I am thrilled to have Shankar Mishra (bio here) as our guest writer this month. I had the pleasure to share a panel with him at a conference, and have long conversations about Digital Marketing Analytics between sessions. He immediately struck me as a very smart man. I have something to confess: I am in awe of people who hold a PhD in Operational Research. Shankar has one. He is not the type to make decisions with a wet finger pointing up in the air; that man measures and calculates. As Vice President, Online Retailing, at the Wyndham Hotel Group, he teaches us this month one thing or two about predictibility in online analytics.
I am also very pleased to welcome Jean-François Bélisle (bio here), one of the amazing experts from the WAO/Network I have the pleasure to collaborate with, who occupies the bulk of his time as Partner (Manager), Customer Intelligence Department at LoyaltyOne. Jean-François offers a deep thinking article about how some analytics can sometime be too… simple!
As for me, I present a much simpler article, looking at what make insights actionable. I believe I bring an angle to that question that is not often touched in key performance indicators discussions.
A longer issue this month, with three articles instead of the usual two. I am again very excited by the high quality delivered by this month’s contributors, Shankar Mishra, Vice President, Online Retail at Wyndham Hotel Group, and Jean-François Bélisle, Partner (Manager) – Consumer Intelligence Department at LoyaltyOne. I would even dare say that they offer us deep thoughts that need some effort, some time to absorb, but with so many gems.
Few years back, though it feels like ages ago, I was working on my first web analytics implementation. As one of the initial tasks for the implementation, we went around the organization to explore what may be the burning questions that our fancy new web analytics tool needed to answer right away. We setup a … Continued
Occam’s Razor is not only the name of a blog by Avinash Kaushik, it’s also a way of thinking that most analytics executives embrace. So what is Occam’s Razor? Occam’s Razor, also referred as the law of parsimony, dates back to the XIVth century with the work of logician William of Ockham and later popularized … Continued
It is almost a cliché to say that metrics should be actionable. No, it is an actual cliché. Books and consultants like myself usually say that so people will avoid measuring, and reporting, on stuff that has either very little value to the business (think hits), or that is very hard to impossible to influence (the weather if you sell umbrellas). So, we all agree that analytics should deliver actionable insights, i.e. new knowledge susceptible to generate action.