Observational marketing research with online/web analytics

Who are your top peeps that deserve some schwag?  You can get a good answer to this question if with observational online data!

We’ll spend the end of the semester working on presenting marketing research results with video, but before then we have two important marketing research methods to cover: observational/ethnographic research methods and experimental research methods.

In the past I’ve shown some cool videos on ethnographic/observational studies (The West Disc 4, 1:02:00, The Merchants of Cool, 00:20:20).  There are also great books on the topic: Born to Buy (Ch 6) by Schor, Why We Buy (Part I) by Underhill, Buying In (Ch 7) by Rob Walker.

But, because you have a website and you’ve been using Google Analytics, Google Webmaster, Google Feedburner and more you have tons of observational data.  So, this is your chance to look at that data and to investigate what the data on these sites means.

Google Analytics has great resources at Google Conversion University.

Google Webmaster has great resources in its Webmaster Tools Help section.

Google Feedburner has great resources in its Feedburner Help section.

Next lab class will be your chance to observe your analytics data that you started gathering earlier in the semester.  Did you start a facebook fan page?  Twitter account?

Next week: setting up a Google Website Optimizer A/B experiment with Custom tumblr pages.