12 years ago
Making #Measure and #LPO More Palatable In Your Organization

One of the hurdles that practitioners of digital analytics (#Measure) and optimization (#LPO) face in their organizations is acceptance – having the tools they utilize accepted as being understandable, useful, repeatable, and reliable. Comments such as this are commonly shared between digital analysts at conferences or over the Twitter virtual water-cooler:

• “Can you explain this more fully to me/train me/get me more up to speed?”
• “This is interesting, but we (traditional analysts) do real analytics (but we need to learn this stuff ASAP, can you help us)?”
• “We can’t do testing – only the product management team does product testing.”
• “This isn’t product testing – it’s creativeusability testing – why are you working on this?”

and so on…

Digital analysts might find themselves on the digital marketing team, but not the customer analytics team or the business intelligence department, and they often find that they are in a curious state of purgatory. On the digital front line but marginalized from the “real analysts,” they are nevertheless highly in demand to transfer knowledge to the very people who marginalize them.

In the rare instances that digital analysts find themselves on the customer analytics team, they might find themselves isolated from the digital marketing team, and find their work in digital optimization continually questioned and parsed for content, creative, usability analysis vs. customer analysis, potentially leaving the digital marketers (who so desperately want insight) to do analysis themselves (or seek help elsewhere).

A digital analyst might be overwhelmed when the proverbial light bulb switches on at his organization, it discovers the internet, everyone figures out that he is the only person who gets it (web, e-mail, mobile analytics and digital testing, and targeting) and suddenly a deluge of demands come his way.

To overcome these hurdles, the digital analyst can take the following steps to make digital analytics and optimization more palatable and digestible in her organization, and eventually make #measure and #LPO an intrinsic part of life where she works:

• uild a “Business Plan”: Create “DigitalAnalyticsAndLPOAtYourPlace.Com” (or a much catchier internal brand), and get senior leader buy–in to help you build a structure around your internal offering.
• Get the Message Out: After you get buy–in, build internal messaging mechanisms (e–mail distribution lists, intranet portals), and send out periodic messages to build your internal audience’s knowledge about what you do. There are a wide range of technology angles you can take here – from high–tech collaboration systems, to one of my personal favorite low-tech tools:

• Take Your Show On The Road: Make time for “lunch and learns,” periodic internal lessons, and so on, to help build your organization’s knowledge base around digital analytics. Find out who the digitally interested are, and share pertinent articles (for example, mobile analytics articles for colleagues distracted by the latest digital handheld gizmo) to help drive interest.
• Get The Data Into Interfaces They Understand: Are traditional analysts leery of learning a new interface? Are they amazed at (or afraid of) how you log in to so many different web based tools on a daily basis? Set up feeds to dump data into interfaces they already like.
• Show ‘Em That Anyone Can Do Experiments: Try some fun activities. For example, take reluctant adoptees out for pizza, and show them the difference between A/B and multivariate testing using as your examples the many pizza options and combinations.
• Show People That Failure Can Lead to Success: Find and share stories about experiments gone wrong and how they turned into something right, to allay concerns about easing from analysis into optimization.

In short, determine how you tell stories with data, get your story out, have fun doing it (pizza!), and you will improve the culture of digital analysis and optimization at your organization.

For more thoughts on making #measure and #LPO more palatable at your organization, check out Chris’ SlideShare and recap from eMetrics Boston 2012 at: http://www.tpgdirect.com/news/2012/10/16/emetrics-boston-2012-recap-tag-management-goes-big-time-funnels-go-away-and-lobby-bar-optimization/

– be sure to save him a few slices of pepperoni

About the Author
Chris is Director of Digital Analytics at TPG Direct Omnicom DAS, where he is focused on continuing the growth of TPG Direct and Omnicom’s digital analytics offerings. Prior to TPG Direct, Chris was the Digital Marketing Analytics Lead at Barclaycard US Barclays, where he focused on digital analytics, testing and optimization across Barclaycard’s credit card, internet banking and emergent mobile commerce platforms.

Before joining Barclaycard, Chris was the Analytics Product Manager for GSI Commerce eBay, where he oversaw a variety of digital analytics related software and service products. Prior to GSI, Chris served in a variety of digital marketing and analytics roles with General Electric. During his lengthy tenure at GE, Chris received several GE awards for internet marketing, analytics, and knowledge management, and filed several US Patent applications, resulting in one US Patent thus far – with more applications still in process.