The problem with vanity metrics – how marketers can stay focused

Earlier this year Yogendra Vasupal, the founder of Stayzilla, announced in a blog post he would shut down all operations of his company – despite having recently raised $33.5 million.

Yogendra wrote an honest and transparent post highlighting the reasons for his decision and admitting that he made mistakes. In the post, he openly admits the company focused on irrelevant data which ultimately led to their demise:

“The initial seven years were all about having...

10 November 2017 | Data-driven marketing

Is innovation stagnating in social media?

We are saturated with social media. According to statistics, 37% of the world is actively using social media.

Facebook has 2bn users, Instagram 700m and even Snapchat has 301m. Instinctively, this feels like impressive uptake for something just shy of its sixth birthday.

Or is it? After all, there are around 579 million people in North America, of which 71 million are Snapchat users, giving us an adoption figure of around 12% in that region.

With some investigative...

20 July 2017 | Social Media Marketing

Is Google taking lessons from the dating scene?

Opinion It almost goes without saying that being found online by search engines is an essential part of marketing for most brands today. An entire industry has sprung up around optimising on-site content so that sites and pages are found better, or at least, more accurately. But if the days of stuffing keywords onto webpages or in meta tags so search engines score them more highly represent the ‘iron age’ of search, then simply prioritising on-site SEO is also starting to look...

7 March 2017 | Organic Search