The Analytics Power Hour

Once upon a time, there was an analyst. And that analyst had some data. She used that data to do some analysis, and from that analysis she realized she had some recommendations she could make to her organization. This was the point where our intrepid analyst reached a metaphorical fork in Communication Road: would she hastily put all of her thoughts together quickly in a slide deck with charts and...

How accurate is your data? How accurate is any of our data? If our data is more accurate, will we make better decisions? How MUCH better? Why do the show blurbs of late have so many questions? THAT is a question we can ACCURATELY answer: because the shows grapple with challenging questions! On this episode, Snowplow co-founder Yali Sassoon joined us to chat about the nuts and bolts of data accurac...

READ ME!!! LISTEN!!! DO YOU KNOW WHY THIS IS IN ALL CAPS?! IS IT RAISING YOUR HEART RATE?! IS IT MAKING YOU A LITTLE IRRITATED?! IT MIGHT BE! IF IT IS, WE COULD MEASURE IT, AND MAYBE WE WOULD REALIZE THAT WE WERE INDUCING A SUBCONSCIOUS EMOTIONAL RESPONSE AND REALLY SHOULD TURN OFF THE CAPS LOCK! That's the topic of this episode: the brain. Specifically: neuroscience. Even more specifically: neuro...

Multi-touch attribution is like fat free cheese: it sounds like a great idea, it seems like technology would have made it amazing and delicious by now, and, yet, the reality is incredibly unsatisfying. Since we've recently covered how browsers are making the analyst's lot in life more difficult , and since multi-touch attribution is affected by those changes, we figured it was high time to revisit...

Did you hear the one about the Harvard-educated economist who embraced her inner wiring as a lateral thinker to explore topics ranging from HIV/AIDS in Africa to the impact of Hepatitis B on male-biased sex ratios in China to the range of advice and dicta doled out by doctors and parents and in-laws and friends about what to do (and not do!) during pregnancy? It's a data-driven tale if ever there...

Are you down with ITP ? What about ETP ? Are you pretty sure that the decline in returning visitors to your site that has everyone in a tizzy is largely due to increasingly restrictive cookie handling by browsers? Do you really, really, REALLY want Google, Apple, Mozilla, and even Microsoft to get on the same page when it comes to cookie handling and JavaScript subtleties? So many questions! Lucky...

Have you ever noticed that 68.2% of the people who explain machine learning use a "this picture is a cat" example, and another 24.3% use "this picture is a dog?" Is there really a place for machine learning and the world of computer vision (or machine vision, which we have conclusively determined is a synonym) in the real world of digital analytics? The short answer is the go-to answer of every an...

What percentage of digital ad impressions and clicks do you think is actually the work of non-human bots? Pick a number. Now double it. Double it again. You're getting close. A recent study by Pixalate found that 19 percent of traffic from programmatic ads in the U.S. is fraudulent. David Raab from the CDP Institute found this number to be "optimistic." Ad fraud historian Dr. Augustine Fou , our g...

It's 1:00 AM, and you can't sleep. The paid search manager needs to know whether brand keywords can be turned off without impacting revenue. The product team needs the latest A/B test results analyzed before they can start on their next sprint. The display media intern urgently needs your help figuring out why the campaign tracking parameters he added for the campaign that launches in two days are...

Somewhere between "welcome to the company, now get to work!" and weeks of tedious orientation sessions (that, presumably, include a few hours with the legal department explaining that, should you be on a podcast, you need to include a disclaimer that the views expressed on the podcast are your own and not those of the company for which you now work), is a happy medium when it comes to onboarding a...

Listen. Really. That's what you can do. You can listen to this episode and find out what you learn. Or you can NOT listen to the show and NOT find out what you learn. You can't do both, which means that, one way or the other, you WILL be creating your very own counterfactual! That, dear listener, is a fundamental concept when it comes to causal inference. Smart analysts and data scientists the wor...

Have you ever thought it would be a great idea to have a drink or two, grab a microphone, and then air your grievances in a public forum? Well, we did! This episode of the show was recorded in front of a live audience (No laugh tracks! No canned applause!) at the Marketing Analytics Summit (MAS) in Las Vegas. Moe, Michael, and Tim used a "What Grinds Our Gears?" application to discuss a range of c...

Did you hear the one about how the AI eliminated cancer? It just wiped out the human race! As machine learning and artificial intelligence are woven more and more into the fabric of our daily lives, we are increasingly seeing that decisions based purely on code require a lot of care to ensure that the code truly behaves as we would like it to. As one high profile example after another demonstrates...

What's in a job title? That which we call a senior data scientist by any other job title would model as predictively...  This, dear listener, is why the hosts of this podcast crunch data rather than dabble in iambic pentameter. With sincere apologies to William Shakespeare, we sat down with  Maryam Jahanshahi  to discuss job titles, job descriptions, and the research, experiments, and analysis tha...

Remember that time you ran a lunch-and-learn at your company to show a handful of co-workers some Excel tips? What would have happened if you actually needed to fully train them on Excel, and there were approximately a gazillion users*? Or, have you ever watched a Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager training video? Or perused their documentation? How does Google actually think about educating a...

A simple recipe for a delicious analytics platform: combine 3 cups of data schema with a pinch of JavaScript in a large pot of cloud storage. Bake in the deployment oven for a couple of months, and savory insights will emerge. Right? Why does this recipe have both 5-star and 1-star ratings?! On this episode, long-standing digital analytics maven June Dershewitz , Director of Analytics at Twitch ,...

We're not sure what's going on with this episode. For some reason, we have a bunch of first-time listeners, and they're all from Apple devices! Maybe it's because the show only comes out every two weeks, and the first-party cookies we've been using to track our listeners are now expiring after seven days! (This is a hilarious episode description if you're well-versed in the ins and outs and ethica...

Have you ever attended a conference? Did you know that analysts over-index towards introversion?* Have you ever struggled to figure out how to start a conversation over a cold pastry and a cup of tepid coffee at a conference breakfast? IS there actually a point in developing and executing a strategy when it comes to attending a conference? Is it annoying to listen to people who speak pretty regula...

Are you a data scientist? I mean, are you really a data scientist? What does that even mean...other than a healthy salary increase? On this episode of the show, Ian Thomas , Chief Data Officer for Publicis Spine sat down with the three co-citizen-data-scientists who regularly host the show to delve into the subject! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a...

We thought we deserved a break from the podcast, so we went looking for some AI to take over the episode. Amazon Polly wasn't quite up to the task, unfortunately, so we wound up sitting down as humans with another human -- Erik Driessen from Greenhouse -- to chat about the different ways that automation can be put to use in the service of analytics: from pixel deployment to automated alerts to dai...

In recognition of International Women's Day , and because it's a really important topic, this is a very special episode. The two straight, white, cisgender male co-hosts of this podcast sat this episode out, while Moe took over the mic for an in-depth discussion with Alison Vorsatz from Fairygodboss and Aubrey Blanche from Atlassian about diversity (a term they both try to avoid) in the workplace....

Do you know something that is really simple? Really Simple Syndication (aka, RSS). Did you know that RSS is the backbone of podcast delivery? Well, aren't you clever! What's NOT really simple is effectively measuring podcasts when a key underlying component is a glorified text file that tells an app how to download an audio file. Advertisers, publishers, and content producers the world over have b...

"Hey, Google! How do you measure yourself?" "I'm sorry. I can't answer that question. Would you like to listen to a podcast that can?" National Public Radio has long been on the forefront of the world of audio media. Why, you might even remember episode #046 , where Steve Mulder from NPR made his first appearance on the show discussing the cans and cannots of podcast measurement! On this episode,...

What does it  really take to bring data science into the enterprise? Or... what does it take to bring it into your  part of the enterprise? In this episode, the gang sits down with Dr. Katie Sasso from the Columbus Collaboratory ...because that's similar to what she does! From the criticality of defining the business problem clearly, to ensuring the experts with the deep knowledge of the data itse...

WHERE were you the first time you listened to this podcast? Did you feel like you were JOINing a SELECT GROUP BY doing so? Can you COUNT the times you've thought to yourself, "Wow. These guys are sometimes really unFILTERed?" On this episode,  Pawel Kapuscinski  from Analytics Pros (and the Burnley Football Club ) sits down with the group to shout at them in all caps. Or, at least, to talk about S...