You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Data Preparation Pain Points?

In today's episode, Naomi asks, what is the biggest pain point for you in data preparation? Well, gosh, there's there's so many things that can go wrong in data preparation. Um the biggest pain point though is that the data you have is not clean or complete. So very often what happens, particularly with marketing data, even with services like Google Analytics, is the data isn't either complete or is improperly collected, or uh in some cases is just wrong. So, for example, let's say you have Google Analytics on your website and you change themes, and you forget to put your tracking codes in the new theme, and you don't notice this until the end of the month when you go to do your reporting.

There's no way to get that data back, it's permanently gone. The data that you have, uh you can report on what you do have, but you're missing a bunch, right? Um that's sort of like a global shortage. And there are techniques to help mitigate something like that, especially if you are only missing a little bit of data and you have an overwhelming amount of other data to work with. There are techniques called imputation methods that can guess, essentially, make a best guess at what happened on those days.

But as we all know, there are marketing anomalies all the time. You may have had a tweet take off that day. You may have had an ad do really well. Someone may have dropped an email. And imputation is going to guess based on things like a predictive mean.

So it's essentially trying to average out all of your other data and make a best guess as to what should have been that spot. If you had a successful anomaly that day, it's not going to be picked up, right? And so things like your attribution analysis as well as just basic reporting are not going to be correct. So that's one of the things that's a big pain point. Another one is when you have incorrect data.

So again, let's say you've got a website and you're running Google Analytics. Actually, no, let's go do with this one. You're doing your email marketing, right? And you're trying to guess the open rate of your email marketing. But what you realize is that Apple's mail privacy protection is auto opening every email that you send to anybody who uses the mail app on iPhone or the Mac and things like that.

And so your data is there, but it's not correct, right? It is it is functionally incorrect, changed by this technology, and you can no longer rely on that information because it's not real. It's not what you're trying to gauge. You're trying to decide are the emails that we're sending out to people, are they being opened? And if a machine is opening every single email, then you don't know that that whether a person ever put eyes on that or not, or if it's just done by a machine.

And so that's an example of where you have corrupted data, right? And you can have the same thing with Google Analytics too, right? You have bots uh and uh and spam uh traffic showing up in your Google Analytics. It looks like you got 10,000 visitors yesterday to your website, but 9,900 of them were automated traffic. Again, that's not something that you can easily repair.

The challenge with all these different ways our data goes wrong is that in many cases they're not repairable, and they're not something we can go back and re get, right? We can't go back in time. Uh we can only collect data and process data from right now moving forward. So if you've got bad data in your wherever it is you store your data, and you don't know that it's bad, you could be making really bad reports and really bad forecasts from it. And so that's the biggest point in data prep is knowing whether your data is any good or not.

Because if it is good, then you can work with it, you can do statistics and data science and machine learning and artificial intelligence and all the fun stuff. But if your data is bad, you can't do any of that. It's like cooking, right? No matter what cool appliances you own, no matter how skilled you are as a chef, if your ingredients are bad, there's not much you're cooking, right? If you if you had meant to buy flour and instead you got sand, I don't care how good a cook you are, you're not making anything edible, right?

So that's really is the the biggest pain point in data preparation. And a lot of companies that do, you know, data preparation services. IBM has it built into Watson Studio. There's Tableau data prep and things like that. There's all these different tools that make the the processing and the preparing of data better and easier.

Um of them can address bad data, you know, poor data quality. None of them ever will be able to. Uh no matter what a vendor promises, there is no tool ever that will be invented that will go back in time and get you clean data from uh from the past. I mean, if you do have a time machine, I think I you I can think of better things to do with that than than fixing your marketing data. But good question.

Thanks for asking.