Data analysis is not easy. It takes years to get good at it, and once you get good at it you realize how much more there is to learn. That is part of the joy. You are always learning. You are always growing. This blogpost is a collection of tips I share with my friends who are just starting out. Each tip is a "simple" mistake that is easily avoided. My hope is that you'll skip them if you are aware of them, and move on to making more important valuable mistakes. :)
I am going to break one of my unspoken cardinal rules: Only write about real problems and measurement that is actually possible in the real world. I am going to break the second part of the rule. I am going to define a way for you to think about measuring social media, and you can't actually easily measure what I am going to recommend. So why break the rule?
With a plethora of digital media channels at our disposal, and new ones on the way every day (!), how do you prioritize your efforts? How do you figure out which channels to invest in more and which to kill? How do you figure out if you are spending more money reaching the exact same current or prospective customers multiple times? How do you get over the frustration of having done attribution modeling and realizing that it is not even remotely the solution to your challenge of using multiple media
99.9996253% of Web Analytics reports produced are utterly useless. Partly because of a lack of any tie to business strategy (ensure you have a Digital Marketing & Measurement Model!), partly because they are out of the box standard reports that web analytics vendors create for “average” people (and we both know that you are not average!), and partly because all they do is present data in the aggregate (a punishable criminal offence if there ever was one!).
Web Analysts are blessed with an immense amount of data, and an amazing amount of valuable, even sexy, metrics to understand business performance. Yet our heroic efforts to report the aforementioned sexy metrics leads to little business action. Why?
