Category: Data/Analytics

Analytics Advice

Posted on

Episode 93: Visualizing & Making Data Valuable, with Eric Boissonneault

In its raw form, data’s not worth much. If refined and put together with other data, it can be worth a lot. Here are well-known brands that built their value by creating a useful visual experience out of user-generated data:

  • Notable Examples:
    • Glassdoor
    • Nest
    • Zapier
    • Mint
    • Robinhood
    • Flipboard
    • Ancestry
    • GoodReads

This episode’s guest will help us see what is possible once you have data in your hands. Eric Boissonneault grew up loving numbers, but it wasn’t until he saw a Hollywood movie about card players at age 16, that he knew how he would apply his skill. He taught himself poker and methodically played this ‘game of chance’ so well that He became a professional player through his years at University du Quebec à Montreal and beyond. 

After cashing his poker chips in, he wanted to show the business world how they could look at the data they have on-hand as the basis for decisions. In 2020 he founded data consulting company Systematik to help businesses untangle, collect, visualize and understand their data.

Listen in this episode for Eric’s explanation of how you can put a unique transformation or twist on the data you already have, and even make an application that monetizes the data. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

How fast will you hit Google Sheets 5-million cell limit? If you have a spreadsheet with 5 tabs and each tab fills columns A to CW, and there is 10000 rows of data in each tab. It happens faster than you think.

Posted on

Episode 83: Quantifying Your Marketing Funnel’s Revenue with Keith Perhac

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

“It’s not working.” That’s the gist of every complaint made about marketing funnels. Marketers painstakingly build a series of offers and pay for traffic to see them, but the conversion rates drop off somewhere between there and the point where sales close.

Can funnels be fixed? Absolutely, but not without knowing a critical piece of data. Getting that data that helps fix the suboptimal parts of the funnel is our focus today. 

To go through this I’m joined by Keith Perhac, a digital marketing expert and software entrepreneur. After growing up in the states, he headed to Japan to become what’s known there as a salaryman. He moved back In 2010 to work with startups and digital marketers looking to grow quickly. He founded SegMetrics, a tool that lets you see revenue from the perspective of each touchpoint in your marketing funnel. Since then, he’s appeared on over 35 podcasts & in 2020 published the book we’re here to discuss, “Building Marketing Funnels that Convert, a 90 minute guide”

When he’s not working on SegMetrics, Keith draws and attempts (futilely) to spend more time outdoors. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Posted on

Episode 77: Stop arguing over leads; start scoring them, with Gary Amaral

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

Two things are required to get a clear view of revenue growth. First, sales and marketing must come together to jointly-define the thresholds at each stage of a lead’s lifecycle. Second, they must apply points to a lead’s every action, either manually or by layering automation on this process. 

My guest believes that lead scoring systems not only bring pipeline visibility, they improve the collaboration between Sales & Marketing. In fact, he claims that by pooling their information on leads and letting AI find the patterns, they can tell when a lead is ready to buy, upsell, or churn. 

Gary Amaral held several positions at places like at BlackBerry & Hootsuite, always at the intersection of marketing and sales. Seeing how poor scoring led to frustration for all involved, he joined forces with two other serial startup entrepreneurs. 

In 2020 they co-founded Breadcrumbs, which is a revenue acceleration platform based on a co-dynamic lead scoring and routing engine. Listen for Gary’s advice on what you need to do to get scoring right. Just as good communication helps keep couples together, the Sales & marketing relationship needs good communication on the status of leads. Lead scoring could very well be the glue in this marriage. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

You can also check out these episodes involving lead scoring:

Episode Reboot.

Download Breadcrumb.io’s lead scoring template

Posted on

Episode 61: Tools for wrangling marketing data, with JD Prater

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

What needs to be done with marketing data to make it usable?

Essentially, it must be taken from its original source, formatted cleanly, and put into your database to be analyzed. This is handled by a process called ETL, Extract, Transform & Load. This process was done manually in olden days, but AI is now facilitating this task to be almost entirely done by technology. 

Our guest can help us get familiar with how this works because he approaches it more from a marketer’s perspective than a technical one. JD Prater has a background in the world of paid media marketing, probably the niche that’s most famous for doing detailed analysis on large amounts of data. He has recently become Marketing Lead at Osmos, the maker of a tool that uses AI to help companies with ETL work. Besides that, JD has done marketing in-house at Amazon and Quora, and worked on brands while with a PPC agency. Besides that, he’s well known for speaking on digital marketing and being involved with several podcasts, and when he’s not on dad duty, you’ll catch him somewhere in his home state of Oklahoma, out cycling on an open stretch of road.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot

Go take a product demo of some tool you might use.

Posted on

Episode 53: Digital Marketing in an AI World with Fred Vallaeys – Summer Books

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov was famously beaten in 1997 by a supercomputer built by dozens of IBM technologists. A Slate article looking at how Deep Blue changed chess said “The change here wasn’t just that a computer could win, but that a computer could help human players win if incorporated into their training regimes effectively.”

The same thing is happening with PPC Platforms. Since 2011, Google has been integrating AI into many of their products, and every campaign feature Google Ads rolls out seems to take away control from us humans and give it to their machines. So if we’re going to follow Kasparov’ lead and get better at this game with the AI, the question becomes, what’s the process for training an ad platform’s AI, when it’s writing programming that only it knows, and even the technologists running it don’t know?

Some answers are contained in the book Digital Marketing in an AI World. Fred Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as Google’s AdWords Evangelist. Today he serves as Co-Founding CEO of Optmyzr, a PPC management software system. Fred is a fixture on the marketing conference circuit and blazed new trails with online industry learning through Optmyz’s PPC Town Halls. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot: 

Remember, computers have a different kind of smarts than us.