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Tag: analytics

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 analytics. Imagine three levels of…

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 would require real-time analysis, whereas…

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 class by saying that the…

Customers as a source of information: 4 risks

Introduction This post is based on Dr. Elina Jaakkola’s presentation “What is co-creation?” on 19th August, 2014. I will elaborate on some of the points she made in that presentation. Customer research, a sub-form of market research, serves the purpose of acquiring customer insight. Often, when pursuing information from consumers companies use surveys. Surveys, and usage of customers as a source of information,…

Basic formulas for digital media planning

Planning makes happy people. Introduction Media planning, or campaign planning in general, requires you to set goal metrics, so that you are able to communicate the expected results to a client. In digital marketing, these are metrics like clicks, impressions, costs, etc. The actual planning process usually involves using estimates — that is, sophisticated guesses of some sorts. These estimates…

Carryover effects and their measurement in Google Analytics

Introduction Carryover effects in marketing are a tricky beast. On one hand, you don’t want to prematurely judge a campaign because the effect of advertising may be delayed. On the other hand, you don’t want bad campaigns to be defended with this same argument. Solutions What’s the solution then? They need to be quantified, or didn’t exist. Some ways to…

A Few Interesting Digital Analytics Problems… (And Their Solutions)

Introduction Here’s a list of analytics problems I’ve devised for a class I was teaching a digital analytics course (Web & Mobile Analytics, Information Technology Program) at Aalto University in Helsinki. Some solutions to them are also considered. The problems Last click fallacy = taking only the last interaction into account when analayzing channel or campaign performance (a common problem for standard Google…

The Bounce Problem: How to Track Bounce in Simple Landing Pages

Introduction This post applies to cases satisfying two conditions. First, you have a simple landing page designed for immediate action (=no further clicks). This can be the case for many marketing campaigns for which we design a landing page without navigation and a very simple goal, such as learning about a product or watching a video. Second, you have a…