Jason asks, “Can you describe a marketing initiative that illustrates the intersection of data and content?” Data is an ingredient, and a fairly substantial one, for any form of content marketing. In content marketing, you have an opinion, a point of view, and then you have to support that opinion. That’s where data comes into…
Stephen asks, “What data points speak to the effectiveness of marketing? In a dashboard published to senior management the last pages of the pdf were dedicated to marketing data. It was visitors to the website, impressions from paid media, Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers, and another data point or two that to me put an undue…
Kanako asks, “What are best practices for conducting A/B tests on non-random situations?” The short answer is for randomized controlled trials, there isn’t a best practice for doing things non-randomly. You need randomization to reduce the impact of confounding variables, and this is something marketers do wrong many, many times. Ways A/B tests go wrong:…
Jackie asks, “How does all this fancy data science kung fu hubbub help us, we’re a traditional sales company that only makes phone sales cold calls?” Data science is a methodology that can be applied to any data you happen to have. In the case of cold calling, as long as you have data about…
Shane asks, “What’s the validity of domain authority in the current SEO landscape where Google is telling us to focus on EAT? Should I be concerned about measuring domain authority or is it more of a metric that does more to stroke ego like media impressions?” The answer to this question requires some statistical knowledge.…
Ashwin asks, “I have data around me related to campaigns – emails, phone calls, and survey data – so how should I start analyzing it?” First, let’s recall that marketing data science is about the application of the scientific method to data. Our first priority, then, is to use the data we have, techniques like…
Albert asks, “What is the best way to sell the idea of marketing data science to executives that don’t see its value, without making them lose face or look bad?” Generally speaking, most executives want the same things – save money, save time, make money. Without pointing out specific failures, look for opportunities where a…
Oz asks, “There’s still the ethical questions that my marketing friends avoid: should Google even have all that data? How ethical is it to use that data? What about pending legislation that would hopefully criminalize lots of common data acquisition methods?” Two points I think are super important: minimum viable data, and behavior rather than…
Paul asks, “What excites you most about AI?” In the context of marketing and data science, AI allows us to scale our inquiries to our data. We have overwhelming amounts of data, and most of it goes unused. Think about all the data just in Google Analytics. How much of it do you actually use?…
