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My Favorite Advice & Data Viz of the Month

My Favorite Advice

Keep It Positive (and Personal)

In a world where it feels like everyone and everything is vying for our attention, what does it take for one message to stand out? Well, Change.org analyzed 164K online petitions and figured out which best converted scrolls to clicks and clicks to donations. My main takeaway (there were a lot, really) is that knowing your audience is key. Supporters are already passionate and motivated to act. So how petition creators framed their call to action — for example, whether they put it in positive or negative terms — often made the difference in supporter numbers. According to this study, the most effective headlines start with a strong action word and signal “the ideas of restoration of rights or coming to the aid of others.” Check out the study for many, many examples.

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Big Changes to Google Analytics, Spending for 2020 & the Male-Dominated World of Data Viz

App and Website, Together At Last

Have a website… and an app? Well, I have news for you. It’s still in beta, but Google Analytics now has a way to combine app and website data into a single property. This is a particularly exciting development because it deviates from the traditional session and pageview method Google Analytics has used for the past 15+ years (listen to me complain about that here). The new measurement model uses events and parameters instead. And, Google’s created a new feature to make tracking the most common events, such as scrolling and outbound link clicks, a lot easier. This is a huge shift for GA and I’m sure I’ll be covering it again very soon.

Gettin’ Cozy With Data Analytics

An understanding of data analytics is important for everyone in an organization, regardless of your role or position. This Harvard Business Review article breaks down 4 crucial concepts you may have forgotten from your freshman year course in statistics. My favorite tip: Always have a control. You probably know about controls from drug trials, but this doesn’t need to be costly nor time-consuming. Although we may be testing new subject lines or web copy (rather than life-saving drugs), this is a concept that communicators should master too.

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Gearing up for 2020 Ad Spend, Internet Trends Report for Data Nerds & Don’t Silo Social Data

Gearing Up For 2020: Political Ad Spend

If you thought the 2016 election was ripe with ads, just wait until the next one. Political ad spending is expected to total $9.9 billion in 2020, according to the latest U.S. ad forecast. Online fundraising isn’t new, but it is bigger than ever. So, expect to see ads for your favorite candidates popping up soon (and often)… if their campaigns get the targeting right. The Dems are all starting from scratch when it comes to digital strategy, while Trump has managed to streamline voter data files to allow his campaign to target people online more effectively. To get an idea of what that means for 2020, I’ll leave you with this quote that stood out to me: “The modern presidential campaign is now largely won and lost online.”

Zuckerburg’s Plan for Privacy

Facebook is working to strike a balance between users’ demands for more privacy and advertisers who, well, pay the bills. Plans for a tool to let people see and manage off-Facebook activity is rolling out in a few months. Zuckerburg said this about it: “It’s designed to give people more transparency and control over the data other apps and websites share with us.” The most important note about this tool is that measurement will remain intact so organizations can understand the impact of their Facebook investment. Sounds like a good move, but I’m waiting to see.

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Google’s Data Studio Updates, Location Ranking & Tinder for Clothes

Google’s Data Studio Just Got a Bit Better

Google’s Data Studio is a pretty sharp (and free) way to create dashboards and visualizations from your Google Analytics data and other data sets. But it’s always been limited in what it can do. However, the program has received some fun product updates in the past few months. My favorite new features are custom data range comparisons and the Tableau-esque ability to drill down in charts. So far, I’ve used this new feature to create more useful maps. Now, dashboard viewers can drill into details about which states and cities their users are located.

Ads, They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

There is a growing interest in the idea of personalization and privacy in the online age. This caught the eye of the New York Times, who decided to conduct its own digital advertising experiment to show how far advertisers go to collect and use our information. My main takeaway is that we have a choice to make: either we all agree to be targeted by hyper-personalized ads that are more relevant to us or we need to create and pass more stringent data privacy laws.

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Better Brand Awareness, Tracking Abandoned Forms & Unraveling the Marvel Universe

Cookies: Sinful or Secure?

This article is a TLDR version of Safari’s latest ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention) initiative. If your job involves digital communications, it deserves at least a quick glance. These changes are great for user security and privacy, but not great for people trying to understand their website users. Prior to this change, Google Analytics cookies expired after two years. That means — theoretically at least— you’d recognize a repeat visitors to your site even if their previous visit was 23 months prior. ITP means that cookies expire after a week. Now when someone doesn’t visit your site for two weeks, their next visit is counted as a new user all over again. Basically, if your organization has goals around growing an “audience of loyal users who visit the site once or twice a month,” Safari’s making it a lot harder to measure your progress.

Europeans, They Are Just Like Us

This newsletter is a sucker for survey results. This time, European charities tell Salesforceabout their marketing challenges. Here are my favorite stats:  For 75% of nonprofits in Europe, “raising awareness of their cause” was the top reason to use social media. But 96% (!) said they aren’t using digital marketing “to its fullest potential.” What’s holding them back? These organizations report struggling with selecting the right social platforms, using paid search (including their Google Ad Grant) and measuring outcomes.

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