Thank-you to Steffen Hedebrandt, Head of Marketing over at Airtame, for writing this article.

 

On August 16th of 1896, local miners discovered gold in the remote city of Klondike, in Yukon, Canada.

As the rumour spread and eventually reached San Francisco and Los Angeles, it launched what was later to be known as the Klondike Gold Rush. Between 1896 and 1899 more than 100,000 people made the long and presumably uncomfortable journey to Klondike.

Some got rich. Some got a bit lucky. Some died in dire pain, due to rough climate. Winter did indeed come. Most had to just travel back the long road from which they had come again, in vain.

There aren’t necessarily the same dangers with data. However, I do see similarities.

Data-driven decision making has become the jitterbug of marketing today. With good reason, one might add. But just as the gold rush of Klondike, not everything that is buzz-worthy is gold.

 

Panning for data

Luckily, digging out, dissecting, and using data is not as hard as drilling and finding gold in the permafrost of Klondike.

We live in a world of abundant data. Everything which is done digitally creates bits and pieces of data. A lot of it is useless for most people, really. In fact, if data was gold, nobody would bother making the journey to Klondike.

In this market of abundance, it’s not a matter of whether the data is available.

It’s a matter of understanding the data, knowing your business strategy, and almost alchemically creating value out of it.

It’s not easy. It takes trial, error, and experience. It takes testing what pan, hammer, or other tool you need to use to make the muddy data materialize into something you can sink a tooth into. Eventually though, you should get the hang of it.

But enough with the storytelling. Let’s do an exponential jump 120 years forward to today, 2016.

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The power of data visualization

You know how you tend to stick on Tweets or Facebook posts that have images more than those that don’t? It isn’t just you.

Now imagine if you could make someone stick on your web performance data as much as you stick on an image-laden Facebook post. Well, you can. Just make your data visual.

90% of the information your brain receives is visual, and visual information is processed approximately 60,000 times faster and more efficiently than text or verbal information.

When we read something, we’re required to think about the words were reading in order to derive meaning. This thinking occurs in the cerebral cortex-part of the brain, which is relatively slow and inefficient. However, when we see something, our visual cortex-part of the brain is the one working. By switching to this area of the brain, this shifts the cognitive balance and allows for exponentially faster and more efficient assimilation of data.

 

 

Basically, the quickest way to get into someone’s head is through visual communication.

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As explained in a previous post, not all metrics are created equal. The most worthwhile metrics are those that you can act upon, those that serve a specific purpose in the analyzation and optimization of your digital strategy.

All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs

Actionable performance metrics, when tracked and properly scrutinized, are your business’s key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs can be either monetary or non-monetary – however, their purpose is to measure your progress in relation to clearly defined objectives. As such, before determining what your KPIs should be, your first order of business is to determine your objectives – KPIs are useless with nothing to measure up against. As Avinash Kaushik (of Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik) so eloquently states: “If you don’t actually know what you’re trying to achieve, it’s also hard to measure success.”

When you have determined your business’s most pressing objectives and the subsequent KPIs to measure, it’s important to keep three particular things in mind no matter which KPI you’re looking at:

1. Single-session analyses will only take you so far: be sure to look at results over several sessions (pan-session analyses), since not all – in fact, not most – conversions will occur on a first visit.
2. Source attribution will become possible thanks to pan-session analyses: by knowing which point of initial contact brought your visitors to your page in the first place (regardless of how they came to your site when they finally converted), it becomes easier to accurately measure marketing success.
3. Segmentation is important to know precisely who is visiting and who is converting – knowing your ideal audience will enable you to create targeted content.

To sum up, you need to remember that your KPIs are dependant on the behaviour of individuals over time. It is important to know the entire picture of the behavioural process involved in the relationship between the user and your company. You don’t need single snapshots, you need the entire movie.

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