On Wednesday 30 September at the eCommerce Expo in London I’ll be making a presentation to my peers at the Digital and Mobile Marketing Theatre. Here’s a taster of what I’ll be talking about!
So much data
As marketers we use data every day, all day long. I know I do. I use data to make decisions, check facts, and a plethora of other things. Sometimes I find, like many other people, the numbers gradually turn from a set of digits, into a blurry mess of swirling digit doom. Once the effects of this have subsided, my face probably does something like this:
At the eCommerce Expo this year I’m doing a talk called “Google Analytics – much more than a reporting tool” to provide some takeaway actions that professionals in eCommerce can put into practice straight away. My tactics aim to help them use data slightly differently and hopefully help them think more about lines of data as story tellers rather than sets of numbers and digits that just represent performance.
Stories from data
As I progress through each of my takeaway tips I’ll be showing the audience how to get to this information and describing what to make of it. By thinking about the why, what, where and when behind the data, you can construct stories from it. We humans are built much better for creating and comprehending stories rather than reams of numbers.
By taking this sea of digits and transforming them into stories I certainly find it helps figure out the meaning behind the numbers. A lot of this boils down to how you sort the data, but rather than thinking in number format, think in story format.
Looking at an example, the data above is for phrases with visibility but no clicks. The beginning of our story is “people can see my results, but they’re not clicking”. The question, like many stories, is why? We can then start thinking about why these people are searching for these terms and why they’re just not clicking on you. We can discover the story of their journey to figure out how we can get more traffic.
I’ll be looking at this – and other tactics – to identify opportunities and help the audience look at data differently, to understand what it’s trying to say. A story is a narrative of a characters journey from one place to another. The same applies with data. The data is telling you the journey of your users. We want to find opportunities to improve that happy ending by discovering the story!
Come along
It’s free to come to the show and my talk – simply register here and come along to Olympia West:
Date: Wednesday 30 September 2015
Time: 10:45 – 11:15
Where: Digital & Mobile Marketing Theatre
