As the axiom goes: people don’t leave companies; they leave their managers. And, good analysts are constantly being approached with new opportunities. So, what’s the secret formula for hanging on to analytics talent? Assuming simply chaining them to their desks isn’t an option, then the trick is keeping them happy and motivated. On this episode, the gang discusses their experiences and perspectives on the topic. Tim tried to quit the show just before recording, but he then discovered that Michae...
Sep 25, 2018•58 min
Tell me about a time you produced an amazing analysis. Please provide your response in the form of a Jupyter notebook that uses Python or R (or both!) to pull words from a corpus that contains all words in the OED stored in a BigQuery table. I mean, that's a fair question to ask, right? No? Well, what questions and techniques are effective for assessing an analyst's likelihood of succeeding in your organization? How should those techniques differ when looking for a technical analyst as opposed t...
Sep 11, 2018•55 min
Mama always said: life is like a box of chocolates , and online learning is sometimes like one of those boxes where you don’t know which piece is delicious nougat and which piece is some sort of nasty, coconut-y cream. Well, maybe not your mama. But, it’s a big world, so, surely, there’s a mother out there somewhere who would agree with the sentiment. On this episode, the gang chatted with Google Consumer Insights Analyst Lizzie Allen-Klein about different learning styles and different approache...
Aug 28, 2018•58 min
For this mini-episode, Tim sits down (virtually) with Episode #077 guest Jodi Daniels from Red Clover Advisors to chat about the world of privacy post-May 25, 2018 (GDPR), as well as the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). Has the free-wheeling world of free-flowing consumer data ended, or are companies simply learning how to behave with more care? Give it a listen to find out?...
Aug 21, 2018•13 min
Business Intelligence. It’s a term that’s been around for a few decades, but that is every bit as difficult to nail down as “data science,” “big data,” or a jellyfish. Think too hard about it, and you might actually find yourself struggling to define “analytics!” With the latest generation of BI tools, though, it’s a topic that is making the rounds at cocktail parties the world over! (Cocktail parties just aren’t what they used to be.) On this episode, the crew snags Taylor Udell from Heap to jo...
Aug 14, 2018•54 min
The company: "Hey, you. That's a mighty nice test you've run. We should be doing that a lot more of those." You: "Um...okay. But, I'm only one person." In this episode, the gang chats with Pinterest 's Andrea Burbank ( Twitter | Pinterest ) about how she (loosely) dealt with this scenario: from sheer force of will to get some early wins to strategic thinking combined with late nights, an obsession with checklists, and a willingness to be flexible as she slowly, but firmly, pushed the organizatio...
Jul 31, 2018•52 min
Humans are creatures of habit. And analysts — those of us who haven’t been so drawn into the world of artificial intelligence that we have become cyborgs, at least — are humans. In this episode, the gang explores the good and the bad side of analytical habits: what analyses we gravitate towards, how we go about approaching those analyses, and, to some extent, how those habits are impacted by our organizational environments. With a side dish of, “What is a data scientist, anyway?” (because who ca...
Jul 17, 2018•51 min
Once upon a time, there was some data. And that data cried out to be extracted and analyzed and packaged up like the most exquisite of gifts and then presented gloriously to an eager and excited group of stakeholders. But, alas! Will this data story have a happy ending? Perhaps. Perhaps not! And that’s the subject of this episode. Sort of. Our intrepid hosts ask the question, “How can we communicate more effectively by applying the tricks of the data journalism trade?” To answer that question, W...
Jul 03, 2018•49 min
Are you reading this? If so, then you are literate. But, are you (and are your stakeholders) data literate? What does that even mean? On this episode -- recorded in front of a live audience at Marketing Evolution Experience in Las Vegas -- the gang tackled the topic. Mid-way through the show, they were delighted to be joined on stage by Gary Angel (unplanned, but due to a series of unfortunate travel and communication mishaps -- recording with a live audience is exciting! He is officially over h...
Jun 19, 2018•37 min
Under the 'guise of a discussion about making the leap into a new technology, this bonus mini-episode (hopefully) clears up the on-going confusion about the Kiss Sisters. Moe sat down with her big sister, Michele, to chat about jumping into learning an entirely new skill when time is short, expectations are high, and the learning curve is steep. The specific example they chat about is Michele's dive into Google Analytics data in BigQuery using SQL, but the tips and thoughts are applicable to any...
Jun 13, 2018•12 min
Put this in your pipe and smoke it: all of the tracking we try to do of people is actually technology designed to track content . And, even that tracking of content was a hacked-together repurposing of a system designed to deliver content. In other words, we've got layers of fiction upon fiction that we're trying to muddle through (and, often, ignore) as an industry. The result? A ridiculous level of inefficiency whereby brands overspend to ineffectively reach their target audiences with direct ...
Jun 05, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Regression. Correlation. Normality. t-tests. Falsities of both the positive and negative varieties. How do these terms and techniques play nicely with digital analytics data? Are they the schoolyard bullies wielded by data scientists, destined to simply run by and kick sand in the faces of our sessions, conversion rates, and revenues per visit? Or, are they actually kind-hearted upperclassmen who are ready and willing to let us into their world? That's the topic of this show (albeit without the ...
May 22, 2018•58 min
Thanks for stopping by. Please get comfortable. We're going to be taking a few notes while you listen, but pay that no mind. Now, what we'd like you to do is listen to the podcast. Oh. And don't worry about that big mirror over there. There may be 2 or 3 or 10 people watching. Wow. We're terrible moderators when it comes to this sort of thing. That's why Els Aerts from AGConsult joined us to discuss user research: what it is, where it should fit in an organization's toolkit, and some tips for do...
May 08, 2018•47 min
Bayesian vs. Frequentist. False Positive vs. False Negative. Truth vs. Uncertainty. It's the world of A/B testing! In this bonus mini-episode, Moe sat down with Chad Sanderson from Subway to discuss some of the pitfalls of A/B testing -- the nuances that may seem subtle, but are anything but trivial when it comes to planning and running a test.
May 01, 2018•13 min
If you have a smartphone nearby and you are not wearing a foil hat, chances are that some brand somewhere -- and probably several brands in many places -- know where you are. Is that creepy? Maybe. It's likely removing a few taps when you check what the weather will be like tomorrow, and there might just be a coupon for a discounted hamburger just waiting to pop up when you get near your favorite QSR around lunchtime! In this episode, James Fogelberg from Landmarks ID joins the gang to discuss t...
Apr 24, 2018•59 min
Have you ever walked out of a meeting with a clear idea of the analysis that you're going to conduct, only to find yourself three days later staring at an endless ocean of crunched data and wondering in which direction you're supposed to be paddling your analysis boat? That might not be an ocean. It might be an analytics rabbit hole . In this episode, the gang explores the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses approach developed by Richards Heuer as part of his work with the CIA, inductive versus ded...
Apr 10, 2018•49 min
That's right. We're trying to grow the reach of this podcast, so we figured we needed to do some growth h---...NO! No. No. NO!!! We're NOT going to use that term. But, it turns out that growth marketing has some interesting concepts. On the one hand, you may think, "Don't I already do that?" And the answer is quite possibly, "Yeah. Pretty much." On the other hand, you may think, "Oh, well that's an interesting lens through which to view the world." And, that is okay, too. Either way, check out t...
Apr 03, 2018•11 min
Michael, Tim, and 12,998 of their closest friends descended on Las Vegas for Adobe Summit the last week of March. With luck, Tim will have worked through the after-effects of the sensory overload of Vegas combined with the sensory overload of Adobe Summit by mid-April, but who knows? The guys (really... just the guys -- Moe was in the U.S., but she was in Austin at CXL Live ) sat down to share their hot takes from the show. Attribution, Adobe Sensei, Adobe Launch, the Philadelphia Eagles, and mo...
Mar 30, 2018•12 min
Some people (possibly even one of the co-hosts of this podcast...on this very episode) have been known to say, "People have this dependency on Excel, which is freakin' weird!" We know it wasn't Tim, because he wouldn't have filtered his language! Whether it's a symptom of weirdness, an illustration of inertia, or an invisible hand of inevitability, though, Excel remains omnipresent. Is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it merely "a thing?" In this episode, the gang dives into the topic: t...
Mar 27, 2018•57 min
Do you model professionally? Would you like to? Or, are you uncertain . These are the topics of this episode: Bayesian statistician (among other official roles that are way less fun to say) Dr. Elea Feit joined the gang to discuss how we, as analysts, think about data put it to use. Things got pretty deep, included the exploration of questions such as, "If you run a test that includes a holdout group, is that an A/B test?" This episode ran a little long, but our confidence level is quite high th...
Mar 13, 2018•1 hr 4 min
Moe sat down for a chat with privacy and GDPR expert Aurélie Pols to dive in to some of the questions that, at times, get treated as peripheral in the run-up to new regulations, but that seem like they are fairly fundamental when it comes to understanding the rationale and drivers behind those regulations: what does the Holocaust have to do with GDPR? Is GDPR something that was simply dreamed up in Europe, or are there roots in other countries (teaser: Eleanor Roosevelt). Is GDPR inherently anti...
Mar 06, 2018•10 min
Raise your hand if you work for a company that sells exclusively low-consideration products and only sells them online. Anyone? Anyone? We only see a couple of hands out there. For all the rest of you, this episode might be of interest. We sat down with Amy Sample — Senior Director of Consumer Insights and Strategy at PBS by day, president of the DAA board by night — to discuss approaches for effective digital measurement in the absence of a clear online conversion. That challenge doesn’t get mu...
Feb 27, 2018•48 min
For the second year in a row for the podcast -- but the first appearance since Moe joined the crew -- we headed to the Hunguest Grandhotel Galya outside Budapest for Superweek , one of the most unique conference experiences in the digital analytics industry: comfortably isolated over an hour outside of Budapest in a beautiful setting, it's a temporary community of, for, and by the analyst. With sessions ranging from GDPR to machine learning to attribution to media analytics, the spaces before, b...
Feb 13, 2018•54 min
In this, our initial bonus audio, Tim sits down with Lee Isensee , creator and curator of the Measure Slack team . We plug the Slack team on every episode of the podcast, and all three co-hosts are active members of the team, so we wanted to find out a little bit about the history, challenges, and envisioned future for the platform. Standard bonus content disclaimer: Bonus content is not released on any fixed schedule, and it does not receive quite the same level of polish as regular episodes. I...
Feb 06, 2018•23 min
You love analytics. Great. You even love your job (hopefully)! But, you're thinking about the future, and it looks like there is a fork in the road. Should you take the path that leads you down the people management path? Or, should you take the path that leads you deeper into the data itself, but as an individual contributor. Can you pursue both paths? As it turns out, Michael stumbled down the former path, while Tim has headed down the latter. So, Moe took a turn in the moderator chair to guid...
Jan 30, 2018•55 min
Do you ever feel like you've got the analytics blues because you see what needs to happen, and it's something innovative, and all the signals say it's the right thing to do... but the realities of organizational life are a brick wall on the path to progress? Welcome to corporate life, buddy. That's just the way it is! Or...is it? On this episode, the gang sits down with Evan LaPointe and gets him to jam a bit -- literally at first, and then figuratively -- about organizational dynamics, the trad...
Jan 16, 2018•56 min
Happy new year! Nothing says a new year like a new year's resolution. And, what's a better professional resolution than to work with stakeholders more effectively? Unfortunately, we've all come across business users who have no interest in the data, have too much interest in the data, or maybe even have the right amount of interest...but in the wrong data. Interactions with those stakeholders can be enormously frustrating and entirely unproductive, yet neither you nor they are going anywhere. Wh...
Jan 02, 2018•1 hr 2 min
2017 was a big year for both the digital analytics industry and for the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Join us, won't you, as we (figuratively!) gaze upon our navels? From the traction the #womeninanalytics movement gained on multiple fronts, to the looming promise of machine learning and AI getting a real foothold in the field, to the podcast finally adding a co-host who is universally admired, we had a lot to talk about! We had a LOT to talk about. Trust us, we edited this episode down heavily!...
Dec 19, 2017•48 min
Are you a data subject? If you're a person, then you better believe you are! And, so is every person who visits your website. And, if you are in the EU, or you have visitors from the EU, then May 25th, 2018, is a day you should be keeping a close eye on and preparing for now! On this episode, Jodi Daniels of Red Clover Advisors joins Moe and Tim to talk all things General Data Privacy Regulation (aka, GDPR). Give it a listen and pick up delightful cocktail party openers like, "Hey, do you know h...
Dec 05, 2017•54 min
When you find a true insight, it can make your head spin. But, will your head spin in a different direction if the insight is found in Australia than if it is found in the United States? On this episode, Rod Jacka from Panalysis joins the crew for a balanced discussion (northern AND southern hemispheres) about how the phrase "actionable insights" should turn the stomach of any right-thinking analyst. More importantly, the gang discusses the need for clarity around insights -- both definitionally...
Nov 21, 2017•56 min
