Tag: analytics

I’m Giving Video Content a Try!

As y’all may recall, last year I was lucky enough to spens some time working with the fine folks at Locally Optimistic to produce and run some AMA content for them – they ended up being more similar to traditional interviews, but folks seemed to enjoy them!

You can find those all here!

These were well received, and generated a TON of insight for folks working in the data and analytics space – but I had a few things I wanted to try doing a little differently:

  • They could be more discoverable: it was tough to know which guests talked about what, they were about an hour long so it was a big bite of content if there was only one thing the viewer was interested in – even with YouTube’s search function it’s likely folks were leaving before the parts they were interested in arrived.
  • They needed a little more social support: I tweeted about each one, but probably different parts and points of the conversation could have warranted its own outreach.
  • The live format, where we’d schedule them and invite members of the community to join, and then post afterward, was a bit tough to schedule, and we never really got the community engagement during the calls that we had hoped for.

So, I’m putting together some videos that hopefully are a step in the right direction – I’ll chat with similar folks, luminaries in the data and analytics space, and then publish the entire conversation, but also smaller chunks (ideally one per topic) which can be posted separately so that folks who are only interested in, say, data career ladders, can easily find and watch only that piece.

I still absolutely have a lot to learn – both about being a data professional as well as producing and sharing video content! – but, I’m giving it a try! I’m also hoping to use this energy to help carry me into blogging more, once more – but that’s a perennial hope, isn’t it?

With no further ado, here is the first full-length conversation, with my friends Stephen and Emilie – I think you’re going to like it!

I’m Doing Live Video Interviews!

This post is a very exciting announcement for me, so I won’t do the typical online-content thing where I tell you a big, narrative tale about me and my values before I actually do the announcing – I’ll do that after.

This coming Monday – TOMORROW – June 24th, at 4PM EST, I’ll be doing the first of many live-streamed video Ask-Me-Anything style interviews with professionals working at the intersection of data and analytics!

(If you’re reading this and want to make a Google Calendar event right this minute, you know what, here’s the Zoom link: https://brooklyndata.zoom.us/j/501489762 )

This first session I’ll be sitting down with my friend and yours, the singular Matt Mazur, once my colleague at Automattic, then a member of the eminent customer-support software Help Scout, and now a free agent, applying his immense experience and insight to problems of analysis and data management for a number of companies, all of which are lucky to have him.

I’m putting this interview together in partnership with the Locally Optimistic team, who I have gotten to know over the last few months and have just been, honestly, consistently impressed!

I first joined the Locally Optimistic community via their blog, as I think is also the case for many of the current members of that Slack instance. As its membership has grown, it’s been a really excellent source of insight and camaraderie: I got to meet a few folks in person at a Looker meetup in NYC (I’m just a drive up the Hudson, remember), as well as at the Marketing Analysis and Data Science conference out in San Francisco, earlier this year.

Ever since I shuttered my podcast about hop farming (more about that here), I’ve missed the kind of social access that doing regular interviews can offer: I am by nature an inquisitive person (some might uncharitably say nosy), and having access to a socially acceptable way to totally pepper someone with questions was in so many ways a rewarding experience for me.

In some ways, Trellis to Table (the hop podcast referenced above) was about connecting small groups and individuals involved in small-scale hop farming, and helping them to share value: by interviewing this totally novel little crew of twenty-something first time farmers in Minnesota, their lessons and energy could leapfrog to the lifetime farmers in Upstate NY, in South Carolina, and suddenly this value had exploded across a network that didn’t even exist before – that was the big motivation for me, by the end.

I think in some ways the intersection of software engineering, data analysis, and business intelligence is in a similar place – there’s a good post about this new type of professional, the Analytics Engineer, on LO – there is this really large, and growing, community of folks whose work doesn’t yet have a clear set of job titles, or a clear sense of what their career progression might look like.

In tapping the Locally Optimistic community for exciting, interesting folks to engage in these video conversations, we can start to create a better shared understanding of our work, and what our work looks like, and how we can get better both as individuals but also as a community of practice.

I’m very excited to get back into the interview game: it’s something I really enjoy, and I hope that y’all are able to get a lot out of it as well.

Matt and I will talk about his professional journey, which has taken him from an officer in the Air Force, to leading an analytics team, to starting his own software business and becoming a business intelligence consultant.

We’ll also explore the world of internal organizational communication, working with non-data teams, and having an impact as a data analyst.I’m very excited to get back into the interview game: it’s something I really enjoy, and I hope that y’all are able to get a lot out of it as well.

As one last reminder, this first session is this coming Monday – TOMORROW – June 24th, at 4PM EST

Here’s the Zoom link: https://brooklyndata.zoom.us/j/501489762

If you want to be super cool, I am also going to be trying to live-stream this via my Twitch channel, which I am literally creating just for this series (!) here: My Real Not a Joke Twitch Stream

Source & Medium: A Medium Sized Dilemma

Subtitle: Source, Medium, Attribution, Stale Information, and The Future of Data

Here’s our situation – we want to be able to slice reporting and dashboards by a number of dimensions, including source and medium.

MARDAT (the team I’m lucky enough to be working with) is working to make this kind of thing a simple exercise in curiosity and (dare I say) wonder. It’s really interesting to me, and has become more and more clear over the last year or so, how important enabling curiosity is. One of the great things that Google Analytics and other business intelligence tools can do is open the door to exploration and semi-indulgent curiosity fulfillment.

You can imagine, if you’re a somewhat non-technical member of a marketing or business development team, you’re really good at a lot of things. Your experience gives you a sense of intuition and interest in the information collected by and measured by your company’s tools.

If the only way you have access to that information is by placing a request, for another person to go do 30 minutes, two hours, three hours of work, that represents friction in the process, that represents some latency, and you’re going to find yourself disinclined to place that kind of request if you’re not fairly certain that there’s a win there – it pushes back on curiosity. It reduces your ability to access and leverage your expertise.

This is a bad thing!

That’s a little bit of a digression – let’s talk about Source and Medium. Source and Medium are defined pretty readily by most blogs and tools: these are buckets that we place our incoming traffic in. People who arrive at our websites, where ever they were right before they arrived at our websites, that’s Source and Medium.

We assign other things too – campaign name, keyword, all sorts of things. My dilemma here actually applies to the entire category of things we tag our customers with, but it’s quicker to just say, Source and Medium.

Broadly, Source is the origin (Google, another website, Twitter, and so forth) and Medium is the category (organic, referral, etc) – if this is all new to you I recommend taking a spin through this Quora thread for a little more context.

What I am struggling with, is this: for a site like WordPress.com, where folks may come and go many times before signing up, and they may enjoy our free product for a while before making a purchase, at what point do you say, “OK, THIS is the Source and Medium for this person!”

Put another way:  when you make a report, say, for all sales in May, and you say to the report, “Split up all sales by Source and Medium,” what do you want that split to tell you?

Here are some things it might tell you:

  • The source and medium for the very first page view we can attribute back to that customer, regardless of how long ago that page view was.
  • The source and medium for a view of a page we consider an entry page (landing pages, home page, etc), regardless of how long ago that page view was.
  • The source and medium for the very first page view, within a certain window of time (7 days, 30 days, 1 year)
  • The source and medium for the first entry page (landing page, homepage) within a certain window of time (7 days, 30 days, 1 year)
  • The source and medium for the visit that resulted in a signup, rather than the first ever visit.
  • The source and medium for the visit that resulted in a conversion, rather than the first ever visit.
  • The source and medium for an arrival based on some other criteria (first arrival of all time OR first arrival since being idle for 30 days, something like that)

It feels like at some point Source and Medium should go bad, right? If someone came to the site seven years ago, via Friendster or Plurk or something, signed up for a free site, and then came back last week via AdWords, we wouldn’t want to assign Friendster | Referral to that sale, right?

Maybe we have to create more dynamic Source/Medium assignation: have one for “First Arrival,” one for “Signup,” one for “Purchase.” Maybe even something like Source/Medium for “Return After 60+ Days Idle”

In the long run, it feels like having a sense of what sources are driving each of those behaviors more or less effectively would be helpful, and could help build insights – but I also feel a little crazy: does no one else have this problem with Source and Medium?

Google Analytics for Science from Scientists

Google Analytics for Science from Scientists

In January, I had an opportunity (through Catchafire) to work with the science education nonprofit Science from Scientists. They had recently set up a Google Analytics property on their web site, and were looking for a volunteer to get things running properly.

Working with their Director of Web Services, I developed:

  • Custom Dashboards to track engagement, donations, lesson plan usage, and geographic interest.
  • Automated email reporting to various staff members and departments.
  • A Campaign Tracking URL builder.
  • Educational screencasts for all of the above.

Today, I’m happy to click the “Project Complete” button at Catchafire, setting Science from Scientists to sail, equipped with a batch of customized data delivery utilities and the educational resources to make use of them in the future.

You can see my Catchafire profile here.