Scapegoating Analysts | Recognizing & Preventing A Bad Idea.

Here’s a sign that you’ve arrived as an Analyst or an Analytics team: At the first sign of failure reported by the data, most people blame you (Analyst/Data). Wear it as a badge of honor! It means your analysis has identified insights that are big enough, important enough, that the recipients get instantly worried. Ideally, […]

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Strategic Marketing Analytics: CMO Dashboards That Rock!

An extraordinary amount of time, effort, $$$ are spent on building dashboards/scorecards for CMOs… Yet, the end result, nearly always, is a useless data puke. It turns out boiling the ocean is hard. To build an effective big picture scorecard for the CMO, that is not data pukey, there are three crucial challenges that have […]

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Transform Data’s Impact: Pick The Right Success KPI!

Your analysis provides clear data that the campaign was a (glorious) failure. It could not be clearer. The KPI you chose for your brand campaign was Trust, it had a pre-set target of +5. The post-campaign analysis that compares performance across Test & Control cells shows that Trust did not move at all. (Suspiciously, there […]

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Winning With Data: Say No To Insights, Yes To Out-of-sights!

If there is one thing the universe agrees on, it is that you should just provide data… You should provide INSIGHTS!!! In the 807,150 (!) words I’ve written on this blog thus far, at least 400,000 have been dedicated to helping you find insights. In posts about advanced segmentation, in posts about how to build […]

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The Most Important Business KPIs. (Spoiler: Not Conversion Rate!)

I was reading a paper by a respected industry body that started by flagging head fake KPIs. I love that moniker, head fake. Likes. Sentiment/Comments. Shares. Yada, yada, yada. This is great. We can all use head fake metrics to calling out useless activity metrics. [I would add other head fake KPIs to the list: […]

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Increase Analytics Influence: Leverage Predictive Metrics!

Almost all metrics you currently use have one common thread: They are almost all backward-looking. If you want to deepen the influence of data in your organization – and your personal influence – 30% of your analytics efforts should be centered around the use of forward-looking metrics. Predictive metrics! But first, let’s take a small […]

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Marketing Analytics: Attribution Is Not Incrementality

One of the business side effects of the pandemic is that it has put a very sharp light on Marketing budgets. This is a very good thing under all circumstances, but particularly beneficial in times when most companies are not doing so well financially. There is a sharper focus on Revenue/Profit. From there, it is […]

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Analytics On The Bleeding Edge: Transforming Data’s Influence

Analytics teams are named for the silos and limitations within which they trap themselves. Paid Media. Owned Media. SEO. BI. Customer Service. Data Warehousing. Email. And, a thousand other silos (depending on your company size). One outcome of this reality is that while every team works hard to do their very best work, it is […]

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Simple Tricks To Up-level Your Analytics Reports.

Like you, I consume a whole lot of reports every day – company data, public data. Many are acceptable, some are very good and all the rest leave me extremely frustrated with both the ink and the think. People make so many obvious mistakes. Sometimes repeatedly. Just yesterday I was quietly seething because none of […]

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Smart Data Visualizations: Quality Assessment Algorithm

The gap between a bad and good data visualization is small. The gap between a good and great data visualization is a vast chasm! The challenge is that we, and our HiPPOs, bring opinions and feelings and our perceptions of what will go viral to the conversation. This is entirely counter productive to distinguishing between […]

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Deliver Step Change Impact: Marketing & Analytics Obsessions

Some moments in time are perfect to reflect on where you are, what your priorities are, and then consider what you should start-stop-continue. In those moments, you are not thinking of delivering incremental change… You are driven by a desire to deliver a step change (a large or sudden discontinuous change, especially one that makes […]

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