Events, clickstream data or hits (as they are known in the world of Google Analytics) are the building blocks of all marketing analytics suites. In the past they have been processed and aggregated into prefabricated reports before we interact with them. With compute and storage costs dropping, using these raw hits suddenly becomes a viable and powerful option. They require some extra leg work to use but in return offer some great advantages including the ability to reprocess the data as many times as you see fit.

For most of us analytics have always been a tool for marketing. But if we drop the assumptions and look at the data we have as a source of insights for the whole organisation to explore how we can make new friends and what difference we can make for the organisation and business in general and not just the website and the online team.

How do you measure the impact of creativity? This is one of the major issues facing analytics in LEGO, since the majority of products are not being sold directly to consumers. Today, LEGO’s internal creative agency is providing thousands of creative communication and marketing assets to hubs all around the world in hundreds of different cultures, but the question remains how can you measure creative work’s productivity and efficiency and how do you determine the return on a creative marketing asset in a complex world?

Marketing automation, machine learning models, customer data platforms; at least one of these is included in your company’s ambitions for 2020. But is you analytics implementation prepared for it? Many companies struggle to implement ambitious data projects because of a lack of data standards and ownership, specialy in the digital analytics sphere.

Marketers and analysts not only want to know which channels & campaigns drive sales and what is their ROI. They want to know how to optimize digital marketing performance starting from strategy and up to keywords bids adjustment. As advertising tools evolve, campaign optimization inside a particular ad service is being constantly improved. The main decision for a marketing professional to make is how to choose the perfect budget allocation across the channels and how to know in advance what results one can expect from each channel in the future.

Have you ever been at a loud party, or a bar, and you suddenly pick out your name being said by your friend down the end of the bar? Your brain exists to find the signal in the noise and pluck out personalized experiences. It's rooted deep in our psychology, and our need for control and to reduce information overload, but at the core... it's just how our brains physically work. There are a number of (expensive) systems that can help you employ personalization on your website, but did you know you could use personalization techniques on your site essentially overnight using free tools, and get some pretty insane results? Using free Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, we helped one client increase their conversion rate by 32X (from 1% to 32%) using free tools, without even having to go through their developers. We'll walk through why humans do the things we do, and then dig into how you too can employ a similar personalization scheme using tools within the Google Marketing Platform to hopefully get some similarly crazy results.