The Analytics Power Hour

Cookies are getting aggressively expired or blocked outright. Referring site information is getting stripped. Adoption of Brave as a browser is on the rise! Yet, marketers still need to quantify the impact of their investments. What is an analyst to do? Does the answer lie in server-side technical solutions? Well, it's not a bad idea to consider that. But, it's almost certainly not "the answer" to...

We didn't want to have a discussion about Netflix's The Social Dilemma , but, somehow, we just felt compelled to do so. It was almost like we had a generally unlikable character from a TV series about advertisers' attempts to manipulate consumer behavior in the 1950s and 1960s transplanted in triplicate into an AI that was optimizing Netflix's reach and engagement by getting us to talk about the m...

Do you know someone who works remotely? Wait. What's that? Oh. It's 2020. I guess a better question would be: do you know any analysts who are NOT working remotely? But, that's not the question we ask on this episode. Some companies—and we're thinking agencies and consultancies here just to have a little focus—were corporate office-less from their founding, and those are the sorts of companies we...

What is data culture? And, more importantly, what is the optimal ratio of agar and the ideal temperature of the corporate petri dish to make a data culture thrive? Moe, Michael, and Tim put their various experiences under the organizational microscope and examined various solutions in the name of (data) scientific discovery! If only organizations were as controllable as a chemistry lab! For comple...

Do you long for the days when your mother could ask you, "Now, what do you actually do for your job?" and "all" you had to do was explain websites and digital analytics? The "analyst" is now a role that can be defined an infinite number of ways in its breadth and depth. Is the analyst who is starting to do data transformations to create clean views still an analyst? Or is she a data engineer? A da...

Did curiosity kill the cat? Perhaps. A claim could be made that a LACK of curiosity can (and should!) kill an analyst's career! On this episode, Dr. Debbie Berebichez , who, as Tim noted, sorta' pegs out on the extreme end of the curiosity spectrum, joined the show to explore the subject: the societal norms that (still!) often discourage young women from exploring and developing their curiosity; e...

How does a Bayesian tell what time it is? She starts with an estimated time as her prior and then makes a video for TikTok. If you've ever made a joke like that and then realized your audience might need a little statistical education in order to appreciate how hilarious it is (or, perhaps, what the probability is that it's hilarious), then this episode is for you. The Chatistician (and the creato...

Once every four years in the United States, there is this thing called a "presidential election." It's a pretty boring affair, in that there is so much harmony amongst the electorate, and the two main candidates are pretty indistinguishable when it comes to their world views, policy ideas, and temperaments. But, despite the blandness of the contest, digging in to how the professionals go about for...

Do you know someone who always seems to have read the latest books and can cite concepts and ideas and authors and titles in any situation? Do you hate that person? Honestly, so do we. But that didn't stop us from recording an episode that, potentially, will grate on your nerves in such a way that you have to draw on your inner grit (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth)...

Analytics is hard (so they say... but we're not going to open THAT can of worms). Do you know what's harder? Managing analysts! I mean, they're always asking, "Why?" Sometimes, they even ask it five times! They can wind up, you know, analyzing whatever you're asking them to do! On this episode, special guest Moe Kiss (you may know her as a co-host of this podcast) joined Michael and Tim to dig int...

A wise man once said, "All forecasts basically assume that tomorrow is going to be very similar to today, just with an adjustment or two." That wise man was Gary Angel from Digital Mortar , and he said that on this very episode as we explored the ramifications for the analyst when the historical data is not at all a proxy for the near-term and medium-term future. What is the analyst to do when her...

Remember back when the global economy was booming and analysts were both in the sexiest job of the century and on the favorable side of the supply-demand curve for talent? Those were the days! On this episode, we sat down with Ollie Darmon from Canva to get his perspective, as an in-house recruiter, on what candidates can and should do to not only get in the door, but to actually close the deal an...

No one has ever been disappointed by a sequel, right? Especially when the original was well-received both by the critics and at the box office. Well, Episode #134: "These Are a Few of Our Favorite (Analytics) Tips" scored an 83% Tomatometer with an audience score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. As it happened, those are the same scores that The Sound of Music achieved, and they're pretty impressive. Un...

A hallmark of the analytics community is the generosity with which ideas and wisdom are shared. One of the largest analytics conferences each year is Adobe Summit. One of the most followed Tims on the planet wrote a book called Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World . Jen Yacenda and Eric Matisoff mixed all three of these truths together in preparation for an hour-long pres...

It sometimes seems like there must be a Moore's Law of marketing technology (or "martech," as the cool kids call it, and our site is on a .io domain, so we're definitely the cool kids) whereby the number of platforms available doubles every 6 to 8 weeks. And, every couple of months, it seems, a whole new category emerges. From CMS to DAM to CRM to TMS to DMP to DSP to CDP, it's an alphabet soup of...

The promise of digital—and the steady shift of consumers' interactions with brands to that medium over the course of the past two decades—is that we can now see so much more of what our customers and prospects DO. But, how much does that tell us about who they really are, why they do what they do, and how they feel as they do it? What are they thinking and feeling as they cross between channels, t...

Sometimes, the best way to get alignment, generate new ideas, hash out different perspectives, or just effectively collaborate is to shift a gathering of peers from being a "meeting run by the organizer" to a "workshop run by a facilitator." Both meetings and workshops should have clear objectives, but workshops, when planned and run well, shift the mindset of the participants even before they arr...

These are interesting times in which we work, are they not? For many analysts, "remote work" is what they call "every weekday" or, for those who don't have things fully figured out, "every day that ends in 'Y.'" For other analysts, the current pandemic has forced them into being an unplanned — and not necessarily desired — full-time remote worker. Juggling kids, silencing pets, finding a horizonta...

Did you know that there were monks in the 1400s doing text-based sentiment analysis? Can you name the 2016 movie that starred Amy Adams as a linguist? Have you ever laid awake at night wondering if stopword removal is ever problematic? Is the best therapist you ever had named ELIZA? The common theme across all of these questions is the broad and deep topic of natural language processing (NLP), a t...

For our special International Women's Day episode, we committed a type one error and peeked at our results, so we are releasing this winner three days early. As good analysts, we set out to optimise the podcast by swapping out Tim and Michael for two guests (it's rare for Tim to be in the control group, but he's an outlier either way). Unfortunately, it turns out we confused testing with personali...

Have you heard the one about the four analysts who run a podcast who walked into a resort in Hungary? Well, now you can! Or, at least get a taste of that experience. Michael, Moe, Tim, and Josh headed to Superweek last month and, among other things, did a 12-hour audio livestream to try to give interested listeners a taste of the experience. On this episode, we're bringing you just over an hour (o...

"QA and patience and reviews by a peer. Data viz testing, hold no chart too dear. Don't be an asshole; automate 'til it stings. These are a few of our favorite things!" With apologies to Julie Andrews, on this episode, Moe, Tim, and Michael shared some of the tactical tips and techniques that they have found themselves putting to use on a regular basis in their analytics work. The resulting show:...

Once upon a time, website behavioral data was extracted from the log files of web servers. That data was messy to work with and missing some information that analysts really wanted. This was the OG "server-side" data collection. Then, the JavaScript page tag arrived on the scene, and the data became richer and cleaner and easier to implement. That data was collected by tags firing in the user's br...

Who would have thought that we'd get to 2020 and still be debating whether recurring reports should include "insights?" As it turns out, Tim did an ad hoc analysis back in 2015 where he predicted exactly that! Unfortunately, the evidence is buried in the outbox of his email account at a previous employer. So, instead, we've opted to just tackle the topic head-on: what is a report, anyway? What are...

It's the end of the year, and we know it, and we feel fiiiiine. Or, maybe we have a little anxiety. But, for the fifth year in a row, we're wrapping up the year with a reflective episode: reflecting on changes in the analytics industry, the evolution of the podcast, and the interpersonal dynamics between Tim and Michael. From the state of diversity in the industry (and on the show), to the trends...