Time Poor, Data Rich

I’ve been pulling together a piece to help empower planners at my agency to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in to doing their own insight gathering and analytics, rather than brief an analyst to do it for them.

When you line everything up it’s amazing what a modern day planner/researcher can get if they know where to look. I thought I’d share some of these tools here in the hope that someone out there might be able to add in some of their own.

Google’s Adplanner can tell you about site visitors, time spent and demographics (Google are a bit hazy on methodology, but they’re a clever bunch so let’s just play along). It can also allow you to create a bespoke audience based on sites they have visited, keywords used in search, etc, and then look at what other sites they visit (note, you need to sign in to Google to use it).

The daddy of web insight tools Google’s Insight for Search has been around a while. It’s a breeze to use and allows you to look at search trends for multiple terms by region and time. Top tip, combine it with their Adwords Keyword Tool to get actual search volumes.

Wordle has brought some much needed pizzazz to tag clouds. They just look so pretty. Paste in text from any doc, or try pasting in Tweets around a keyword (use this to find the tweets) to instantly visualise how a brand is being discussed.

Tag Galaxy must win the prize for visualisation. It crawls Flickr and grabs images tagged with your keyword before illustrating the results on a spinning interactive globe. Great for demonstrating the visual cohesion, or lack of, for a brand.

Brilliant new tools are also emerging from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other digital giants who are sitting on a ton of data. In time these will be as sophisticated and easy to use as the Google suite.

The most amazing thing though, is that all this is available to anyone, anywhere for absolutely nothing, zero, zilch.