When it comes to making analytics and digital marketing mistakes, there are few ways to thoroughly break your company and your efforts as effective as bad data. Let’s look at some common mistakes today in the data lifecycle.
Collection
Two fundamental mistakes occur in collection. First, starting with the wrong question (or no question at all) is probably the largest mistake. If you start with a flawed premise or foundation, everything you build on top of that will be corrupted. For example, “what is the ROI of social media?” would be a flawed question for a non-monetary outcome, since ROI is a financial equation. The better question in that situation would be, “what was social media’s contribution to the outcome?”.
The second mistake is collecting the wrong data. This can occur for any number of reasons, from biases in collection to simply getting data about the wrong things. Again, if you ask about the ROI of social media and you’re collecting data about anything except the investment and the return, you’re not collecting the right data.
Analysis
The biggest mistake in analysis is… not doing analysis. An awful lot of people lack data analysis skills and as such, they simply dump data on their problem and hope that someone else can pick out the pieces that are important. It’s akin to wanting to cook a nice dinner but having no idea how to cook, so you just dump all the ingredients on the table and hope it’s edible. The remedy is simple, if not easy: learn to do data analysis with tried and true methods. Take a statistics course in iTunes U for free – there are several excellent ones from HEC and the Saylor Foundation that would be worth your time.
Insight
If deciding on a course of action is the fundamental goal of insight, then deciding on the wrong course of action would be how to break your data lifecycle. This comes from two principle sources. First, if your collection is bad and your analysis is bad, then you’re going to develop incorrect insights and conclude a wrong course of action. That’s fixable by being rigorous in your data collection and analysis.
The second insight mistake is more insidious and painful: having a pre-determined action and trying to massage your data, analysis, and insights to fit that pre-ordained conclusion. If you’re in a situation like that, be intellectually honest with yourself and others and simply say what the course of action is. It’ll save you tremendous amounts of time, effort, and labor by not having to massage existing data to support your conclusion.
Action
There isn’t much that can go wrong with action that isn’t based on flaws earlier in the lifecycle, except for you to not do what you’d set out to do and what your data, analysis, and insights support. This is certainly a very real possibility! A corporate mandate may arrive from on high that changes your priorities or alters your resources, leading you to not do what you intended. In a case like that, you’ll lack subsequent data for future analysis and will likely have to start over.
I hope this two part look at the data lifecycle gives you some help in examining how you and your organization use data, and helps to fill in some gaps.
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