The Analytics Power Hour

Happy New Year! Sure. The ball has dropped in Times Square, and a new year means an opportunity to look forward. But, we wanted to take a quick look back first -- on the industry, on the podcast, and on the world in general. From GDPR to Bayesian statistics to machine learning and AI to... podcast (and #mattgershoffed) stickers , 2018 was, clearly, the Year of the Analyst. So keep analyzing! For c...

Have you ever had stakeholders complain that they're not getting the glorious insights they expect from your analytics program? Have you ever had to deliver the news that the specific data they're looking for isn't actually available with the current platforms you have implemented? Have you ever wondered if things might just be a whole lot easier if you threw your current platform out the window a...

What's the hot new technology of 2018? AI? Deep Learning? Pole-dancing robots ? Maybe. Or, maybe it's customer data platforms (CDPs) -- a topic we actually covered way back in January 2017 on episode #053  with Todd Belcher , who, at the time, was with CDP provider BlueConic . Since then, Todd left BlueConic to start CDP Resource , which is, well, a resource for companies looking to select, implem...

Perspective is a good thing. We've all agonized about a misreported metric or an unsatisfying entry page analysis and had to remind ourselves that we're not exactly saving lives with our work. On this episode, though, the gang actually meanders into life-and-death territory by chatting about one of the uses of data outside of the world of digital marketing and websites and eCommerce: natural disas...

Remember when you used to keep all of your data packed into data boxes and stacked up on a bunch of data shelves in your state-of-the-art data warehouse? Well, it might be time to fire up the data forklift and haul all of those boxes out of the structured order of your data warehouse and dump them into a data lake so that it can float and sink and swim around in semi-structured and unstructured wa...

To think, it was barely-considered subtle humor that we used two  trailing zeros in episode #001. But, despite our best efforts to destroy our reputations or our livers long before we centupled that original episode, we failed on both fronts, and we now need that third significant digit! For this special episode, we invited listener questions, and our listeners responded. Some of them blew right p...

Are you deeply knowledgable in JavaScript, R, the DOM, Python, AWS, jQuery, Google Cloud Platform, and SQL? Good for you! If you're not, should you be? What does "technical" mean, anyway? And, is it even possible for an analyst to dive into all of these different areas? English philosophy expert The Notorious C.M.O. (aka, Simo Ahava ) returns to the show to share his thoughts on the subject in thi...

As the axiom goes: people don't leave companies; they leave their managers. And, good analysts are constantly being approached with new opportunities. So, what's the secret formula for hanging on to analytics talent? Assuming simply chaining them to their desks isn't an option, then the trick is keeping them happy and motivated. On this episode, the gang discusses their experiences and perspective...

Tell me about a time you produced an amazing analysis. Please provide your response in the form of a Jupyter notebook that uses Python or R (or both!) to pull words from a corpus that contains all words in the OED stored in a BigQuery table. I mean, that's a fair question to ask, right? No? Well, what questions and techniques are effective for assessing an analyst's likelihood of succeeding in you...

Mama always said: life is like a box of chocolates , and online learning is sometimes like one of those boxes where you don't know which piece is delicious nougat and which piece is some sort of nasty, coconut-y cream. Well, maybe not your mama. But, it's a big world, so, surely, there's a mother out there somewhere who would agree with the sentiment. On this episode, the gang chatted with Google...

For this mini-episode, Tim sits down (virtually) with Episode #077 guest Jodi Daniels from Red Clover Advisors to chat about the world of privacy post-May 25, 2018 (GDPR), as well as the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). Has the free-wheeling world of free-flowing consumer data ended, or are companies simply learning how to behave with more care? Give it a listen to find out...

Business Intelligence. It's a term that's been around for a few decades, but that is every bit as difficult to nail down as "data science," "big data," or a jellyfish. Think too hard about it, and you might actually find yourself struggling to define "analytics!" With the latest generation of BI tools, though, it's a topic that is making the rounds at cocktail parties the world over! (Cocktail par...

The company: "Hey, you. That's a mighty nice test you've run. We should be doing that a lot more of those." You: "Um...okay. But, I'm only one person." In this episode, the gang chats with Pinterest 's Andrea Burbank ( Twitter | Pinterest ) about how she (loosely) dealt with this scenario: from sheer force of will to get some early wins to strategic thinking combined with late nights, an obsession...

Humans are creatures of habit. And analysts — those of us who haven't been so drawn into the world of artificial intelligence that we have become cyborgs, at least — are humans. In this episode, the gang explores the good and the bad side of analytical habits: what analyses we gravitate towards, how we go about approaching those analyses, and, to some extent, how those habits are impacted by our o...

Once upon a time, there was some data. And that data cried out to be extracted and analyzed and packaged up like the most exquisite of gifts and then presented gloriously to an eager and excited group of stakeholders. But, alas! Will this data story have a happy ending? Perhaps. Perhaps not! And that's the subject of this episode. Sort of. Our intrepid hosts ask the question, "How can we communica...

Are you reading this? If so, then you are literate. But, are you (and are your stakeholders)  data literate? What does that even mean? On this episode -- recorded in front of a live audience at Marketing Evolution Experience in Las Vegas -- the gang tackled the topic. Mid-way through the show, they were delighted to be joined on stage by Gary Angel (unplanned, but due to a series of unfortunate tr...

Under the 'guise of a discussion about making the leap into a new technology, this bonus mini-episode (hopefully) clears up the on-going confusion about the Kiss Sisters. Moe sat down with her big sister, Michele, to chat about jumping into learning an entirely new skill when time is short, expectations are high, and the learning curve is steep. The specific example they chat about is Michele's di...

Put this in your pipe and smoke it: all of the tracking we try to do of  people is actually technology designed to track  content . And, even that tracking of content was a hacked-together repurposing of a system designed to  deliver  content. In other words, we've got layers of fiction upon fiction that we're trying to muddle through (and, often, ignore) as an industry. The result? A ridiculous l...

Regression. Correlation. Normality. t-tests. Falsities of both the positive and negative varieties. How do these terms and techniques play nicely with digital analytics data? Are they the schoolyard bullies wielded by data scientists, destined to simply run by and kick sand in the faces of our sessions, conversion rates, and revenues per visit? Or, are they actually kind-hearted upperclassmen who...

Thanks for stopping by. Please get comfortable. We're going to be taking a few notes while you listen, but pay that no mind. Now, what we'd like you to do is listen to the podcast. Oh. And don't worry about that big mirror over there. There may be 2 or 3 or 10 people watching. Wow. We're  terrible moderators when it comes to this sort of thing. That's why Els Aerts from AGConsult joined us to disc...

Bayesian vs. Frequentist. False Positive vs. False Negative. Truth vs. Uncertainty. It's the world of A/B testing! In this bonus mini-episode, Moe sat down with Chad Sanderson from Subway to discuss some of the pitfalls of A/B testing -- the nuances that may seem subtle, but are anything  but trivial when it comes to planning and running a test.

If you have a smartphone nearby and you are not wearing a foil hat, chances are that some brand somewhere -- and probably several brands in many places -- know where you are. Is that creepy? Maybe. It's likely removing a few taps when you check what the weather will be like tomorrow, and there might just be a coupon for a discounted hamburger just waiting to pop up when you get near your favorite...

Have you ever walked out of a meeting with a clear idea of the analysis that you're going to conduct, only to find yourself three days later staring at an endless ocean of crunched data and wondering in which direction you're supposed to be paddling your analysis boat? That might not be an ocean. It might be an  analytics rabbit hole . In this episode, the gang explores the Analysis of Competing H...

That's right. We're trying to grow the reach of this podcast, so we figured we needed to do some growth h---...NO! No. No. NO!!! We're NOT going to use that term. But, it turns out that growth marketing has some interesting concepts. On the one hand, you may think, "Don't I already do that?" And the answer is quite possibly, "Yeah. Pretty much." On the other hand, you may think, "Oh, well  that's...

Michael, Tim, and 12,998 of their closest friends descended on Las Vegas for Adobe Summit the last week of March. With luck, Tim will have worked through the after-effects of the sensory overload of Vegas combined with the sensory overload of Adobe Summit by mid-April, but who knows? The guys (really... just the guys -- Moe was in the U.S., but she was in Austin at CXL Live ) sat down to share the...