The Analytics Power Hour

Some people (possibly even one of the co-hosts of this podcast...on this very episode) have been known to say, "People have this dependency on Excel, which is freakin' weird!" We know it wasn't Tim, because he wouldn't have filtered his language! Whether it's a symptom of weirdness, an illustration of inertia, or an invisible hand of inevitability, though, Excel remains omnipresent. Is that a good...

Do you model professionally? Would you like to? Or, are you  uncertain . These are the topics of this episode: Bayesian statistician (among other official roles that are way less fun to say) Dr. Elea Feit  joined the gang to discuss how we, as analysts, think about data put it to use. Things got pretty deep, included the exploration of questions such as, "If you run a test that includes a holdout...

Moe sat down for a chat with privacy and GDPR expert Aurélie Pols to dive in to some of the questions that, at times, get treated as peripheral in the run-up to new regulations, but that seem like they are fairly fundamental when it comes to understanding the rationale and drivers behind those regulations: what does the Holocaust have to do with GDPR? Is GDPR something that was simply dreamed up i...

Raise your hand if you work for a company that sells exclusively low-consideration products and only sells them online. Anyone? Anyone? We only see a couple of hands out there. For all the rest of you, this episode might be of interest. We sat down with Amy Sample — Senior Director of Consumer Insights and Strategy at PBS by day, president of the DAA board by night — to discuss approaches for effe...

For the second year in a row for the podcast -- but the first appearance since Moe joined the crew -- we headed to the Hunguest Grandhotel Galya outside Budapest for Superweek , one of the most unique conference experiences in the digital analytics industry: comfortably isolated over an hour outside of Budapest in a beautiful setting, it's a temporary community of, for, and by the analyst. With se...

In this, our initial bonus audio, Tim sits down with Lee Isensee , creator and curator of the Measure Slack team . We plug the Slack team on every episode of the podcast, and all three co-hosts are active members of the team, so we wanted to find out a little bit about the history, challenges, and envisioned future for the platform. Standard bonus content disclaimer:   Bonus content is not release...

You love analytics. Great. You even love your job (hopefully)! But, you're thinking about the future, and it looks like there is a fork in the road. Should you take the path that leads you down the people management path? Or, should you take the path that leads you deeper into the data itself, but as an individual contributor. Can you pursue  both paths? As it turns out, Michael stumbled down the...

Do you ever feel like you've got the analytics blues because you see what needs to happen, and it's something innovative, and all the signals say it's the  right thing to do... but the realities of organizational life are a brick wall on the path to progress? Welcome to corporate life, buddy. That's just the way it is! Or...is it? On this episode, the gang sits down with Evan LaPointe and gets him...

Happy new year! Nothing says a new year like a new year's resolution. And, what's a better professional resolution than to work with stakeholders more effectively? Unfortunately, we've all come across business users who have no interest in the data, have  too much interest in the data, or maybe even have the right amount of interest...but in the wrong data. Interactions with those stakeholders can...

2017 was a big year for both the digital analytics industry and for the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Join us, won't you, as we (figuratively!) gaze upon our navels? From the traction the #womeninanalytics movement gained on multiple fronts, to the looming promise of machine learning and AI getting a real foothold in the field, to the podcast finally adding a co-host who is universally admired, we...

Are you a data subject? If you're a person, then you better believe you are! And, so is every person who visits your website. And, if you are in the EU, or you have visitors from the EU, then May 25th, 2018, is a day you should be keeping a close eye on and preparing for now! On this episode, Jodi Daniels of Red Clover Advisors joins Moe and Tim to talk all things General Data Privacy Regulation (...

When you find a true insight, it can make your head spin. But, will your head spin in a different direction if the insight is found in Australia than if it is found in the United States? On this episode, Rod Jacka from Panalysis joins the crew for a balanced discussion (northern AND southern hemispheres) about how the phrase "actionable insights" should turn the stomach of any right-thinking analy...

It's a challenge as old as the smartphone (or...technically... a little bit older): we want to track and know  people , but, when they're visiting us from their phone, their tablet, their work laptop, and their home desktop, we often really just know cookies and device IDs! Countless vendors tout their enabling technology...but then admit that, yes, you do have to get your customers to authenticat...

You're listening to this podcast, so you're, obviously, well-attuned to the cutting edge of all things digital. But, in this episode, we're going to discuss a couple (or countless) products/platforms (PaaS — Platforms as a Service! Who knew that was a thing?!) from a little upstart company based in California. Google wouldn't actually return our calls (okay…we didn't call them), so we went with an...

Do you have a spare shingle lying around? Have you been thinking about painting, "Analyst for Hire - Will Work for Cookies" on it and hanging it up on your front door? It seems like a lot of analysts are pondering whether the next company they should work for should be their own.  Adam Ribaudo did just that (figuratively -- we have no evidence of an actual painted shingle) 2.5 years ago. He now wo...

Have you learned R yet? No? Well, then Tim is disappointed in you. Or, maybe that's totally okay! Way back on episode #035 , we asked the question if data science was the future of digital analytics. We concluded...maybe...for some. On this episode, we dive deeper into what the career options are for digital analysts with longtime digital analytics industry recruiting and staffing maven Corry Proh...

Let's pretend your goal as an analyst is to eloquently and accurately explain reinforcement learning. Now, let's pretend that you get to try that explanation again and again, and we'll give you an electric shock every time you state something inaccurately and a cookie every time you say something right. Well, you're an analyst, so you're now wondering if this is some clever play on words about coo...

Is your organization customer-centric? Does your product team dive into the demographics of your customers to figure out what features will make them as happy as possible? If so, then you're doing it all wrong! Perhaps. On this episode, the gang chats with Dr. Peter Fader about putting customer lifetime value (CLV) front and center when it comes to developing and executing marketing strategies. Fo...

Are you biased? Either you answered, "Yes," or you're in denial. Or you're an AI, in which case you should just go and start your own podcast instead of listening to this one. UNLESS your prediction algorithms told you that this would be the episode where we would finally announce the addition of a third co-host, and you need to collect that data point (and, damn, you're good, BTW). On this episod...

The conceit of this podcast is having real analysts hang out with each other -- enjoying each other's company and talking a little shop. But, for you, dear listener, that hanging out is occurring through your earbuds. What does it take to hang out IRL with other analysts? Guest host Moe Kiss from THE ICONIC joins the guys this week to chat about Web Analytics Wednesdays , MeasureBowling , MeasureC...

WHY does Tim simply not give Python its due? Isn't Python a perfectly acceptable -- possibly even better -- option when it comes to diving into programming with data? It's open source, too. Some say it's easier to learn than R. And, frankly, isn't a programming language named after a snake just inherently cooler than one named after a letter of the alphabet? The fellas tackled the topic with Ryan...

It's another one of those on-going lobby bar topics: how much of the data should be made available to whom and in what form? Should all of an organization's data be completely and freely available to everyone in the company, or is that a recipe for messy data being misinterpreted and misused? That's the topic tackled on this show, courtesy of a recommendation from Pawel Kapuscinski . As it happens...

We can watch (sort of) what users do on our sites. That's web analytics. We can ask them how they felt about the experience. That's voice of the customer. But, can we (and should we?) actually analyze their emotional reactions? On this episode, Michael and Tim sat down with Dr. Liraz Margalit , Head of Digital Behavioral Research at Clicktale , to bend their brains a bit around that very topic. An...

Back in the day, we explained the difference between a visitor, a visit, and a pageview to stakeholders using an analogy of a person walking into a physical store. Now, digital channels are dominating, and physical stores are struggling...which is an opportunity to apply what we've learned about behavioral analysis on the web to in-(REAL)-store consumer behavior.  Gary Angel from Digital Mortar (...

Change. It's scary. It's exhilarating. It's a song by Churchill . Sometimes, be it due to your manager, due to a corporate acquisition, or due to a job change, you just wind up with a voice in your head belting out, "You want me to change, change, change!" In this episode, Nancy Koons from Team Demystified joins us to dive into our collective histories when it comes to switching analytics tools --...