Christian's away so we brought young Seth in to keep us company. He had some strong views on the boss. Have a great break everyone. Datalicious will be back on 3rd January 2012.

Google just uploaded the videos from last year's Think Auto events in Sydney and Melbourne so I thought I'd share that with you. Check out the below recording including slides on how we think the automotive industry could crack cross-channel media attribution and finally give digital the credit (and budgets) it deserves.

The presentation covers basic media attribution best practice as well as some suggestions on how to track offline media responses online and link offline car sales back to online campaigns and website behaviour. Have a look, especially if you work in marketing in the automotive industry, as everyone seems to know how important digital is in the research process but no-one seems to be able to quantify exactly how much - here's a few ideas.

Google Analytics just released a video with details on its brand new multi-channel funnels or media attribution solution that's currently being introduced as a limited pilot. Watch the video below to see all five new reports in the new multi-channel funnels section including the overview, assisted conversions, top conversion paths, path length and time lag reports. 

This is a good video to watch if you just want to find out about cross-channel campaign tracking and optimisation in general, quite well done and explain, but keep in mind that the solution only includes data from direct visits and not mere banner impressions (that didn't result in a click-through) which is a big limitation (but who knows what will happen with that, Google owns DoubleClick after all).

Anyway, even if you are a big display advertiser, you should sign-up for early access to the new reports, more insights can never hurt as long as they're interpreted correctly.

Great video on information visualisation with some good examples: We are swimming in data, too much to comprehend at times. Matthias Shapiro walks through the visualisation techniques that can be used to figure out what a data set is trying to tell us.