site. In fact, getting backlinks from link farms — a group of websites that all link to one another to increase organic search rankings — can result in a penalty from Google. Google also penalizes any site that gets caught paying for links.

Some link-building tips to turn to instead include:

Create high-value content that others want to share
Promote your content via social media, which leads others to sharing it
Submit your website to business directories
Promote your content via paid campaigns, which may lead others to link to it
Look for relevant content on other sites that contains broken links, and send an email with the suggestion to use your content as a replacement
Ask people in real life to share your website or content on social media

Brand Building

Google rewards well-known brands. And branded searches (your company’s name, domain name searches and product searches) will lead right back to your website.

Google offers a great tool, Google Trends, that allows people to track interest in a topic, such as a brand, over time. SEO professionals can also use this tool to track searches for specific products or services.

Social Media

Social media plays a big role in how people learn about brands, websites and content. As of 2022, there were 4.59 billion social media users worldwide — a number expected to grow to 5.85 billion by 2027.

You should have a presence on the social media channels that matter most to your target audience.

Some of the most popular social media platforms, as of 2022, include:

Facebook: More than 2.9 billion monthly active users (MAU)
YouTube: More than 2.5 billion MAU
Instagram: More than 1.4 billion MAU

Not only should your profile include pertinent information about your brand (what it does, where it’s located, contact methods, the website, hours for in-store operation, etc.), but you should also post original and engaging content regularly.

For instance, if you offer a specific product, you could create educational content on how to use that product or answers to frequently asked questions. You can also encourage user-generated content from your community.

Encourage users that read and engage with your social media content to visit your website or web content to learn more.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is exactly what it sounds like — it refers to the technical aspects that play into your website and web pages, like page load speed and responsiveness.

Google Search Console is an ideal tool for monitoring and maintaining SEO health. It can measure traffic, generate reports, including a technical SEO report, and fix issues.

Technical SEO includes:

Site Speed

Loading performance is part of Google’s Core Web Vitals, which measures different aspects of the user experience. A website or page should only take 2.5 seconds or less to load the page’s main content.

To ensure fast website load speeds, you should:

Choose a fast hosting option
Choose a fast domain name system (DNS) provider
Keep the use of scripts and plugins to a minimum
Use small image files (without creating pixelization)
Minify your site’s code
Compress your webpages

Mobile-Friendliness

As of the second half of 2022, mobile traffic accounted for more than half of global web traffic. Not only does a mobile-friendly design make for a better user experience, but it’s a significant ranking factor for Google.

If you’re unsure of your website’s mobile accessibility, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Most brands accomplish mobile-friendliness by using a responsive web design, which adjusts itself automatically depending on the type of device a person is using.

Google also offers a guide on customizing website software for companies that use content management platforms (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or Squarespace.

Beyond using a responsive design, companies should also pay attention to how content and assets behave on-page for mobile users. Layouts that shift when a person is trying to read content or interact with the page are a significant part of Google’s Core Web Vitals.

SEO professionals can monitor these movements with a metric called cumulative layout shift (CLS), which measures visual stability and quantifies how often these shifts occur. Core Web Vitals recommends that pages maintain a CLS of 0.1 or less.

XML Sitemaps

An XML sitemap helps search engines understand your web pages while crawling them. It tells them:

Exactly where each page is
When a page was last modified
Which pages hold the most priority
How frequently a page is updated

Some hosting platforms create an XML sitemap automatically. If your chosen platform does not, you’ll want to look into using an XML sitemap generator.

Site Indexing

Google Search Console allows you to submit your website’s XML sitemap for site indexing. (Bing also has a version of this tool called Bing Webmaster Tools.)

These tools also track the general SEO performance of your site, allowing you to:

Test your site’s mobile-friendliness
Access search analytics
View backlinks to your site

Search in 2023: SEO Strategy Remains Top Priority

People want content that is high-quality and relevant to them. If you want to appear in their search results, it’s essential to pay attention to changing SEO trends and tactics.

Google continually updates its algorithm, meaning how they rank your site or content will depend on your use of the latest SEO strategies. With the latest tips above, you can ensure your content meets essential Google ranking factors and shows up in search results for your target audience.

By Michelle Hawley

Michelle Hawley is an experienced journalist who specializes in reporting on the impact of technology on society. As a senior editor at Simpler Media Group and a reporter for CMSWire and Reworked, she provides in-depth coverage of a range of important topics including employee experience, leadership, customer experience, marketing and more. With an MFA in creative writing and background in inbound marketing, she offers unique insights on the topics of leadership, customer experience, marketing and employee experience. Michelle previously contributed to publications like The Press Enterprise and The Ladders. She currently resides in Pennsylvania with her two dogs.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

In News

Using YouTube Studio Analytics for Shorts, Remixes, and More

November 15, 2022 No Comments

By Anna Sonnenberg

Wondering whether your YouTube shorts, remixes, or videos are working for you? Having trouble finding the YouTube analytics you need?

In this article, you’ll learn how to analyse all types of YouTube content.

YouTube Studio Analytics: What’s New for 2022?

In May 2022, YouTube announced a series of new analytics features and a complete redesign of the platform’s channel-level analytics. These new Youtube metrics features began rolling out in the first half of 2022. As of September 2022, all channels should have access to them in YouTube Studio.

According to YouTube’s Creator Insider channel, the changes largely came about because of the growing popularity of Shorts with YouTube viewers. With the redesigned YouTube Studio analytics, creators can more easily differentiate shorts from other channel content and glean more useful insights.

Although YouTube Studio has released several new features and redesigned existing options, the platform hasn’t removed any analytics. That means you can still find all of the data you’re accustomed to reviewing in YouTube Studio, as long as you know where to look for it in your YouTube account.

#1: Channel-Level Content Analytics

You can find the biggest update to YouTube Studio analytics at the channel level. In the past, when you opened YouTube Studio and selected Analytics from the left-hand menu, you would have seen Reach and Engagement tabs to the right of the Overview tab.

The Reach and Engagement tabs no longer appear in YouTube Studio’s channel-level analytics. In their place, the Content tab is your destination for all reach and engagement metrics related to the content you’ve published.

YouTube Studio automatically customizes the Content tab for your channel analytics based on the type of content you publish. If you stick to long-form content, for example, you’ll only see the Videos chip at the top of the tab. But if you publish shorts, livestreams, or community posts, relevant chips will appear in your account. Let’s take a look at the available metrics.

All-Content Metrics

Select the All chip on the Content tab to see an overview of all your channel’s content and compare results from different types of content. To find out which type of content is getting the most traction, take a look at the Views panel.

Here, you can see a tally of all the views your channel has generated, broken down by content type. Between the bar graph and the percentage breakdown, you can easily pinpoint the most popular type of content for your channel.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article

By Anna Sonnenberg

Sourced from SocialMedia Examiner

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Critical Analytics That Will Improve Your SEO Results

September 22, 2021 No Comments

By Nick Chernets

Without a doubt, Google Analytics is the best gift that Google has given us — a free website analysis service that provides information on how users find and use company websites.

Web Analytics refers to the measurement and analysis of data meant to inform and provide a clear understanding of user behaviour on web pages.

It includes audience data; the number of visits, unique users, what type of device they use, etc., audience behaviour; the most visited pages, time spent on pages, bounce rate, etc., campaign data; campaigns that generate more traffic, keyword searches that resulted in a visit, etc. and SEO positioning which refers to the strategies and techniques that a website utilizes to place as high as possible in the search engines.

The vast majority of SEO actions can be measurable and quantifiable using Google Analytics, taking into account the three fundamental insights of web traffic: engagement, user behaviour and conversion.

Web, organic and referral traffic

Web traffic represents the users who visit a website. It’s measured in visits, also called sessions, and is a common way to analyse the ability and effectiveness of attracting an audience. There are different types of web traffic, but organic and referral traffic insights are truly significant for SEO.

Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors that come directly from the search results of a search engine. This is the most important traffic as it is directly linked to the website’s positioning in the SERPs.

Referral traffic provides you with the data about visits that arrived at the website via external sources other than a search engine, such as a link on another website.

Desktop, mobile and brand traffic

These days, more and more people opt to use their smartphones to access the web. Therefore, it’s essential to differentiate between and consider the percentage of incoming traffic from mobile phones and incoming traffic from desktops.

It’s exciting to analyse the type of searches users make that land them on your website. Users can reach your page from a third-party website, by generic keyword searches or by brand search. Brand traffic is the most important and occurs when a user accesses your website by typing the name of your brand or one of your specific products in the search engine.

Location tracking is key

Knowing where visitors come from will make it easier for you to improve your local SEO strategies and make them more specific and effective. For example, if part of your traffic comes from Eastern Europe, you can generate related content for that particular audience.

In addition, make sure to distinguish between different types of users when analyzing your web traffic. New users land on the website for the first time and are registered by Google Analytics through an ID. Recurring users are those already assigned an ID by Google Analytics and are recognized as already “known” users.

Keep in mind, though, that sometimes these particular analytics Insights can be misleading. For example, if a recurring user accesses the website from another browser, they are counted as a new user. The same happens when cookies get deleted.

Engagement behaviours and bounce rate

One of the most potent qualities of Google Analytics is that we get to learn about the behavior of users while they’re on our website. It’s important to pay attention to several insights regarding the way these users interact with the site. This concept is vital as it quantifies the percentage of users who leave the website without interaction.

A high bounce rate means that we fail to offer interesting content to the audience or possibly miss the opportunity to respond to the user’s search intention appropriately. The bounce rate is a variable that can differ depending on the type of website and content. Therefore, it is possible to configure the average time to consider for the bounce rate analysis.

Pageviews and average time on page

A session represents the set of actions that a user performs in a given time. For instance, a user who visits several pages per session indicates that the content is attractive and optimized.

This particular insight defines the average duration of the session for each user. Obviously, the longer the average duration, the better the content that’s offered to the audience. Google Analytics allows studying user behaviour by grouping similar content. This makes it a lot easier to understand the user’s journey and interaction as well.

Conversion rate and ROI

Conversion is the ultimate goal of every business website: a subscription, a download, a purchase, etc. Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors (out of the total number of visitors) who have completed the desired goal. A high conversion rate is indicative of successful web design and marketing efforts. It means that people search for what is being offered and find it without issues. This is, essentially, an indicator that shows the performance obtained from SEO (or any other) investment. The formula to calculate ROI is as follows: ROI = (Profit – Investment) / Investment.

Keep in mind that there are other calculation options where it’s possible to use other indicators, such as the number of visits without final conversion and others.

Improving SEO using Analytics Insights

Google Analytics can help develop considerably more effective SEO optimization by analyzing all the information that it provides. As mentioned, looking into the web traffic insight is a valuable piece of data that will show the actual reality of your website’s functionality and usefulness. And it’s with Audience Reports that you can establish different criteria to determine the quantity and quality of traffic on your website.

Therefore, you can temporarily adjust metrics such as the number of sessions, number of users, page views, average duration or bounce rate.

Acquisition reports deal with the insights regarding visits, the originating channels, and the number of conversions. In these reports, the type of traffic is crucial to conclude the audience, i.e., whether it’s organic, direct, referred or social traffic. The secondary dimension function allows you to expand the information within a primary dimension. For example, in the Audience by Device report, the default dimension is “Source” However, if you select a secondary dimension, for example, “City,” you will see where the traffic originated from.

Another way to perform in-depth analysis in Google Analytics is by using segments. A segment is a subset of data that shares common characteristics. For example, a segment could be users from a specific geo-location out of a complete set of users. Another segment could be users visiting a particular page on your website.

Google Search Console reports and queries

The integration of Google Analytics and Search Console will allow you to analyse and improve the presence of your websites in Google search results from the same platform. With Google Search Console, you can analyse web traffic, learn about the positioning of your pages, analyse performance, measure the conversion rate, detect errors, and delete URLs that you don’t want to appear in searches.

Improving SEO positioning depends on how much valuable information you can collect and how you decide to use it. Google Analytics is a great resource that every business should implement as the main tool to help them achieve their goals.

By Nick Chernets

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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Q : What is People Analytics?

July 23, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from EHL Insights

Analytics give an important way for businesses to track and measure whether they are meeting their goals. We have analytics to track online marketing efforts, finances and many other aspects of business. Now, analytics technology is being used for human resources (HR), especially in the recruitment of employees but also in much broader company applications. This type of technology is known as people analytics, or you may hear it referred to as HR, workforce or talent analytics.

What is people analytics? How can it be used by HR professionals, including those in hospitality?

Definition of People Analytics

People analytics uses technology to determine insights about potential employees by collecting and analysing data about each candidate. This method combines both quantitative and qualitative data taken from a collection of sources, including social media, psychometric or game-based assessments, applications, profiles and others. It often relies on the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), which can help to quickly collect and analyse data from many sources.

People analytics brings together numerous disciplines into one application. It incorporates:

Human resource management
Data science
Finance
Organizational management

It can be applied to many business decisions relating to employees, which makes it ideal for use by human resources managers and departments. This method works for any type of business, and hospitality businesses could find it particularly useful for recruiting and onboarding employees with the mix of hard and soft skills that are important for their roles.

Why is People Analytics important?

This type of analytics is not exactly new, as large organizations have been using it for years. But as technologies and capabilities for this purpose are becoming more accessible, more businesses are able to use it. Also, more brands are developing their own versions of this type of analytics as technology advances at a fast pace.

It is important that technology is making employee data more prevalent for recruiters and managers because the modern world has made it increasingly difficult for them to make hiring decisions. Now, more and more people are working remotely, by necessity or by choice. This may mean working from home, yet it can also mean that professionals work from afar when it fits a role, sometimes from another country.

It is not always possible for managers to conduct in-person interviews or get to know a candidate as they could in the past, even the same way they did just a few months to a year ago. The work world has changed, and most likely many people will continue to work from home even as society resumes in-person activities over time.

Also, technology allows managers to understand a lot more about candidates than they could through past methods. They gain access to a much greater amount of data, allowing them to find the best candidates and know as much as possible about each one, including factors such as:

Work performance
Personality
Strengths and weaknesses
Reasoning skills
Employer and customer satisfaction
Turnover rate
Level of engagement

They get better information, rather than relying on instincts, first impressions and a candidate’s answers to standard questions during an interview. These kinds of old-fashioned measures can be deceptive. People analytics brings more legitimacy and data-driven methods to a human resources department. Technology can take data from various sources and bring it together in helpful formats like graphs and charts. This helps give a better picture of a candidate to inform decisions. Having better data and insights to share can help human resources keep up with other departments that are using high-tech capabilities. HR professionals become better able to show their processes and results compared to past HR methods. They can more easily answer questions on employee turnover and related workforce information that helps the company overall.

Benefits of People Analytics

People analytics helps companies find the best candidates for their open positions and fill them with the right people for the job. Making these hiring decisions can make all the difference to an organization’s success.

Yet the role of people analytics is not just for recruitment. Executives can also use it to make management and organizational decisions related to their employees and their companies. Let’s go over some many benefits of using people analytics. Management can use it to:

Understand their workforce and find the best potential in their employees by better developing and managing them.
Improve their employee satisfaction and performance; in turn, this can reduce turnover and improve retention rates.
Gain information to inform broader business decisions and goals.
Learn more about top-performing staff and use the knowledge in training efforts for those who are performing at a lower level.
Grow their workforce.
Inform workforce planning.
Reduce bias and increase diversity within the workforce.
Improve speed and accuracy within recruitment measures.
Create more business productivity.

It’s clear to see how these benefits can have a significant positive impact on any company, including those in hospitality.

We talked about how management can look at individual employee characteristics through people analytics. Yet they can also use it to look beyond individual employees and see wider patterns. For instance, management can see collective data on performance throughout the company. They can better understand factors that lead to successful employees and better performance, as well as where there is room for improvement. They can use this information to improve their current workforce and also to have better recruitment and development practices for new hires. They can have a better idea of the right characteristics to seek going forward.

The data can even go beyond the organization to include the whole industry. People analytics technology is able to collect publicly available information on an industry to show a company how it is measuring up. In addition to showing a company’s place compared to industry competitors, it can provide helpful industry-specific information on the best sources for recruiting top talent and the best characteristics for roles within this field.

People Analytics can even help companies adapt as the world changes, such as the way COVID-19 changed the way business was carried out. Businesses who use it and have data at their fingertips are better able to change the way they use their employees as the company needs to change its methods. For instance, they could identify roles that are able to switch to remote work and identify employees who could shift into different work roles as needed.

Using People Analytics well

It’s not enough for businesses to have the technology and collect data on their workforce. Instead, they need to properly understand and use the data. They need to put it into action. This is where many organizations fall off track. What helps is to:

Develop a data-driven organizational culture.
Collect accurate information.
Make sure the information is current.
Have an experienced analytics team to analyse the data and create effective insights.
Share the insights in real time with decision-makers.

People analytics can also be incorporated into relational analytics, explains an article in the Harvard Business Review. This type of analytics shows how people interact with one another, and it can use a range of data like email exchanges and file transfers. Looking at both individual characteristics and employee relationships together can show an employee’s effectiveness. It can also help identify an employee’s hard and soft skills to further develop their talent and role within the organization. For example, it can be used to find employees who excel at ideation, efficiency or leadership.

Conclusion

The information gathered through people analytics can improve an organization on every level. Employees are the heart of every company. This is especially true of hospitality companies, where employees work directly with guests and have a direct bearing on their experience. Even employees who are behind the scenes need to be effective at influencing the company’s processes and guest experience. People analytics offers a great way to find the right employees, use a workforce in a better way and improve a company overall.

Sourced from EHL Insights

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At last, a way to build artificial intelligence with business results in mind: ModelOps

July 1, 2021 No Comments

By Joe McKendrick,

Is there a way for IT leaders to be proactive about AI and machine learning without ruffling and rattling an organization of people who want the miracles of AI and ML delivered tomorrow morning? The answer is yes.

How should IT leaders and professionals go about selecting and delivering the technology required to deliver the storied marvels of artificial intelligence and machine learning? AI and ML require having many moving parts in their right places, moving in the right direction, to deliver on the promise these technologies bring — ecosystems, data, platforms, and last, but not least, people.

Is there a way for IT leaders to be proactive about AI and ML without ruffling and rattling an organization of people who want the miracles of AI and ML delivered tomorrow morning? The answer is yes.

The authors of a recent report from MIT Sloan Management Review and SAS advocates a relatively new methodology to successfully accomplish the delivery AI and ML to enterprises called “ModelOps.” While there a lot of “xOps” now entering our lexicon, such as MLOps or AIOps, ModelOps is more “mindset than a specific set of tools or processes, focusing on effective operationalization of all types of AI and decision models.”

That’s because in AI and ML, models are the heart of the matter, the mechanisms that dictate the assembly of the algorithms, and assure continued business value. ModelOps, which is short for :model operationalization, “focuses on model life cycle and governance; intended to expedite the journey from development to deployment — in this case, moving AI models from the data science lab to the IT organization as quickly and effectively as possible.”

In terms of operationalizing AI and ML, “a lot falls back on IT,” according to Iain Brown, head of data science for SAS, U.K. and Ireland, who is quoted in the report. “You have data scientists who are building great innovative things. But unless they can be deployed in the ecosystem or the infrastructure that exists — and typically that involves IT – – there’s no point in doing it. The data science community and AI teams should be working very closely with IT and the business, being the conduit to join the two so there’s a clear idea and definition of the problem that’s being faced, a clear route to production. Without that, you’re going to have disjointed processes and issues with value generation.”

ModelOps is a way to help IT leaders bridge that gap between analytics and production teams, making AI and ML-driven lifecycle “repeatable and sustainable,” the MIT-SAS report states. It’s a step above MLOps or AIOps, which “have a more narrow focus on machine learning and AI operationalization, respectively,” ModelOps focuses on delivery and sustainability of predictive analytics models, which are the core of AI and ML’s value to the business. ModelOps can make a difference, the report’s authors continue, “because without it, your AI projects are much more likely to fail completely or take longer than you’d like to launch. Only about half of all models ever make it to production, and of those that do, about 90% take three months or longer to deploy.”

Getting to ModelOps to manage AI and ML involves IT leaders and professionals pulling together four key elements of the business value equation, as outlined by the report’s authors.

Ecosystems: These days, every successful technology endeavour requires connectivity and network power. “An AI-ready ecosystem should be as open as possible, the report states. “Such ecosystems don’t just evolve naturally. Any company hoping to use an ecosystem successfully must develop next-generation integration architecture to support it and enforce open standards that can be easily adopted by external parties.”

Data: Get to know what data is important to the effort. “Validate its availability for training and production. Tag and label data for future usage, even if you’re not sure yet what that usage might be. Over time, you’ll create an enterprise inventory that will help future projects run faster.”

Platforms: Flexibility and modularity — the ability to swap out pieces as circumstance change — is key. The report’s authors advocate buying over building, as many providers have already worked out the details in building and deploying AI and ML models. “Determine your cloud strategy. Will you go all in with one cloud service provider? Or will you use different CSPs for different initiatives? Or will you take a hybrid approach, with some workloads running on-premises and some with a CSP? : Some major CSPs typically offer more than just scalability and storage space, such as providing tools and libraries to help build algorithms and assisting with deploying models into production.”

People: Collaboration is the key to successful AI and ML delivery, but it’s also important that people have a sense of ownership over their parts of the projects. “Who owns the AI software and hardware – the AI team or the IT team, or both? This is where you get organizational boundaries that need to be clearly defined, clearly understood, and coordinated.” Along with data scientists, a group that is just as important to ModelOps is data engineers, who bring “significant expertise in using analytics and business intelligence tools, database software, and the SQL data language, as well as the ability to consistently produce clean, high-quality, ethical data.”

Feature Image Credit: IBM Media Relations

By Joe McKendrick

Sourced from ZDNet

In News

20 Social Media Analytics Tools for Small Businesses

May 10, 2021 No Comments

By Samson Haileyesus

Social media analytics tools are essential to measuring social media ROI — that is, your company’s return on investment from using social media. If you are a social media manager or own a small business, you are going to need the best tools you can find. The same goes for those involved in influencer marketing or digital agencies that run social media campaigns.

Great tools make your job easier, save precious time and give you insights into each of the social networking sites that your company or clients are active on. They also help you shine in front of clients or others in your company. Luckily there are plenty of tools available. Some are free or offer a free version with limited features suitable for small start-ups. But if your needs are more robust, and you require a paid tool, many of them offer a free trial so you can check out the features in detail before you buy. We’ve included the best tools for small businesses of all sizes in our list.

What are social media analytics?

The definition of social media analytics is the systematic collection and evaluation of data that helps you measure how well or how poorly you are doing on social media. After all, resources are limited in most businesses. You can’t afford to spend time and money on activities if they don’t pay off. The analytics tools in our list help you decide where to spend time, how to maximize your efforts, and how to gain insights into your audience (see data analytics tips).

Analytics tools are different from social media management tools. There are plenty of tools that help you post updates on social media channels and even schedule content in advance. Those are not the kind of tools we mean. Below we are mainly focused on tools to understand and measure your social media performance.

Best Free and Paid Social Media Analytics Tools

We’ve assembled a list of the best social media analytics tools appropriate for small businesses. Click on one of the tools in the list below or scroll down to learn about what makes each the best in class.

Analytics Tools Provided by the Social Networks

1. Zoho Social

image: zoho

Touted as among the best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software Zoho through its social media analytics tools Zoho Social offers some great tools to manage your social media outreach from a single platform. You can schedule publishing posts through an intuitive publishing calendar, monitor campaigns and create custom reports. The monitoring dashboard gives you the ability to easily to measure the pulse of your campaign and respond in real-time to engage with your audience. Zoho Social starts with a standard monthly billing of $10 that allows you to manage one brand across seven channels. The robust agency plus costs $300 a month and enables the management of 30 brands across a whopping 140 channels.

What it does:

Zoho Social is the part that enables you to understand your social media audience and how they engage with you.
You can listen to multiple channels from a single dashboard and respond in real-time.
You can also dig deeper into each post to measure their reach and engagement.
The integration with Zoho Desk makes Zoho Social ideal for a comprehensive social media outreach where you can create tickets from social media for your support team to see and resolve them from Zoho Desk.

What’s it great at:

It offers the complete package from managing your social media accounts,
publishing, monitoring and offering cutting-edge analytics.
It supports Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
It is compatible with mobile apps for Android and iOS.
It also seamlessly integrates with Zoho CRM for greater collaboration.

2. Hootsuite

image: hootsuite

Hootsuite is another social media management tool. As social media analytics tools go, it helps manage posts, collaboration, scheduling and analytics. With it, you can automate posts, schedule them and take key performance metrics to gauge the performance of your marketing content. The starter package is set at $19 a month with support for 10 social media channels and unlimited scheduling capabilities for one administrator. The enterprise package offers a customized solution.

What it does:

It comes with all the bells and whistles you might need for your startup or growth stage as a small business when it comes to social media analytics tools.
It integrates with all social platforms including Facebook and Instagram so your social media analytics and management are done from one platform.
Hootsuite Impact also integrates with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and your ad accounts on the various social platforms.
It comes with a complete toolbox for all your social media needs which includes contact management, conversion tracking, keyword filtering, customer targeting, multi-account management, and much more.

What’s it great at:

You have the ability to monitor multiple social media streams that include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress blogs.
It comes with capabilities that include scheduling posts in advance.
User-friendly analytics data.
Team collaboration.

3. Buffer Analyze

image: buffer

Buffer Analyze offers simple and easy social media analytics that includes comprehensive features for managing your social media streams. It helps you easily manage multiple social media accounts, allowing you to customize post-times and schedule posts. It offers a built-in social media analytics tool and gets recommendations to expand reach, engagement, and sales. The starter package for this social media analytics tool is $15 per month. And it allows you to analyse eight social channels and up to 100 scheduled content posts. The business tiered package comes at $99 per month you can analyse 25 social channels and a whopping 2,000 scheduled posts for six administrators.

What it does:

You can measure your social media performance by comparing paid and organic results.
Track engagement from social accounts.
Measure stories, individual posts and hashtags and see if you are reaching targeted audiences.
Reports can be generated in PDF or images that include charts.

What’s it great at:

Scheduling posts.
Analytics.
Cross-posting, so all your social media posting are consolidated in one place.

4. Sprout Social

image: sproutsocial

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that offers a good mix of management and analytics to meet the needs of most small to midsize businesses. This platform focuses on social management, data, and employee advocacy. Pricing for Sprout Social starts at $99 monthly and you can analyze up to five social profiles, an intuitive all-in-one social inbox, social media CRM tools, compatibility with both android and iOS mobile apps, and more.

What it des:

Sprout Social has a dashboard that helps you manage social media channels as well as your brands in one go.
The Instagram stories analytics tool comes with a series of pop-up questionnaires to help you better determine your company’s needs allowing you fashion your social media experiences.
It is backed up with a strong social CRM platform and a help desk.

What’s it great at:

Well organized dashboard.
Seamlessly works with Twitter and Facebook.
Scheduling posts.
Discovery capability in terms of your followers, interactions, mentions, and likes.
Analytics.

5. Studiorific

image: studiorific

Studiorific offers an all-in-one social media analysis platform that hosts all social management tools for scheduling engaging posts and reporting. You are able to put all your social media accounts under one roof for seamless integration of your digital content. Studiorific offers a real bargain with lifetime access to its starter package at only $29 for a one time purchase. This allows you to manage 12 social accounts, unlimited scheduling capabilities; image and video storage; a built-in image editor, analytics and much more.

What it does:

Track your social media accounts for posts performance and engagement.
Attract users in actual time.
Its analytic tool helps you optimize your marketing plan and opt to send and receive direct messages from Instagram users right from your Studiorific dashboard.
Has a photo editing tool to customize image size for all of your social media networks.

What’s it great at:

Competition analysis.
Works across several social media channels.
Post scheduling.
Built-in image editor.
Analytics.

6. Sendible

image: sendible

Sendible is a social media content management platform designed with agencies in mind. The platform brings all your social networks together into a centralized hub that helps you execute your strategy for multiple brands at scale. Pricing for this social media analytics tool starts at $29.00 per month. This allows you to analyze 12 profiles and generate eight quick reports. Sendible offers a 14-day free trial as well.

What it does:

Customize and preview posts on each social media platform and also keeps image pixel quality. Thanks to its built-in editor you can also design your own graphics using Canva.
See when your audiences are most engaged on Instagram so you know the best times to post. Collaboration is made easy with Sendible as you can set up approval workflows and keep your posts on-brand.
Use its one-click reports to pinpoint your most engaging content or choose to build and automatically send custom reports.

What’s it great at:

Competition analysis.
Works across several social media channels.
Post scheduling and auto-response.
Tracking visitors.
Analytics.

7. Keyhole

image: keyhole

Keyhole comes with a real-time dashboard that shows you how many people posted with your hashtag, along with the number of retweets, likes and impressions your campaign is generating. The dashboard captures a detailed overview of your entire campaign and mentions all details and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) you need. Keyhole’s Suite comes at $59 per month and has a free trial available as well.

What it does:

With the metrics it provides you can set your specific KPIs and measure results accordingly.
You can monitor all your campaigns in one go.
Discover and track influencers.
See the performance of the content.
Monitor brand health.
Get real-time actionable data and reports.
Gain insights on trends and conversion rates.

What’s it great at:

Real-time tracking of campaigns, hashtags, and keywords.
Influencer and new client identification.
Event and engagement tracking.
Customized alerts.
Analytics.

8. Rival IQ

image: rivaliq

Rival IQ helps deliver analytics and competitive intelligence to help your digital marketing. The solutions offered include the ability to show the data and easily make informed decisions, improve results, and better understand your competition. BRival IQ pricing starts at $199.00 per month, a free trial is also available.

What it does:

By using competitive benchmarks and comparative analysis Rival IQ sends you alerts whenever your competition posts high-performing content, such as boosting a post on social media.
Helps you move quickly to respond to and counter-messaging in actual time.
It integrates with Google Analytics to get a complete understanding of your customers’ journey.
Get a free head-to-head report against your main competitor on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and see how you stack up.
Helps you to uncover new opportunities, identify trends, and track results across all major channels and the web.

What’s it great at:

Actual time dashboard showing how many visitors posted with your hashtag.
Tracking retweets, likes and Impressions on campaigns.
Dedicated Influencers metrics.
Analytics.

9. Social Report

image: socialreport

Social Report management platform offers solutions that include advanced scheduling, social networks monitoring, analytics, one-click reporting, smart automation, and more. When it comes to tracking performance Social Report offers everything from your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, to business reviews, website site performance and blogs. Users can quickly and easily organize their data by customers or business. The pricing starts at $49.00 per month, you can start it all with a 30-day free trial.

What it does:

Gives you the option to not only track your own social profiles but your competition as well.
With its Smart Inbox, you have the capability to get all of your social messages across all of your social media profiles gathered and organized in one stream.
Apart from publishing content in several accounts at once, you can also send the content you schedule to your teammates for administrator approval and tracking the content.
Once you dive into the stream, you will be able to engage, join conversations, and respond directly to customers.

What’s it great at:

Advanced scheduling.
Social network monitoring.
Analytics.
One-click reporting.
Smart automation.

10. Planable

image: planableThis social management tool comes with a dashboard that helps you manage multiple social media platforms in one place. Planable’s dashboard has a great visually focused user interface that helps even the novice amongst us to easily navigate through content management, automated publishing, customer engagement across multiple accounts. Planable unfortunately does not provide analytic and reports solutions for your business. Pricing for Planable starts at $39.00 per month in addition to a free trial.

What it does:

Planable’s strong suit is creating, planning, and approving posts and it is considered among the best social media tools.

What’s it great at:

Centralized social media content management.
Planning and scheduling.
Analytics.
Social media post preview.

11. Loomly

image: loomly
Loomly offers a calendar-based social management platform for businesses. Pricing begins at $25, allowing you to manage up to ten accounts. You can start with a 15-day free trial to learn more. Solutions offered by Loomly include automated publishing and ads management.

What it does:

Helps users to engage and respond to audiences and measure outreach in terms of organic vs ads post overviews.
Offer notifications from emails, push, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
Ideas for content in posts, trending topics, and RSS feeds
Monitor date-related events and social media best practices.

What’s it great at:

Centralized social media content management.
Planning and scheduling.
Analytics.
Collaboration.
Post ideas.

12. Sociamonials

image: sociamonials

Sociamonials has social media analytics tools that help you manage multiple social media accounts that include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google my Business, LinkedIn and YouTube. The Social Pro package comes with a monthly $19 subscription for managing up to ten social profiles including Facebook, Twitter and unlimited scheduling capabilities. A free 14-day trial is available for those interested in trying this tool out.

What it does:

Run contests, tweak content,
Find influencers and capture leads.
Analytics for traffic, brand awareness, Return on Investment (RoI) and more.
Post scheduling.

What’s it great at:

Brand tracking.
Automated publishing.
Conversion tracking.
Customer targeting.
Contact database.
Email marketing.
Multi-campaign.
Analytics.
Keyword filtering.

13. Agile CRM

image: agilecrmAgile CRM has an all in one CRM that includes automation of all your sales, marketing and service efforts in one single platform. This cloud-based SaaS service comes with a mobile-ready feature allowing you to make tweaks while off location. It has a free version for users and the starter kit comes at $8.99 per month.

What it does:

It comes with a contact management tool for all your accounts.
Analytics to track stages and milestones.
Voicemail automation.
Appointment scheduling.
Lead scoring.
Email tracking.

What’s it great at:

Social suite.
Landing page builder.
Ticketing analytics.
Marketing automation.

14. Cyfe

image: cyfe

Cyfe offers an all-in-one social management app that helps you easily monitor and analyze all of your business data in one, organized place. Cyfe has a free version where you get two fully functional dashboards and a 30-day history. The starter package comes at $29 per month and it includes unlimited widgets; custom logo; custom themes; and unlimited data exports.

What it does:

Users can connect and pull data from their advertising, email, monitoring, sales, finance, SEO, social media, support, and web analytics accounts- all in one go.
Cyfe’s unique selling point is that it helps you make business decisions by automating all of your business data into a single and highly-organized view thus saving you time from gleaning over spreadsheets.
See performances on your social media, analytics, marketing, sales, and support together.
The choice of reports in various formats including PNG, JPEG, PDF, and CSV formats

What’s it great at:

All in one monitoring.
Collaboration.
Monitor multiple campaigns.
Scheduling.
Analytics.

6 Analytics Tools Provided by the Social Networks

The third-party social media tools above have many advantages, not the least of which is a centralized dashboard to see stats from multiple networks in one place. However, don’t overlook the networks’ own analytics. While you can only get statistics and insights from that particular network, they can be very useful especially for those who spend most of their time on just one or two platforms. Here is a review of what six social media Networks provide for free:

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights helps you track likes, page views, and more. This gives you valuable insights to help you track and measure your outreach efforts. With Facebook Page Insights you get access to detailed analytics for your Facebook Page where you can see which campaigns are working well and those that need more tweaking. You also learn how your audience interacts with your content and improve your results over time.

This tool helps you understand your Facebook audience so that you can create better-targeted ads and create more compelling content. You can see actions on your page; the number of views; likes generated by your content; fan source responsiveness followers; negative feedback; and orders. Facebook even has a dedicated resource center including free tools for small businesses that help you boost your online engagements both for Facebook and Instagram.

Instagram Insights

Instagram offers insights to help you learn more about your followers and page performance. You can learn about the demographics of your Instagram audience and track the performance of your Instagram posts and Stories. Instagram Insights lets you can view your audience’s engagement with specific posts, stories and IGTV videos. It is a free tool that gives you a great overview of your page’s performance in terms of the number of accounts reached, content interactions, followers, and approximate earnings. Each of these Instagram metrics comes with a detailed breakdown.

LinkedIn Analytics

With LinkedIn Analytics you gain valuable data regarding the performance of your LinkedIn page. It includes the receptions towards your updates including videos posted. The tool also provides a breakdown of visitors and followers including the number of likes, shares, comments, and mentions. Additional analytic tools include LinkedIn Career Pages, as well as access to Talent Brand analytics that help you measure your talent pipeline, talent flows, talent attraction, and application behaviour. With the Pipeline Builder analytics, you can see metrics based on timelines ranging from the past seven days to 12 months. You can also customize the timeline to suit your particular needs.

Pinterest Analytics

With Pinterest’s Metrics tab, you will be able to track the number of pins created from your website to help you glean the average amount of daily content pinned from your website. You can also look at the number of repins users have used from your website on to their own boards, which helps you increase the exposure of your content to people who are not currently following your account. At the same time, you can also see the daily average number of people who saw your pins for both pins and repins. All in all Pinterest’s analytics come with a total of six metrics: pins; repins; most clicks; most repinned; visitors and visits; and reach.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter analytics uses graphs and reports to show the performance of important metrics. These include your top tweet, top mention and top follower(s). Additional insights include the number of tweets sent; number of visits your Twitter profile received; the number of mentions your account received; followers gained and tweet impressions received over a period of time. These also come with the number of impressions on videos, tweets, video completion rates, audience insights, and conversion tracking.

YouTube Analytics

YouTube analytics provides you with data about your videos’ performance including watch time, viewer demographics, traffic sources, impressions, subscribers and revenue. This comes in handy if you want to understand whether audiences like the content you produce, and what can be done to improve your videos’ performance. You can also segregate the data based on the playlist, time period, devices where your video was viewed, comments, and shares to decipher the nuances of your visitors.

What should small businesses look for in social analytics tools?

Depending on which social media analytics you decide to use here are some of the essentials you should be looking for:

Comprehensive analytics: Besides looking for a social media analytic process that crank out numbers, look for one that gives you further insights. This includes engagement, likes, demographics; conversations, hashtags, and even competitor’s performance. So there’s no need to flip through different systems just to get the results you need – these come in handy for tweaking your outreach. If your social media analytics tool integrates with Google Analytics it would help in building robust reporting.
Integration across social media platforms: Look for a solution that offers analytics for social media across the board that measures Instagram, Facebook and other data. This will help you get a good perspective on the performances on your various social media handles.
Offers customized team tracking and collaboration: Besides how you measure your social media analytics it should help you customize how you share, plan and collaborate across teams.
Multiple reporting options: A key component in analytics is in the manner in which reports are generated. Look for the best social media analytics tools offering data and reports in multiple formats this could be in PDF, JPEG, PNG or even .xls.
Additional tools: In addition to analytics look for tools that help you edit pictures as well as integrate with other Customer Relations Management System (CRM) solutions. Particularly integration with a CRM system will help you convert your engagement into leads thus helping you go up the ladder of engagement.

Finally, if you run a marketing agency or are starting a social media business, look specifically for agency features. These include the ability to track performance results by client, deliver white-label reports with your brand, or offer multiple client logins. Whatever your needs, make a list of your top requirements so that you don’t miss any as you evaluate the options.

Image: planable

By Samson Haileyesus

Sourced from Small Business Trends

In News

Gartner: Top 10 data and analytics technology trends for 2021

April 7, 2021 No Comments

By n.f. mendoza

The pandemic forced D&A leaders to step up research and analysis to respond effectively to change and uncertainty, the firm says.

While much of the loudest buzz surrounding the impact of COVID-19 was focused on the dramatic shift from on premises to remote work, the pandemic further affected every aspect of the enterprise, which includes data and analytics technology. The uncertainty of what the tech industry would face forced D&A leadership to quickly find tools and processes — and put them in place — so they could identify key trends and prioritize to the company’s best advantage, said Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner, in the company’s recently released information.

Gartner has now identified 10 trends as “mission-critical investments that accelerate capabilities to anticipate, shift and respond.” It recommended that D&A leaders review these trends and consider and apply as necessary. Following is a summary from Gartner of the trends:

Trend 1: Smarter, responsible, scalable AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are key factors. Businesses must apply new techniques for smarter, less data-hungry, ethically responsible and more resilient AI solutions. When smarter, more responsible, scalable AI is applied, organizations will be able to “leverage learning algorithms and interpretable systems into shorter time to value and higher business impact,” Gartner’s report said.

Trend 2: Composable data and analytics

Composable data and analytics leverages components from multiple data, analytics and AI solutions to quickly build flexible and user-friendly intelligent applications to help D&A leaders make the correlation between the discovered insights to actions they must execute. Open, containerized analytics architectures make analytics capabilities more composable.

Public or private, data is unquestionably moving to the cloud and composable data, rendering analytics “a more agile way to build analytics applications enabled by cloud marketplaces and low-code and no-code solutions.”

Trend 3: Data fabric is the foundation

D&A leaders use data fabric to help address “higher levels of diversity, distribution, scale and complexity in their organizations’ data assets,” as a result of increased digitization and “more emancipated” consumers.

Data fabric applies analytics in order to constantly monitor data pipelines; data fabric “uses continuous analytics of data assets to support the design, deployment and utilization of diverse data to reduce time for integration by 30%, deployment by 30% and maintenance by 70%.”

Trend 4: From big to small and wide data

Using historical data for ML and AI models was rendered irrelevant, once changes based on the pandemic had an extreme effect on business. D&A leaders need a greater variety of data for better situational awareness because human and AI decision making grows more complex and demanding.

Therefore, D&A leaders need to choose analytical techniques that can use available data more effectively and they can with more insight that now requires less data.

“Small and wide data approaches provide robust analytics and AI, while reducing organizations’ large data set dependency,” Sallam said in a press release. “Using wide data, organizations attain a richer, more complete situational awareness or 360-degree view, enabling them to apply analytics for better decision making.”

Trend 5: XOps

DataOps, MLOps, ModelOps and PlatformOps, which comprise XOps, are necessary to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale through DevOps and using best practices of reliability, reusability and repeatability. This also reduces duplication of technology and processes and enabling automation.

Operationalization must be addressed initially and not as an afterthought because the latter is why most analytics and AI projects fail. The report said, “If D&A leaders operationalize at scale using XOps, they will enable the reproducibility, traceability, integrity and integrability of analytics and AI assets.”

Trend 6: Engineering decision intelligence

D&A leaders can make engineering decisions more accurate, repeatable, transparent and traceable, as decisions grow more automated and augmented. Gartner refers to “engineering decision intelligence,” which applies to a series of decisions of business processes as well as grouped emergent decisions and consequences.

Trend 7: Data and analytics as a core business function

D&A is now making the shift into a core business function, rather than a secondary activity. D&A now is a shared business asset aligned to business results. Gartner noted that D&A silos break down because of better collaboration between central and federated D&A teams.

Trend 8: Graph relates everything

Graphs form the foundation of most modern data and analytics capabilities and are reliant on the foundation to find relationships between people, places, things, events and locations across a wide variety of data assets. D&A leaders rely on graphs as quick answers to complex business questions, which require contextual awareness and an understanding of the nature of connections and strengths across multiple entities.

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Gartner predicts that by 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations, up from 10% in 2021, facilitating rapid decision making across the organization.

Trend 9: The rise of the augmented consumer

Today, most business users use predefined dashboards and manual data exploration, but this can lead to incorrect conclusions and flawed decisions and actions. Time spent in predefined dashboards will progressively be replaced when users’ needs can be delivered with automated, conversational, mobile and dynamically generated insights customized through a predefined dashboard.

“This will shift the analytical power to the information consumer, the augmented consumer, giving them capabilities previously only available to analysts and citizen data scientists,” Sallam said.

Trend 10: Data and analytics at the edge

Support for data, analytics and other technologies are found in edge computing environments, closer to assets in the physical world and outside IT’s purview. Gartner predicts that by 2023, over 50% of the primary responsibility of data and analytics leaders will comprise data created, managed and analyzed in edge environments.

Gartner concluded: “D&A leaders can use this trend to enable greater data management flexibility, speed, governance, and resilience. A diversity of use cases is driving the interest in edge capabilities for D&A, ranging from supporting real-time event analytics to enabling autonomous behavior of things.”

Gartner Data and analytics summit

Gartner analysts offer more analysis on data and analytics trends at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summits 2021, taking place virtually May 4-6 in the Americas, May 18-20 in EMEA, June 8-9 in APAC, June 23-24 in India, and July 12-13 in Japan. Follow news and updates from the conferences on Twitter using #GartnerDA.

This article was originally published on TechRepublic.

By n.f. mendoza

Sourced from ZDNet

In News

Why You Should Become An Expert in Google Analytics

March 24, 2021 No Comments

By The Cheddar Shop

Google Analytics has become a powerhouse in recent years. The ultimate web tracking tool, it’s utilized by everyone from entrepreneurs to big businesses, providing users with the data they need to measure the effects of their web and marketing efforts. In fact, this report shows that Google Analytics is used by 84.2% of all the websites whose traffic was analysed (representing 54.9% of all websites).

Being skilled in Google Analytics can be a major draw to employers and can also help individuals build their businesses and determine just how well their marketing efforts are doing. But while the tools might be very powerful, the more the user understands the platform, the meaningful the data and the deeper the insights. As such, right now is a great time to learn the ins and outs, with the Google Analytics Master Class Bundle available for just $35.

With over 3,891 enrolled students, this bundle is highly-rated for a reason. Through five expert-led courses, you’ll learn everything from the fundamentals to advanced techniques. A good place to start is the hands-on training course on Google Analytics for beginners. The 4.4-star-rated course covers the basics, such as how to load demo data from an online store as well as analyse audience, acquisition, and behaviour reports.

Once you start tinkering in Google Analytics, you’ll notice there’s quite a lot of data to comb through. Through this course pack, you’ll learn how to navigate through all this information and how to make smart business decisions using that data. Get a deep understanding of all the methods and techniques necessary to measure, monitor, and analyse your web traffic. Take your expertise a step further when you learn how to set up an Analytics Dashboard in Google Data Studio, unveiling key insights that can directly affect marketing and sales decisions.

The bundle includes a 4.5-star-rated Google Analytics exam prep course. The course features practice questions and feedback on your wrong answers, so you’ll be ready to ace the exam and get this industry-recognized certification, not to mention grow your business or career.

More than half of the world’s websites are running Google Analytics. Don’t get left behind. Get the Google Analytics Master Class Bundle for $34.99 (Reg. $995).

Prices subject to change.

By The Cheddar Shop

Cheddar is partnering with StackCommerce to bring you the Cheddar Shop. This article doesn’t constitute editorial endorsement, and we earn a portion of all sales.

Sourced from Cheddar