Cvent Survey

According to recent research by Gartner, the top priorities for CIOs in 2012 include analytics and business intelligence. This makes perfect sense as companies realize they need to leverage their internal and external data sources to better compete in rapidly changing markets. Analytics, including the analysis of web data, have become a mainstay in both the consumer and B2B marketing environments. Most analytics operations include a forward looking component, whereas business intelligence (BI)...Continue Reading »

As a marketer I am always curious about the impact of marketing activities and purchase behavior. In short, I wonder if our activities cause people to purchase our products and services. The notion of causality goes back some time in the area of social, economic and business research. Our colleagues in the physical and life sciences have a much easier time asserting that X causes Y. Such is not the case in the business world.

With that said the advent of web analytics and marketing automation has...Continue Reading »

Survey research, be it for marketing, economic, social or health reasons, like any scientific endeavor has its share of debate. Recently I spoke about the interval vs. ordinal nature of psychometric scales, e.g. Likert, and the stir it has caused. Another example is the placement of open-ended questions in surveys.

Open-ended questions are as close as most quantitative researchers typically get to qualitative work. Not only is placement a concern, by design they allow respondents the option...Continue Reading »

In marketing research, as well as other forms of social, economic and business research, interval and ratio data are king. Yet as we have seen in other posts there is much that can be done with nominal and ordinal data. What makes interval and ratio data exciting is that they support a full-range of statistical tests and transformations.

The difference between interval and ratio data is simple. Ratio data has a defined zero point. Income, height, weight, annual sales, market share, product...Continue Reading »

It is common for many organizations to run ongoing surveys in order to collect continuous feedback. While it is easy to gather the data cumulatively, it takes more work to collect data on a weekly or monthly basis. Previously, you needed to run a separate report each time you needed data: 12 times a year for monthly reports. Cvent has now added dynamic date filters to our online survey reporting engine which will make data collection easier.

In many of our standard reports you will now see a...Continue Reading »

The survey is one of the most important means of collecting data. The advantage is that it can be given to a large sample that may ensure a reasonable rate of return. However, the survey has disadvantage—it may not yield the finer details for what you are seeking data. For example, you have designed a customer feedback survey. The questionnaire typically would be a YES/ NO type, or a Rating Scale type of a questionnaire. If you want to measure every possible variable, then the survey becomes...Continue Reading »

January is an excellent time to step back and review your talent pool for the coming year. Each year employees leave their current position for a new one. There are many reasons for this, with salary being amongst them. A recent projection by Phil Reeves, who conducts salary studies on behalf of the marketing research industry, reported that job changers can expect to see bumps of 15–20% compared to 0–3% for those who stay put.

My current salary study for the IT industry shows similar...Continue Reading »

Performance reviews are a necessary evil in the workplace. The good news is that the one-way, annual performance evaluation where an employee gets to hear about the all things she did wrong over the past year, and maybe a few that she did right, isn't the be all and end all of the review process. The 360 performance review has gained some traction, but it, too, has its limitations ... and detractors.

People like Nancy Clark, founder of Leadership Dynamics, Inc. believe that 360 reviews do more... Continue Reading »

One could say there is a natural order to things. In survey research when we think of order we think of ordinal data. What differentiates this data type from nominal data is that we can leverage the respondent’s willingness to rank their choices. This takes the analytical options up a notch from measuring simple percentages and modal values.

Ordinal data is literally data that can be placed into an order. This can be applied to baseball teams, horse racing, consumer preferences, or your place in...Continue Reading »

In times when every penny counts, there is more demand on training managers to “prove” that training has paid off. Most organizations follow Kirkpatrick’s 4 Levels of Evaluation:

1. The immediate feedback: The smiley sheets at the end of the training program where participants respond to questions on trainer, training materials, facilities and other aspects of the training
2. Improvement in knowledge: This measures to what degree training has improved the conceptual knowledge of the participants
3. Applicat...

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