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WEBINAR SUMMARY

Webinar Title: Custom Calculations: Your Business Is Unique, Shouldn’t Your Metrics Be? (Oct 2015)

Company: Looker

Speakers:• Levi Davis, Analyst at Looker• Anika Kuesters-Smith, Analyst at Looker

Next:Webinar Overview

Webinar OverviewThis webinar provides an overview of building custom metrics for your organization. Looker analysts Levi Davis and Anika Kuesters-Smith discuss moving beyond high-level KPIs, the benefits of custom metrics, identifying key metrics, and rolling them out to the broader organization. They also provide numerous examples of companies who have successfully developed and rolled out custom metrics that have positively impacted several business areas, from user experience to sales effectiveness.

Next:Webinar Sections

Webinar SectionsPart 1: Custom Calculations: Your Business is Unique, Shouldn’t Your Metrics Be?Part 2: Beyond High Level KPIs – LookerPart 3: Benefits of Custom AnalyticsPart 4: Custom Metrics for HubspotPart 5: Ad Hoc Analysis of DataPart 6: Ad Hoc Analysis to Detect FraudPart 7: Metrics – Defining, Measuring, and Taking ActionPart 8: Getting Creative to Measure What you Want to MeasurePart 9: Data DemocracyPart 10: Measuring Success the Right Way – Upworthy and Looker

Next:Summary of Part 1

Part 1: Custom Calculations: Your Business is Unique, Shouldn’t Your Metrics Be?

The webinar begins with a brief introduction by Looker host, Elena. She then introduces the webinar presenters, Levi Davis and Anika Kuesters-Smith, both analysts at Looker. Levi provides an overview of the key topics covered in the webinar: moving beyond high-level KPIs, the benefits of custom metrics, identifying key metrics, and rolling them out to the broader organization.

Next:Summary of Part 2

Part 2: Beyond High Level KPIs – Looker

Levi goes on to discuss three reasons why companies should move beyond high level KPIs: 1. Looking at high level metrics does not allow you to uncover

hidden insights in your data 2. The ad hoc nature of many business questions requires using

custom metrics3. Significantly impacting high-level metrics is difficult for the

average employee to achieve. Anika further explains that moving beyond traditional KPIs allows employees to interact more closely with data, make data-driven decisions, and answer more interesting business questions.

Next:Summary of Part 3

Part 3: Benefits of Custom Analytics

Anika next provides an example of how Looker client Infectious Media moved away from traditional customer retention metrics, which allowed them to identify and better target key demographic segments.

Extra: Infectious Media on Looker video• http://www.looker.com/video/infectious-media

Next:Summary of Part 4

Part 4: Custom Metrics for Hubspot

In the next section, Levi delves further into the benefits of custom metrics by demonstrating how Hubspot uses custom metrics for measuring sales team performance. Salespeople are measured not just by quantity and size of deals, but also by quality and longevity of deals, which improves customer retention over the long term.

Extra: Driving Behavior With Data At Hubspot – Looker video• http://info.looker.com/h/i/118957871-driving-behavior-with-data-at-hubspot

Next:Summary of Part 5

Part 5: Ad Hoc Analysis of Data

Next, Levi discusses how custom metrics can be used in quick ad hoc analyses to answer simple questions, but that you should be careful of spurious or coincidental correlations that often surface in these types of analyses.

Next:Summary of Part 6

Part 6: Ad Hoc Analysis to Detect Fraud

Anika next provides an example of how ad hoc analysis helped a large sales organization better detect expense fraud and ultimately saved the company millions of dollars annually.

Next:Summary of Part 7

Part 7: Metrics – Defining, Measuring, and Taking Action

After this example, Anika suggests that the steps for implementing custom metrics

• First involves identifying your key metrics• Next, quantifying these metrics, and• Finally, once these metrics are in place, taking action to

continuously evaluate and improve upon the system

Next:Summary of Part 8

Part 8: Getting Creative to Measure What you Want to Measure

Levi further discusses how sometimes creativity is required to measure the metric you’re particularly interested in.

Additionally, setting up tracking for your custom metrics is critical and should be done in a quick and easy way, since new custom metrics will be implemented constantly.

Next:Summary of Part 9

Part 9: Data Democracy

Next, Levi suggests that a Business Intelligence tool like Looker should allow non-technical people to answer at least basic questions of the data, as it allows them to be more self-sufficient and feel more empowered.

Next:Summary of Part 10

Part 10: Measuring Success the Right Way – Upworthy and LookerAnika finishes the webinar by explaining how organizations may need to identify new metrics to to properly measure success.

The example she provides is about Upworthy, a progressive news and media company that developed two custom metrics to better measure customer engagement and attention. After implementing these metrics and refining their business intelligence processes, Upworthy was able to curate content more effectively, better engage its users, and outperform business goals.

Extra: Looker blog post about Upworthy’s data challenges• http://www.looker.com

/blog/a-next-generation-data-architecture-for-a-next-generation-media-business

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