UpBuild

Values-Driven Technical Marketing

Ruth Burr Reedy

What “Data Should Tell a Story” Really Means

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Working in marketing, you’ve probably heard that “data should tell a story.” It sounds like a hacky business cliche, but thinking about data in terms of storytelling can help you be a lot more effective in creating and delivering reports, dashboards and other data-driven recommendations to your clients and stakeholders.

Simply put, “data should tell a story” means that you should never be reporting on information without having a clear idea of what it means, the context in which it should be interpreted, and the actions you’d expect to be taken as a result. Anyone can pull a report – the real value is in using that report to effect positive change. [Read more…] about What “Data Should Tell a Story” Really Means

MozCon 2017: Collected Live Tweets

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Last week, I attended MozCon in Seattle. As usual, I live-tweeted the heck out of it! For those of you who weren’t able to attend, or who want a wrap-up to refer back to, I’ve collected my live tweets of each session below, along with my main takeaways from each talk, and a link to the talk’s slides where I could find them. Enjoy!

Day One

Rand Fishkin, “Inside Google’s Numbers in 2017”

Rand started out the conference with a by-the-numbers overview of Google’s current search growth and market share. Google is still the biggest referrer of traffic on the web, sending TEN TIMES more traffic than the next biggest referrer (Facebook).

Lisa Myers, “How to Get Big Links”

Lisa’s approach to link building outreach and content creation is so refreshing. She’s been able to get big results by letting her team be creative and try bold things, knowing that there will be failures. I loved her idea to find existing data sets and leverage them to create new, beautiful content pieces. I think the most important takeaway from her talk is that content marketers/link builders are individuals, and you get way more success by letting them approach things their unique way rather than locking them into a rigid process.

Oli Gardner, “Data Driven Design”

Oli’s talk contained one of the statistics that stuck in my mind the most from MozCon: 51% of marketers he surveyed said their analytics was set up wrong. I know that’s a huge problem we help clients combat at UpBuild; it’s really challenging to make sure you’re tracking everything you need to track, in a way that gives you confidence that the numbers are accurate. Once you have that in place, you can use your data to gain new empathy for your users, understanding why they behave in the ways that they do, and designing solutions to better serve their needs. [Read more…] about MozCon 2017: Collected Live Tweets

Why Image Resizing is Important

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When optimizing websites for faster page load time, one of the most common errors we see is that images aren’t the proper size, requiring the browser to resize the image every time the page loads. Since images can often make up the bulk of the bytes needed to load a web page, everything we can do to make our images smaller and easier to load will pay dividends in increased site speed. [Read more…] about Why Image Resizing is Important

Track Post Publish Date as a Custom Dimension in Google Analytics

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I recently spoke at DFWSEM’s monthly meeting, on the topic “Track Everything with Google Tag Manager.” We had a great time, talking about some (but by no means all) of the many wonderful things you can track using Google Tag Manager (check out my slides for more on that).

While I was prepping for the talk, Beth Kahlich hit me up on Twitter with this question: [Read more…] about Track Post Publish Date as a Custom Dimension in Google Analytics

How We Built UpBuild’s Family Leave Policy

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When Mike first sent me the offer for the Director of Strategy role here at UpBuild, I was (perhaps needless to say) incredibly stoked. I also had a couple of follow-up questions as we discussed the offer, one of which was: does UpBuild have a family leave policy in place?

Mike and I had discussed my wanting to start a family at some point as part of the reason I was looking to change roles and work remotely. It’s not a level of transparency I’d recommend for everyone in their job search process; I was really fortunate to already have a pretty good level of trust with Mike built up from having known him through the industry for so long.

Mike responded:

[Read more…] about How We Built UpBuild’s Family Leave Policy