When it comes to making analytics and digital marketing, there’s a very clear lifecycle of how to make data useful. Let’s take a look at the four step cycle.

Collection

The first part of the data lifecycle is collection of data. What are you going to measure? Typically, this starts with a question, like “How is our website contributing to our business?” or “What impact is social media having on our sales?”. All collection begins with questions, because if it doesn’t, then you’re just amassing data for no good reason – and chances are, you’re not collecting things that are required to answer your burning questions.

Analysis

Once you’ve got the data, you have to process it. This doesn’t just mean slap up Google Analytics and hope it does the work for you. Analysis is all about understanding the methods for making data more clear, for removing error, for clarifying it so that it’s usable. You’ve got to know and understand the methods of data analysis like chi-squared tests, R and S regressions, etc. Ultimately, analysis can then help you understand whether or not you’ve got an answer to your question.

If we use the example above, we’ve got our social media data and our sales data. Through a regression analysis and a chi-square test, we can assess whether or not there’s a correlation and dependency on social media in our sales data.

Insight

You’ve got data. You’ve got it cleaned up and you’ve now got an answer to your question. The next step in the data lifecycle is insight. It’s up to you to transform the data into something usable, something that can help you make decisions about what to do next, about how to make the answer to the question impactful.

If we continue on our social sales example, let’s say that there’s a 0.875 correlation (very strong) between social media activity and sales and there is dependency on social media activity in the chi-squared test. Our insight is therefore that social media activity drives sales.

Action

You’ve got data that’s been analyzed, you’ve extracted an insight from it, and now it’s time to finish this iteration of the lifecycle. Take action! Use the insight you gained to decide on a course of action. If, in the examples above, we’ve determined that social media activity drives sales, then we need to test that. We need to increase the activities we’ve been doing to see if there is a proportional increase in sales.

Unsurprisingly, this takes us back to step one of the lifecycle. We test, we collect data on the test, and then it’s time to analyze it, develop insight from it, and test some more.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the consequences of skipping steps in the data lifecycle.

2 Comments

Whitney Hoffman on August 30, 2012 at 9:52 am

This reminds me of the IDEO design process- that comes down to Learn Look Ask Try or Understand, Observe, Brainstorm and Prototype. I think it’s a good framework for approaching a myriad of problems and coming up with new solutions. 🙂
Barrett Rossie on August 31, 2012 at 6:07 pm

Chris, this may seem basic, but it’s so important. A very similar cycle applies to development of strategic messages.