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Data is the raw material for developing insights. If the complete data is not available to insights team then you can’t expect the insights to be very valuable. Insights teams will make the best out of what they have available but you will get far better insights if you spend little time with them to understand what they need and help them with these for major roadblocks. Data Sources and Collection – Insights team has identified the data sources required for them to provide great insights, the data is all there either available internally or externally. The big challenges comes when the data teams actually start to figure out how the data will be collected. For  internal data sources  the organizational barriers are the biggest ones that prevent one team for getting access to the data that other team owns. Your team will need your help in navigating those barriers and help the free flow of the data. If external data sources are on their list then your help will be needed to p...

Email list growth is the foundation of email marketing program. Unless you keep care in protecting and growing that list you will end up non functional email marketing program. Recently, I wrote a post on  23 Metrics for Email Marketing Metrics  that you should know about, in this post I am taking 3 metrics from that list and adding one more to call out the 4 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the email list growth.  Here are the four KPIs: Email Complaint Rate/Spam Complaint Rate  – SPAM complaints can kill your marketing program. This KPIs allows you to see if SPAM complains are becoming an issues, you goal should be to minimize this KPI. Spam complaint rate is measures as the percentage of your email recipients who marked your emails as Spam. Looking at this number campaign by campaign and then aggregated over month will show you if you are annoying your subscribers to a point where they consider your email as spam. This number is readily available in mo...

Have you wondered why you are getting a very low engagement on your Facebook posts?  Here are nine common reasons that result in low Facebook post engagement and tips on how to fix them. You are posting on wrong day and time – You should time your posts according to your audience’s (fans/targets) most active time on social media. If you are posting your messages when majority of your audience is not active then you are not achieving the maximum benefit from your posts. Below is an infograph that is based on analysis conducted by Bridge.com ,  which provides general information about the best time for Facebook posts. However, rather than blindly accepting these suggestions, you should use your own data to figure out the best day and time to posts. There are several tools that will allow you to see when your audience is most active. For example, simply Measured provides you stats such as “Top Day For Comments” and “Top Time For Comments”. You are posting too many ...

Colors can add to your data visualization and make the story stand out or they can distract the audience from the main message. It all depends on what colors you chose and how you use them. In this post, I am listing three things to keep in mind when creating your next data visualization. I am not guiding you specifically on what colors (hue, value and chroma) to use but three things to keep in mind when selecting the colors: Use conventional colors :  Generally red color means negative or a bad value and green means positive or a good value.  Choosing the default colors as presented by your visualization tool might not convey this meaning in all the cases.  Say, for example in Tableau, when you choose the default “Red-Green Diverging” color from the pallet, the red represents the smallest number while green represents the largest number, and it changes from red to green for the values in between. This generally works fine.  Where this becomes an issue i...

We all know that wrong data leads to wrong analysis and hence can cost a lot of money.   In this post I am highlighting 5 issues that lead to wrong data and hence wrong analysis.  Make sure you take care of these issues before spending any time on analyzing and putting your presentation together. Manual entry by end users – When you rely on the end users/customer to enter the data in the free form you will get lot of variations of the data. For example, when you ask them to enter the city, you can get variations such as Redmond, Redmond WA.  Redmond (Seattle), Remond etc.  Doing any analysis on the city level will pose an issues since you have several variation of the same city. Unless you have thoroughly cleaned and accounted for every possible variation you will not have the right analysis. In order to avoid such issues, wherever possible provide the choices via drop down or auto-fill rather than letting users type in the answers. Manual entry b...

Are you loosing your email subscribers right after they are signing up? If yes then you might be making a similar mistake that I encountered recently. Here is what happened to me: I submitted my info on coolinfographics.com to download a free chapter of the book. After I filled the form, I got a message that I will get an email with a link to the download.  I eagerly waited for the email to arrive. As soon as I got the email, I opened it and quickly clicked on a very prominent and long link. I was expecting to see a page where I will either be able to download the chapter or my download will automatically start. Instead I got the following message: What???? What just happened? Turns out that the long prominent link in this email was not the link to download the sample chapter, instead it was an Unsubscribe link.  So I accidentally unsubscribed from the mailing list I subscribed only few minutes ago.  I am sure, I am not the only one who has done that. I wonde...

Are you one of those advertiser, who is struggling to understand why your Display Advertising is not providing the desired results?  If answer is yes, then this post is for you. Below are 4 most common reasons why your display advertising might not be working. Ad Views: According to a study by Sticky,  77% of ads are never se en by people . Even when the ad is considered viewable, meaning it is within viewing area, only 55% ads are actually viewable. Which results in a very lower click through rate, the average banner CTR is about 0 .1% and declining. Spider and Bot Ad Clicks:  Spider and bots, instead of humans, make up a significant amount of clicks on the ads. All these spiders do is click on an ad, land on your site and then leave causing millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks.  As a result you will either see a very high bounce rate on your pages and/or mismatch in the clicks reported by ad network and visits reported by your Web Analytics solution....