One of the key challenges that business owners have repeatedly faced over the years is how to measure company performance and understand the return on their investments. You may have heard the famous statement, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” This quote has been attributed to several famous entrepreneurs from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, including John Wanamaker, Henry Ford, William Wrigley, Jr., and Lord Leverhulme. Regardless of who actually said it, I bet many people still share this same sentiment today.
Unlike our predecessors from the Industrial Age, we can't use the same excuse. In the current Digital Age, we’re afforded far more options when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of different business activities than they were. By its very nature, digital exudes or radiates data. For the past 20 years, we’ve had the luxury of monitoring website traffic and online campaigns. More recently we’ve added social media and mobile apps to our list of possible data sources. As more “things” become Internet-enabled, the data we collect will begin to be only limited by our imaginations. When we hear experts predict by 2020 nearly $20 trillion will be created in economic value by more than 40 billion Internet-connected devices, we know we’re on verge of entering the Data Economy.
In order to succeed in this increasingly data-driven and data-dependent world, entrepreneurs will need to adapt and embrace all the benefits it has to offer. I would anticipate that John Wanamaker and other departed industrialists would be jealous of what data we have at our fingertips today. As the business guru, Peter F. Drucker, once noted, “What gets measured, gets managed.” As your ability to measure different aspects of your business is enhanced through analytics so is your capacity to better manage them. We can see how this same philosophy is a key component of Eric Ries’ popular lean startup methodology. Data plays a central, underlying role in the hypothesis testing, iterative product releases, validated learning, and feedback loops that Ries emphasizes. Clearly, today’s business owner needs to be both digital- and data-savvy to survive and thrive in this new economy.
My main goal with this series of articles is to cover topics that will help entrepreneurs, business managers, and marketers to succeed in the emerging Data Economy. During my 11 years as a digital analytics consultant and evangelist at Adobe (previously Omniture), I’ve interacted with hundreds of organizations—large and small—across different industries and continents. From this experience, I will focus on widely-shared issues that I’ve encountered at these organizations:
- How should you build out your analytics capabilities?
- How can you help empower more employees with relevant data?
- How can you become a better data storyteller?
- How do you know if your digital content is engaging visitors?
- What ways can you better segment or bucket your customers?
You need to know I’m not a data scientist. I don’t have a PhD in statistics or mathematics. I’ve never coded in Python or R. My background is actually in marketing, and I became interested in digital analytics after graduating with my MBA degree. My passion for digital data led me to publish two analytics books, Web Analytics Action Hero and Web Analytics Kick Start Guide (Adobe Press). While many blogs cover the technical aspects, I will focus on the softer side of analytics that is essential to business owners who want to create a data-driven culture, turn more insights into action, and generate a higher return from their analytics investments. I look forward to helping you in your data-driven journey and hearing of your future success.
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