According to the 2016 State of Analytics research, 86% of industry professionals believe that data are critical to their decision-making processes. Really? What is today called data-driven is not exactly what being guided by data truly means. KPIs, dashboards, online reports, data and more data. They are just data! Few professionals contextualize data and turn data into actions. You can be a specialist in collecting numbers, but it is no use if you do not know how to use them. The premise of the digital professional today is to be data-driven, analytical, skilled at crunching data… Yes, all beautiful and wonderful, but how about turning data into something tangible? In a Forrester survey, 74% of companies want to be data-driven, but only 29% say they are good at connecting analyses with actions. In other words, 2 out of every 3 companies do not know how to act on data. If you have in your company more than 10 macro KPIs, something is wrong. I am sorry to tell you that your company suffers an organizational pathology. It must be among those 2 companies cited above. Want to know whether your company is really guided by data? Simple: define metrics on which actions can be taken. Before thinking about numbers, before thinking about audience, define metrics together with your data-collection definition. You will only be able to call yourself data-driven if everyone is aligned to a central metric, everyone has access to the data they need, and everyone can draw insights from those data. When you unite your entire company around a common metric, that drives all employees to act toward what is essential for the experience and impact of your product or service on the user. A tip: if you have any KPI in your company from which it is impossible to draw any insight and turn it into action, delete it! It serves little purpose beyond cluttering your spreadsheets and confusing your current actions. In the same 2016 State of Analytics research, 60% of people said they use 2 or more analysis tools. What for? Certainly their functionalities are not being used completely enough to be worth their costs. One well-chosen analysis tool is already enough for the whole company to have access to the data and draw useful insights from them. The more different tools or databases, the more chances of error with divergent data.
60% of the companies interviewed in State of Analytics 2016 use more than one data-analysis tool. I will not even talk about those KPIs that are “manipulable,” created by the truckload. An example is Channel Attribution in digital marketing, or Multi Attribution Model. There is so much cross-referenced data that what should better indicate where results are coming from only confuses the data analysis even more. If each marketing professional models their own form of attribution — the one where the result looks prettier — that is hardly a good sign. It is one more way to present pretty data for weak results. Avoid that, be critical, and act on data and metrics that matter. One of the most important metrics for digital marketing is ROI, or return on investment. Is it hard to calculate how your actions influence that metric? Here is the secret.
Prefer the whole book?