Category: Data

UPDATE: IMEC Labs is now being run by Eric Enge and the folks at Stone Temple Consulting (as I was unable to commit enough bandwidth consistently to continue the experiments). The new signup form is here, and I’ve updated the links below. Over the last few months, I’ve been running some experiments in Google’s search engine and on social media…

I recently downloaded ExactTarget’s 2014 State of Marketing, and found the data extremely compelling. Here’s what they had to say about methodology and respondents: The 2014 State of Marketing survey was conducted online from October 24, 2013, until November 1, 2013. The survey was sent to more than 48,000 marketing professionals and a total of 2,651 marketers started the survey,…

It’s becoming common wisdom in the SEO, startup, and marketing worlds that so-called vanity metrics are accursed trolls of numbers, sent from the fiery deep to confuse, mislead, and prey on the weak-minded marketer. E.g: In a lot of ways, I agree with posts like those Eric Ries has written on the topic. Pivoting based on actionable metrics vs. those…

On April 4th at 6:30pm Pacific Time I put up a blog post on this site and shared it on Twitter and Google+ (note: this was 12:30pm on April 5th in Sydney, where I hit publish). Over the next 24 hours, something very curious and new occurred – Google+ drove as many visits to the post as Twitter did, and…

I’m excited to see the marketing field getting more interested in correlation data and metrics around SEO. There’s a lot of folks citing data from SearchMetrics’ UK Study, from Mark Collier’s Open Algorithm project, and from Moz’s own ranking factors and follow-up reports. (Searchmetrics’ study at left, OpenAlgorithm at right) The trouble is how this data gets perceived and interpreted…

I was recently chatting with my friend Matthew Brown of AudienceWise about the distribution of the web’s traffic, and we both wondered – do referrals from external domains follow a “long tail” distribution pattern? I surmised that only ~20% of the referrals that the average website receives comes from the tail of the distribution curve, whilst Matt felt that number…