Data Analytics culture
You will often see that the way you are reporting data to the decision maker are not having any impact at all. One of the main reason is that the decision maker does not understand the data you are showing or do not want to understand them.
The typical use case is the following one, you spent a full week-end drafting a 20 pdf document page full of analysis and the decision maker is telling you that she or he had no time to read it, as a result, as a result you know here that a long format document is not the way you should show the data to this person.
Knowing the data culture of an individual is close to psychology, it takes time and a need to understand the person you are talking to. One way you can earn a lot of time is by directly asking to the person concerned about the way she or he would like the data to be delivered to her/him, here are below a list of different format:
- a dashboard with KPI (Key Performance Indicators within it). Note though that even if analytics solution are promoting the use of dashboards you will see that not everyone are fans of dashboards. It has been said that every worker has a dashboard with all its KPIs on it it (webmasters, copy writers...) but it is not true. It really depends of how they feel about it.
- a simple email.
- an access to the analytics solution where she/he can directly check the performances.
- a PDF report.
- a slideshow presentation in a meeting.
- a single A4 page format.
- a screen display with 1 or 3 indicators hosted within the main hall.
- an SMS notification.
- a led or a sound blinking/ringing when a specific treshold is reached.
- a person entering within her/his office.
- ... as previously mentioned it is hard to tell which format is the most suitable. You will see according to the behaviour of the decision maker.
Note that in general, your speech will have more impact if you follow those pieces of advice:
- Remove everything that everybody know already (what is the point of adding a 5 pages company introduction if we are already working within the company).
- Be synthetic (do not write a 3 sentences long in order to say something which can stand in 2 words).
- Ask yourself why you are including this part within the report. If you have a good justification for every piece of information you are including within it, then you know that you are in a safe zone.
- Always drive your work on the return of investment. If your data are not linked with finance/money you will see that you won't have the interest of your audience. Saying something like "70% of our advertising budget has been spent to promote 404 pages" will have for sure an impact if they did not know about it.
- State your recommendations straight away when you introduce your results. There is this famous quote from Steve Jobs “It does not make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people to tell us what to do.” there is a bit of that in digital analytics.
- Always justify your recommendations, guts feeling or random recommendations make no sense.
- Add visual, you will earn time and make an impact straight away.