a day in the life of a digital analyst

W H I T E P A P E R

A DAY IN THE LIFEOF A DIGITAL ANALYST

BY JIM STERNE

2AT INTERNET / WHITE PAPER

ABOUT JIM STERNE

Jim Sterne is an international consultant who focuses on measuring the value of the Web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written eight books on using the Internet for marketing, is the Founding President and current Chairman of the Digital Analytics Association and produces the eMetrics Summit and the Media Analytics Summit.

/ ABOUT JIM STERNE

http://www.targeting.com/

http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/

http://www.emetrics.org/

http://mediaanalyticssummit.com/

http://mediaanalyticssummit.com/

3AT INTERNET / WHITE PAPER / SUMMARY

Introduction 4

Start of a new day 5

Chapter 1: First Interruption: Advertising 6

Chapter 2: Second Interruption: Product Marketing 12

Chapter 3: Third Interruption: Product Merchandising 15

Chapter 4: Fourth Interruption: Customer Experience 19

Chapter 5: First Actual Meeting: 22Lunch with the New CMO

SUMMARY


INTRODUCTION

Do you know if your company’s digital strategy is trulyworking? Is your digital performance reflective of yourbusiness goals? When it comes to making choices, are the best decisions immediately clear?

Our solutions are designed to help crystallise insights, enabling you to answer these questions with a confident "yes." Intuitive and fully customisable, our tools let everyone at your company access, visualise and share the specific data they need, right when they need it. The result? More agile, effective, intelligent decisions.

In this white paper, renowned digital analytics expert Jim Sterne explores how different teams might use AT Internet’s tools to go beyond the data and make truly agile business decisions. Step into the shoes of John – a digital analyst on a mission to ask the questions that truly matter – and learn how to awaken decision-makers company-wide to the power of real-time, flexible data.

/ INTRODUCTION


START OF A NEW DAY

/ START OF A NEW DAY


"Hey, John. Sorry to pop in unannounced but I was sent to get the first trends of the new campaign on our fives top sites. We started it yesterday with our top ‘sponsors’. We’ve got this meeting this afternoon and we really need to show that display ads on identified websites are performing."

"Good morning, Andrew. Nice to see you. I hope you had a nice weekend."

"I, well, yes. Uhm, thank you and, uh, you too."

"Thank you."

"The numbers?"

"Not this time. This time, we’re going to discuss what business decisions you’re making with these numbers and why it’s so important to show those particular ads are better. That way, I can actually help your whole team accomplish your goals."

"Well, it’s no big thing... it’s just a meeting... We want to know if the new concept/campaign is having a good start and how the audience is responding to it."

"And what if they’re not?"

/ CHAPTER 1 / A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DIGITAL ANALYST

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"We want to know if the new campaign is having a good start and how the audience is responding to it."

FIRST INTERRUPTION:ADVERTISING

CHAPTER 1:


"Well, then... We might stop it sooner after giving it a try for a few days. Depends on the results. Actually what we are expecting is that the KPIs are above the average so we can justify extending it to more sponsors. That’s the second step of the campaign plan. Can you show me those numbers?"

"Certainly. What was the campaign label?"

"We didn’t get the chance to label it."

"I see. Tell me something. Last night, did that 2012, blue Peugeot drive by this office faster than the 2013, green Citroën?"

"What? I’m sorry... I didn’t... I wasn’t..."

"My point exactly. You want to know how well your ads performed after the fact, but you didn’t ask us to track them."

"But we only had an hour to get that ad delivered and it would take days for the 20 sponsors to add the tag..."

"You know, you can do that tagging thing yourself. We can show you how to create your own tags and make sure nothing leaves the building without one and then we can give you all the results. And fortunately, AT Internet, that’s our digital analytics tool, has this great feature called the Data Manager. This is one of those tricky situations where it can save the day. You sent that banner ad to 20 partners and I can, right here, integrate a custom source for the 20 different referrers."


They will be associated withthe right campaign

Fill in the referer URLs

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"You can do that tagging thing yourself. We can show you how to create your own tags...And then we can give you all the results."


"So here’s exactly what you were looking for. But for next time, we have a very straightforward process for tagging anything we put out there so we can track it and tell you how well it did."

"But if we only have an hour to..."

"Then you’ll have to squeeze in another fifteen seconds to get the right tagging in place."

"Fifteen seconds? And I can do that?"

"Yep."

"But we need this for display ads and search ads and emails and sponsored links and we need to track which did the best in a given campaign."

"We’re all set up for that and we can show you how to use our Data Manger in about half an hour. Each banner within a given campaign is uniquely identified and we can see how many times it was displayed and all the traffic generated to your landing page by traffic source."

"But we’ve got so many requirements from publishers. Sometimes it’s JavaScript or in an iFrame and sometimes they use different adservers like DART, and then we’ve got all the search engines."

"Yes, we can handle all of that. See, the thing I’m trying to explain is – if you will take just a moment to put the tags onto whatever promotion you’re running – we can manage all the data collection and report generation...


Just need to push it live

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That means you and I can talk about what you’re trying to get out the other end rather than spending all this time on the minutia of tagging. So now, let’s shift this conversation a little. What do you want to know about your campaigns?"

"Like I said, we need the regular campaign KPI for each of our five websites and the details per sponsor, and then need to compare it with the sales of the promoted product as well as the ‘side effects’ on other products..."

"Why?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"What do you hope to learn from those particular numbers?"

"Well obviously, we want to know which ads are doing better when shown on which websites or networks."

"The campaign optimization is mainly based on campaign performance comparison. Do you use other metrics and analyses feeding the optimization?"

"Where is this going?"

"My question exactly. There’s a lot of interesting behavioral and contextual information that can help you leverage your campaign globally. For instance, if we look at the timing, here, you see that generally all the navigation and content consumption is happening during the day, but if we add the conversions, we see they’re mostly made in the afternoon or on weekends."


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"There’s a lot of interesting behavioral and contextual information that can help you leverage your campaign globally."


"That’s interesting! Especially for basket abandonment, special offers and all the campaigns we’re running to accelerate the purchase process and..."

"And there is a lot more to dig into and get, but for that we have to get away from the Emergency Tagging thing. Basically, you want to know which ads are getting the most attention, bringing the most people back to our landing pages, encouraging the most engagement with our website and eventually causing more people to buy stuff so you know where you should spend your advertising budget next time, right?"

"Yes, of course."

"Great! Let’s focus on that end of the conversation instead of on the bits and bytes. First, let’s map out your next campaign and together, we’ll set up the tracking, the reporting, the dashboards and the majority of the work we do will be in place for next time. And, our system is flexible enough to accommodate all the weird things that happen in real life, like grabbing data from a live event on a tablet or tweaking our dashboards on the fly."

"Can you come to our meeting this afternoon and explain..."

"Explain why I didn’t just give you the numbers your boss wanted? Sure, but I’m going to send Margaret instead. She’s our liaison to your department and you’ll be working directly with her. She can walk your whole team through insight creation and data-driven business decision-making, and sign up the right people for do-it-yourself tagging training. I’ll let her know."


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"Our system is flexible enough to accommodate all the weird things that happen in real life."


"That would be great."

"Glad I could help. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I see the head of Product Marketing wants a word. Come on in, Michael..."


JOHN


SECOND INTERRUPTION: PRODUCT MARKETING

"You didn’t give me the pageviews per visit by source I asked for and I need to create my PowerPoint deck for my meeting this afternoon."

"Right. And I see you didn’t respond to my question about your request."

"You mean your snide, ‘Why do you want to know?’ I want to know so I can do my job!"

"Oh dear. I’m so sorry. I meant that question in the best way possible – really. Please have a seat and let me explain. What I wanted to know was this: What is the end game? What are you really trying to learn when you ask for those numbers?"

"Well, if I know which promotions are driving the most pageviews then I can do more of those types of promotions."

"Right. But when you’re counting pageviews, what are you really after? What is it that pageviews represent?"

"Oh, I see what you’re saying. I’m trying to figure out which of our product launches in the past two weeks are generating the most interest. We’re only going into production on half of them so I need to know which are the most interesting to the public."


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CHAPTER 2:

"What is the end game? What are you really trying to learn when you ask for those numbers?"


"Let me show you how easy it is to pull solid information out of our system so we can refine the question. Pageviews won’t inform you about sales. Pageviews per product may be interesting to get a view of the global interest in the product, but we can reveal some interesting phenomena if we overlay that indicator with the click-to-basket rate and the conversion rate per product."

"Yeah, but the last time I asked for that, it took days."

"Not any more. I just drag and drop this, and then drag and drop this, and here it is. We can call this first group Popular But Non Seller. People are really after those products – there’s a huge number of pageviews but almost no conversion. So we have to figure out what’s blocking sales. Is it uncompetitive pricing? Delivery time? Negative feedback?"

"OK, I know who can chase that down for me."

"Then you have Missed Best Sellers. These products have impressive conversion rates but really low pageviews. These are the ones you have to promote and really push in your merchandising. They just need more exposure. Or try to see how to help people find those products more easily. Is it a wording or search engine problem, or maybe we didn’t list them on affiliate sites?"


Popular but non seller Missed best sellers

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"THE LAST TIME I ASKED FOR THAT, IT TOOK DAYS."

"The last time I asked for that, it took days."


"OK, wait. This is great but I have to run. Is there some way I can access this report, just like you have it now?"

"Sure. Like this... here it is. I just integrated it into your current dashboard. Look over these numbers but come back next week and we can examine more interesting aspects like the profitability per product."

"Thanks. We’ll talk more. This is going to be really useful. I can’t wait to tell Melissa in product merchandising, but I have to go now."

"Don’t worry, I will. She’s right behind you. Thanks for dropping by, Michael. Come on in, Melissa."


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THIRD INTERRUPTION: PRODUCT MERCHANDISING

"I feel like I should have been in this meeting. Product marketing and product merchandising should be looking at the same info at the same time, right?"

"That’s a really good idea. In fact, it’s crucial! I can manipulate the data but only those responsible for getting the work done can really understand what it means. I can point things out, but it’s the synergies between the right people and the data that make the magic happen."

"Well, I don’t need magic at the moment, I just need to know how long it’ll take to find out what’s selling in the stores compared with what’s selling online."

"Not long at all. But if you tell me the question behind the question, I can come up with some useful insights."

"That would be great. Now that we’ve changed our strategy to the web supporting the stores instead of competing with them, we’re trying to understand why people buy some things online and some things in the store. There’s a lot involved in a consumer decision like that, so I want to start with in-store versus online sales by geographic regions just to see what it looks like."

"And what do you think the reasons are?"


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CHAPTER 3:


"I’ve been in this business for a long time and the one thing I know for sure is that my guesses are wrong about as often as they’re right, and the only reason I’m still in this business is that I can quickly change my mind when I’m wrong. I want to know what’s actually happening instead of flipping coins or depending on pundits."

"You just made me happy. You are going to love how flexible our data collection and management tools are."

"I want to really be able to dig into the numbers and have a conversation with the data we have and a lot more besides."

"A lot more?"

"Whatever I can get. If store sales are down and online sales are up in the same location for all our product lines then I assume the weather is bad. Can we correlate weather data to our online behavior and in-store sales figures?"

"Yes."


GenderAgeRevenueEducationHousehold

Age

Revenue

Gender

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"Can we correlate weather data to our online behavior and in-store sales figures?"


"And segment our customers by age, location, hobbies and topics of interest?"

"We have relationships with third-party data brokers and can segment by gender, size of household, employment status, income, number of kids in the house, stuff like that. We integrate sociographic and demographic data made up of nearly 100 criteria per profile just based on anonymous surfing habits. And I can set up periodic reports or give you a dashboard once we settle on what view works best for you."

"OK, good. But dashboards are good for sales or finance, not for me. Oh, sure, I want to be notified if something goes haywire, but what I really want is to have the keys and drive the data myself."

"OK, you just made me very happy. Jessica is your department liaison. I’d like to set up a one-hour, initial training session and then weekly meetings so you can get to know how to bend the system to your will."

"I’ve done this before and frankly, I find it too frustrating."

"Really? Why?"

"Twice, I’ve spent hours learning about system limitations instead of learning how to make it answer my questions. ‘We don’t have a variable for that,’ or, ‘That tag was implemented the wrong way and we didn’t collect that data,’ or, ‘We can only show that sort of thing on a monthly basis.’ Really frustrating."

"Wow, you really have been down this road before, haven’t you? Those are the exact reasons why we chose AT Internet. We can correct tagging mistakes without tearing everything apart and starting from scratch. We can create our own custom variables and there’s no limit. And it’s pretty near real time so you won’t wait a month or even a day to see up-to-date data. Look at this dashboard we just put together. This is what the CEO sees, and here is a much more detailed view for the managers. You don’t have to think about the limits – just think about what information would be useful for each group and we’ll build the dashboard. This is extremely flexible. We can add or modify any information on the fly so think of it as a ‘continuous improvement process’."

"Which way is Jessica’s office?"


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"Right over here. Let me introduce you. Jessica, I’d like you to set up some meetings with Melissa and get her up to speed. She’s our latest convert and wants to get her hands on the data."

"Wonderful! Nice to meet you, Melissa."

"I’ll leave it to you two while I see what Edward wants. Hi, Ed."


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FOURTH INTERRUPTION: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

"Hi, John. I’m hoping you have some magic data that can tell me how our customers are acting differently on different devices."

"I’m headed over for lunch with our new CMO. Care to walk and talk?"

"Yeah, that’d be nice. Listen, I just got back from a conference where the head of one of the biggest retailers and the head of one of the biggest online publishers talked about how people of different ages are behaving differently on tablets versus phones, and how they act differently depending on whether they started their product search on one or the other. We’re putting hashtags on billboards so tracking website data alone just doesn’t cut it."

"So you want to be sure you’re tracking from, say, a mobile ad to an app to our website to the store?"

"Yes, I know, it’s too much to ask, but that’s the direction we have to go in."

"We are going that way. In fact, we have the technology to do that now."


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"You want to be sure you’re tracking from, say, a mobile ad to an app to our website to the store?"

CHAPTER 4:


"We just need to sit down with you and your team to figure out how to incentivize people to identify themselves on each of their devices."

"But nobody does that."

"I do that with Amazon. I want Amazon to recognize me on every device I have and if they had a store, I’d use my loyalty card every time."

"That’s right. Me too. So we can do this without fingerprinting or IP addresses?"

"That’s right. We just have to get them to want to log in, like we do on Amazon. Once they log in, not only will we have a clear vision of each specific behavior on each device, but we’ll have it at the visitor level so we can correlate it to any action made on any platform."

"Like, did he put the product in his basket on his mobile phone, and later buy it on his computer?"


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"We can do this without fingerprinting or IP addresses?"


"Right, and we can combine mobile, tablet and computer funnel performances... the whole thing. We’ll have a real end-to-end, multi-device perspective. Then, we just have to ask the right questions. So, when can you come by? We’ll map out the next few months of promotions to see how we can capture the brand experience from the customer’s point of view."

"How soon can you convince our new CMO that it’s a good idea?"

"In about a minute when I sit down to lunch with him. That’s him over there."

"Good luck!"

"Thanks."


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FIRST ACTUAL MEETING: LUNCH WITH THE NEW CMO

"Hello, Paul, I’m John."

"Thanks for making the time, John. Have a seat."

"Thank you. I understand you’ve worked with our new CEO before."

"Twelve years. That’s why I’m your new CMO. Mary brought me in to help get this place into shape. We’re certain that this company is primed for leveraging data so we’re here to shake things up."

"Once we shifted our focus to getting a decent data governance plan in place, we zeroed in on the best analytics engine we could find. I’m enthused by our tech, so now it’s all about people. We simply have to have more people..."

"You know we have zero budget for new hires? Let me ask you a straight question. How can we dramatically improve things within our current resources and solution?"

"Indeed! My current team could pull so much more value from the data and tools we already have if only we could be insights creators instead of just generating thoughtless, useless reports. The people who do come in see the value...

/ FIRST ACTUAL MEETING / A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DIGITAL ANALYST

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"How can we dramatically improve things within our current resources and solution?"

CHAPTER 5:


...I just had four encouraging conversations this morning, but I can’t get everybody to see the whole picture all at once. I don’t need more people, I just need managers to switch gears and start leveraging the data. We have to have more buy-in to the idea that analytics is a tool and not a judgment."

"This is all about the business value of our analytics investment. Is our current implementation of AT Internet easy enough to use that we can get our business decision-makers comfortable slicing and dicing?"

"Yes, it is. But let’s start with the business problems we’re trying to solve. If you want to drive from Paris to Berlin, our conversation about data is very different than if you want to get from Paris to London."

"Well, I want to do both and get to San Francisco as well. So here’s the problem: I want to raise revenue, lower costs and increase customer satisfaction, but the most important question to answer is how well the money we’re spending on all our different promotional efforts in different marketing channels is contributing to the growth of our higher-value customers. For example, we have a content marketing program but no strategy. We barely have a content marketing philosophy. How can we measure the success of our videos, white papers and blog posts so we know what we should be doing more of and what we should stop doing?"

"Well, first we have to define success. What’s the goal?"

"Standard marketing metrics, right along the customer life cycle: intent to purchase, purchase, customer satisfaction."

"OK. So, Jennifer runs the Behavioral group and they share intent with Research. Research does the text analysis stuff – what people say – and Susan’s group looks at what people do: clicks, time on site, recency, frequency and such. Think of it as Research looking outside the company and Behavioral watching what happens on our own properties."

"OK. But I’ve been thwarted by tools that offer a massive number of reports, but throw up technical roadblocks or charge exorbitant fees when we want to drill. People learn not to ask really good questions because of how long and how much money it takes to get answers. I’m not as familiar with the AT Internet suite as I’d like, so walk me through it."


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"I want to raise revenue, lower costs and increase customer satisfaction... How well is the money we’re spending contributing to the growth of our higher value customers?"


"It’s a really flexible system but without the pain and suffering of a raw SQL query so yes, we can slice and dice without the questions needing to go through a programmer. We just need to get people trained on asking really good questions."

"OK, fine. Let’s say people get beyond the regular, basic behavioral or consumption stuff. Can we readily derive more important metrics like customer lifetime value?"

"Well, this is a bit more complicated because of the variables. I mean, one piece of content can be consumed in multiple versions across multiple devices and even on lots of different websites because we syndicate it through affiliates. It’s not as daunting as it sounds; with the content tagged appropriately, we can tell you which type of content in which format works best on which devices."

"But let’s say some new business unit wakes up to the power of analytics, comes to your team and starts asking a bunch of questions. The first answer is inevitably, ‘We don’t know,’ because they haven’t followed your tagging protocol. Their data is meaningless. How do you keep them interested?"

"The AT Internet Data Manager is powerful, but like any tag management system, it relies on a straightforward tagging protocol in order to assure current and historical data quality and consistency. So, to keep them from walking away and not coming back, maybe our new CMO can make our tagging protocol law. Then we could answer questions, provide insights and turn this place into a data-driven insights machine."

"Are we getting enough detail out of AT Internet to let product managers and merchandisers and store managers freely ask a wide variety of questions?"

"We’re tagging and tracking the usual stuff from up at the category level to monitor the marketplace, down to internal search to see where our menus are failing. We can do multivariate testing. We can watch Flash content and mobile sites..."

"But what if we want to create something new, like a tag that denotes a specific interaction like a combination of behaviors over a certain time period that indicates interest in one product segment over another?"


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"Yes, we can create custom metrics which means unlimited customer dimensions. In other words, we have a true analytics engine instead of pre-canned reports."

"Alright, let’s try this: We have multiple stores online and offline, selling the same product in different colors and sizes sometimes under different brand names. Can you tell me how many blue, size 6, cap sleeve, knee-length dresses we sold in each store and in total, and what sort of customers bought them and what got them to us in the first place?"

"Yes to all of that. You can also break it down by zip code or customer catchment area, which not only shows the sales turnover generated on and offline, but identifies cannibalization between the two. We can even integrate our CRM data or use an AT Internet profiling partner to link consumption to specific profiles. We can recognize the difference between online and offline shoppers and serve relevant content and offers in real time and then we can analyze the interaction between online and offline. For example, a customer who bought online and picked up their order in store, but cancelled one item. AT Internet’s system captures the updated order information and gives us a real end-to-end view."

"Good. But how well are we doing with data integration?"

"We look at three types of data integration. First, new data sources come into the Analytics Center of Excellence and I monitor all of that. Second, we make sure those numbers show up properly in dashboards. We’re very big on automating reports, so we spend a lot of time getting the dashboard right and as little time as possible grinding them out. Think of these two as input and output."

"I’ve found reports are fine for accounting, but we need to operate based on thresholds, alerts and the development of insights. I have yet to see a new idea pop up out of a dashboard."

"Our delivery team prides itself on providing meaningful dashboards with standard gauges to assure you things are running fine. We show pops-and-drops, which are the alerts, and then comments, which are inklings and hunches and questions. This is where they work with our senior analysts who are the discovery folks...


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"We can analyze the interaction between online and offline. ...AT Internet’s system gives us a real end-to-end view."


...They are the ones who liaise with business units and the product managers to figure out if they can glean meaning out of the numbers and come up with insights to drive the business."

"To do that well, we need ultimate flexibility with the data. Lay out the restrictions for me. How far back can we go and how granular is the data we can look at?"

"This isn’t a black box. We own all of our data. It doesn’t go away unless we want it to, and I believe we want at least two years in order to do seasonal comparisons."

"How much do you trust the data?"

"You mean, data quality?"

"I mean, if an analyst comes to me and says the data suggests we should place all of our bets on red products this season, how seriously should I consider it?"

"That’s a matter of confidence. I trust our behavioral data and our transactional data with 97% confidence and..."

"Not 100%?"

"Stuff happens – real life. But there are quality assurance steps throughout – when we capture the data, when we process it, when we plug it into dashboards and when we export it to other systems."

"Once we get people to understand that some data is more trustworthy than others, how do we get them comfortable asking questions?"

"’The data suggests,’ is the important thing here. So far, intellectual capacity and gut feel are more capable – flawed, yes, but capable – of weighing a massive number of variables and coming to a conclusion. The data might suggest something, but people with years of experience are much more astute at ‘knowing’ if the advice makes sense or is a statistical anomaly."

"So you’re not all about the data, all the time."


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"A clock tells me it’s lunch time, but can’t tell me if I’m hungry."

"Your watch should be able to someday."

"And your product managers should be able to determine if there’s a market for it."

"Now I want to ask about the real value that comes out of the far end of all this data diving. I need to really understand where, how and when we get orders of magnitude return on our investment on technology, process and people. I need to defend all of this to the Board. They get it, but they don’t quite believe it yet."

"Well, now we’re back to the fact that we have a decent data governance plan and a solid analytics engine in place. So now, it’s all about people."

"We need to bring them on board."

"Right, and there are multiple issues. First, they have to understand the upside. For that, we have Lunch-and-Learn sessions, success story case studies and online tutorials, but they won’t come or read or participate until they are convinced, and they won’t take the time to be convinced unless there’s a downside to staying away. Put analytics in their performance reviews to make them viscerally interested in the process rather than just the result, and they’ll stop ignoring the analytics. Once they see what the ACE can do for them..."

"ACE?"

"Sorry, Analytics Center of Excellence... Then they’ll start getting creative about using data. That’s when you start getting orders of magnitude return on investment. The ACE can get them started, but the magic happens when they really understand the possibilities and their ad hoc questions are less about proving that they made a good decision last quarter and more about making a more informed decision today."

"But you’re still going to have to get them to tolerate this governance scheme you have in mind."


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"The magic happens when people understand the possibilities, and their ad hoc questions are less about proving last quarter’s good decisions, and more about making informed decisions today."


"We have to get them to comply with the data governance structure we have in place. First they get it, then they like it, and then they want it. That makes them willing to do the work to make it work."

"You sure you don’t have some marketing experience hidden in your resume?"

"Scout’s honor. So, you motivate them, I educate them, their peers convince them by example and once they’re on board with the governance process..."

"So spell out the orders of magnitude return."

"This is about a new way of thinking about business. Once our directors and managers understand the depth of our data and the ways we can slice and dice, they will start to ask more kinds of questions. That’s going to make all of them more willing to turn to data as part of their decision-making process. Gut feel has worked for humans for millions of years but data-informed gut feel is demonstrably better."

"You want to see all of them to log in and start asking questions?"

"Some of them, certainly. But not all of them have the time to acquire the in-depth knowledge about which data are trustworthy, and to what degree."

"So you’re not a proponent of data democratization?"

"I’m also not a proponent of everybody managing their legal problems or medical diagnoses. There are certain skills that take a while to hone and business decision-makers are not usually trained in those areas. That’s why we have policies and oversight committees."

"But you agree that we want to get them to the point where they can ask ad hoc questions."

"Yes, that is the goal. If we can get everybody excited enough to really get creative with their questions then we end up with orders of magnitude return on investment."

"But if they get good at it and ask a lot, then they overrun your ACE with query after query. I’ve seen whole reporting processes grind to a halt because too many people started asking too many questions and since they couldn’t manipulate the data themselves..."


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"This is a new way of thinking about business. ...Gut feel has worked for humans for millions of years, but data-informed gut feel is demonstrably better."


"I’ve seen that too and that’s another reason we went with the AT Internet approach. This engine is capable of interactive, drag-and-drop, on-the-fly segmentation that lets me slice on any dimension, preview the results to see if it makes sense before pushing it out to a hundred dashboards. We need the business side of the house to use their intuition and experience to see if our results make sense in terms of reality on the street, but we can’t give them the keys or it’s too easy for them to tweak their questions ever so slightly to get the answers they want, rather than surfacing new truths. That’s where the analyst and the business person need to work together. And that’s why I think we have the technology and the processes... now we just need to get the people in this company to see data as a valuable tool and not an accounting of their abilities."

"I get your point. But I want to be very sure your team and tech are up to the task. Let’s say somebody comes up with a unique, custom variable and then wants to use it in other calculations that get used elsewhere? Like people do with formulas in spreadsheets?"

"Not only can we create those kind of metrics, we can encode them so that when somebody asks a complex question that references that calculation, the query for that variable executes against the most current data we have. You can create a multidimensional variable and stick it in a dashboard and then it’s built in."

"But if we really get on a roll, I don’t want my people to be stymied in the middle of a brainstorming session by being told they’re asking for too much, too fast. For instance, how long would it take you to give me a report highlighting which content elements and on which platforms were most likely responsible for driving sales of red shoes in the past two weeks?"

"About three minutes."

"And if I said I wanted it to be month-over-month by demographic and personality type... by region?"

"Another three minutes."

"Updated daily with three threshold alerts to be emailed to five different people."

"One more minute."


JOHN

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JOHN

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JOHN

"This engine is capable of interactive, drag-and-drop, on-the-fly segmentation that lets me slice on any dimension, preview the results to see if it makes sense before pushing it out to a hundred dashboards."


"And show the difference in profit between purchase journeys that started on a phone versus those that started on a tablet versus a desktop."

"Two more minutes."

"Broken down by whether they received and/or opened a promotional email."

"Another minute."

"Who were also exposed to a specific display ad."

"Another minute."

"For people who purchased within two days, five days and ten days."

"Another two minutes."

"As compared to blue shoes, by size and brand."

"Three hours."

"Wait... Why?"

"Because it will take the first hour to round up all of the people whose business decisions will be based on the results of that query, and the next hour to find out why they are asking the question. Then I’ll know enough to use other data they are unaware of to give them much more nuanced answers they can use for lots of decisions."

"And the third hour?"

"Lunch."


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About AT Internet

AT Internet is one of the world’s major players in Digital Analytics. Its decision-making solutions and services provide companies with an integral analysis of their performance and presence on all online digital platforms: the web, mobile and social media. The strength of AT Internet’s technology and the quality of its customer relations are recognised worldwide. AT Internet has more than 3,500 clients all over the world from all sectors. The company, which has more than 200 employees, is present in 32 different countries through its clients, subsidiaries and partners.

Credits: Author: Jim Sterne Illustrations: Mark Hill Layout & graphics: Romain Zampieri Copywriting & editorial coordination: Ashley Kibler, Bernard Segarra

Legal notice: The brands and logos contained in this document are registered or non-registered trademarks, property of the AT Internet Corporation, or third parties. Any use not explicitly authorized by the holders of the aforesaid brands is strictly prohibited. Any reproduction, partial or total, of this document without the express authorization of AT Internet is prohibited. AT Internet reserves the right to update the current document at any time and without prior notice. Non-binding document and informations.

© AT Internet - 2014


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