Levelling-Up
Level 2 – Using Our Data To Drive Actions and Continuing To Work on Metrics, Accuracy, and Process
o move into levels 2 and 3, we’ll be looking to work through several vital tasks depending on how large our organisation is and how far up the curve we’re ultimately looking to go. Those tasks often centre around reporting, dashboarding, and further planning for additional tracking and more detailed insights and questions.
When approaching reporting and dashboarding, it’s important not to rush in (Chapter 9 – Reporting vs. Dashboarding). Much time is spent building reports and dashboards for stakeholders who do not value or understand them. This is also the most visible part of what you’re offering and so most susceptible to HIPPO bias and ‘helpful’ opinions.
HIPPO is an acronym representing the common factors that can influence decision-making: the opinions of the highest-paid person, individual experience or intuition, personal biases, politics, and organisational culture.
Just as we want to include our key stakeholders in the right stages of the Measurement Plan, we need to ensure our end users are aligned with how the data you prepare will look and should be used. If you don’t do this, they may think your data is F**ked, even if it’s not. Just one doubtful and unanswered question or comment from the C-suite or senior leadership team can send your report up in flames, with doubts cast on the rest of the data’s accuracy and, therefore, all your insights being called into question. It is better to keep them in the fold and onside as you work through a proper reporting structure and strategy and provide wireframes of possible dashboards and key metrics before catching them off guard with a dazzling data puke that creates more questions than it answers. Data puke is term coined wonderfully by author Avinash Kaushik.
Level 3 – Laying the Groundwork for Greater Personalisation, and Uncovering Detailed Insights and Wisdom
In level 3, it is important to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. Your detailed reporting provides great insights using tactical and strategic reporting to the right level within your organisation. Now you’re starting to look outside your silo and area and looking to start designing solutions around how to track and service your customers across multiple channels and touchpoints (Chapter 3 – The Power of One). You’re having conversations about customer relationship management (CRM) systems and exciting new tools (Chapter 8 – Let’s Go Tool Shopping) and about whether we get a new content management system (CMS) or how to integrate our existing tools and technology better. You may have other marketing tools, such as email-based or programmatic, running alongside your paid search or facebook ads, and you want to join those audiences. Perhaps you have lots of great offline data completely isolated from you, your own data, and your team.
You will then go beyond the standard metrics and dimensions and start building your own scoring or indicators. A user experience team may look to introduce page or customer quality scoring like Google’s HEART Metrics.
Source: McKtui Consulting based on Google’s HEART Framework.
To better surface real information about on-site behaviour or build out your own customer lifetime value equation, understanding the value of the sale is more than just that one sale; it’s every other product they go on to buy and the additional customers they bring along with them.
If your website is heavy on content and you want your visitors to spend a long time there, a content stickiness score could be much more helpful than page time or bounce rate: adding a compounding value for every additional piece of content a user ingests after an initial piece or landing page.
You’re making the best of understanding and perfecting the few silos of data you have access to right now, but this is where we take the leap of faith, rally our expeditionary force and cross ‘The GAP’; the rewards are high, but so could be the costs (Chapter 7 – Picking a Strategy). How do we ensure we have the proper business case to make this decision, and what do we need to know? First, we need to know if we have what it takes because we may need to build in those areas or outsource (Chapter 5 – The Pillars of Personalisation), and then we need a plan (Chapter 6 – Plan, Plan, Plan).
Hopefully, you’re starting to feel there may be some method to this madness by now.
