This is an unpublished exploratory study we wrote with Professor Jim Jansen for Machine Learning and Data Analytics Symposium (MLDAS2018), held in Doha, Qatar. Change of landscape: For a long time, automation has been invading the field of marketing. Examples of marketing automation include the various scripts, rules, and software solutions that optimize pay-per-click spending, […]
Tag: analytics
Use Cases for Personas
This is a joint piece by Dr. Joni Salminen and Professor Jim Jansen. The authors are working on a system for automatic persona generation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The system is available online at https://persona.qcri.org. Introduction Personas are fictive characterizations of the core audience or customers of a company, introduced into software development and […]
Tips on Data Imputation From Machine Learning Experts
Missing values are a critical issue in statistics and machine learning (which is “advanced statistics”). Data imputation deals with ways to fill those missing values. Andriy Burkov made this statement a few days ago [1]: “The best way to fill a missing value of an attribute is to build a classifier (if the attribute is […]
Google Analytics: 21 Questions to Get Started
I was teaching a course called “Web & Mobile Analytics” at Aalto University back in 2015. As a part of that course, the students conducted an analytics audit for their chosen website. I’m sharing the list of questions I made for that audit, as it’s a useful list for getting to know Google Analytics. The […]
Simple methods for anomaly detection in e-commerce
Anomaly is a deviation from the expected value. The main challenges are: (a) how much the deviation should be to be classified as an anomaly, and (b) what time frame or subset of data should we examine. The simplest way to answer those questions is to use your marketer’s intuition. As an e-commerce manager, you […]
Platform metrics: Some ideas
I was chatting with Lauri [1] about platform research. I claimed that the research has not that many implications for real-world companies apart from the basic constructs of network effects, two-sidedness, tipping, marquee users, strategies such as envelopment, and of course many challenges, including chicken-and-egg problems, monetization dilemma, and remora’s curse (see my dissertation on […]
Digital analytics maturity model
Digital analytics maturity model: Concepts — here, focus on is on buzzwords and realization that “we should do something”. Tools — here, focus is on tools, i.e. “Let’s use this shiny new technology and it will solve all our problems.” Value — here, we finally focus on what matters: how will the tools and technologies […]
Argument: Personas lose to ‘audience of one’
Introduction. In this post, I’m exploring the usefulness of personas in digital analytics. At Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), we have developed a system for automatic persona generation (APG) – see the demo. Under the leadership of Professor Jim Jansen, we’re constantly working to position this system toward the intersection of customer profiles, personas, and […]
Agile methods for predicting contest outcomes by social media analysis
People think, or seem to assume, that there is some magical machine that spits out accurate predictions of future events from social media data. There is not, and that’s why each credible analysis takes human time and effort. But therein also lies the challenge: when fast decisions are needed, time-taking analyses reduce agility. Real-time events […]
Problems of standard attribution modelling
Attribution modelling is like digital magic. Introduction Wow, so I’m reading a great piece by Funk and Nabout (2015) [1]. They outline the main problems of attribution modelling. By “standard”, I refer to the commonly used method of attribution modelling, most commonly known from Google Analytics. Previously, I’ve addressed this issue in my digital marketing […]