Sort Sort Sort....

Sorting is such a simple thing, but it helps so much in interpreting the data and making business sense and insights.


Below, I take an example of only 5 data points but with 15-20 data points all over the place, it is hard to understand the data and derive insights.


In the first chart, it is easy to make out that impressions and CTR is not a 1:1 co-relation but in the lower chart where the Impressions are sorted with highest to lowest, you can see a clear inverse relation - the higher the impression the lower the CTR. Thus, if a media planner were to look at this data, it would come to mind to move the impressions from the lower CTR sites to the higher ones where the CTR is much higher.

Dashboards...

I am sure people in marketing have been hearing this term -"Dashboard" and a lot of time people wonder what is it?

As I see - A dashboard is a graphical representation of the key success and diagnostic metrics used to measure the performance of the campaigns.

I was browsing the internet and found this great site which talks about Dashboards - http://chiefmarketer.com/crm_loop/roi/marketing_dashboard/

Personally, I have built a lot of them for various types of campaings - Direct Marketing, Branding, Channel Performance (email vs. phone vs. display vs. DRTV), Site Performance, Product Performance (product A vs. product B)

As an example the table below shows all the key metrics week over week but it is like staring at 100s of numbers and it is hard to make business sense out of these. What exactly is going on...

Now, looking at the dashboard below (same data as the above table) helps understand all the key metrics in a clear and consise way thus helping make better business decisions and also come up with questions - why did a particular metric drop or rise.

Data Trending

I just realized a few weeks ago the importance of trending data. I had always set up dashboards to show trends, so it was always second nature to me - looking at trends.

Just imagine looking at a dashboard which does not show any week over week trends. Just a weekly refresh showing the previous week's results.

It would be obvious to me why the final recipients of the dashboard would not be happy, what is missing? I would not be able to get the answers to questions like - how was this metric 3 weeks ago, make me realized a ah! Week over Week trending is missing.

Just imagine this data shown in 5 separate charts, how will you derive any business insights out of this? But looking at the chart above you can clearly see that there was a clear upward trend until week 3. WHY? Probably seasonality or launch of campaign ...Why sudden drop in week 4 and then again an upward trend in week 5. Was week 4 just an anomaly or was there really a reason for this drop?

All these questions are sparked looking at week over week trends.

Data Representation/Visualization

Data can be seen in many forms but how easy it is to interpret to make business decisions is the key. A CEO or CMO cannot be presented to look at 100s or 1,000s of rows of data in excel or a SAS output which even analysts find it hard to read.

Not even CEO or CMO, presenting data (1,000s of rows) to someone who is not playing with the data on a day to day basis is not fair.

One would then argue oh! I will summarize the data and bring it down to a table. My thought would be great, but there is something called Data Visualization. Let's take an example, below is a table showing spend and revenue. The ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) in the table is defined as Revenue/Spend.

This shows the data but it is not very easy to visualize in a table. Now, look at the charts below.

This chart shows the % spend by site and the % revenue generated due to advertising at each of those sites. It is very easy to visualize that MSN was the most efficient site in terms of generating revenue. MySpace had the lowest efficiency.

The chart below is another way of showing the spend efficiency by site.
Aren't the two charts a better way to look at the data?