Cesar Brea’s book, Marketing and Sales Analytics, is a practitioner’s take on analysis. He discussed implementing marketing analytics.
Conversations With Experts
Indeed, a full third just details his conversations with practitioner experts. The work has several points that are worth considering. Brea also includes elements that I would have avoided. The division of marketers into those from Earth, Venus, and Mars depending upon their attitudes to analytics didn’t do much for me. It seemed a bit too cheesy.
Discussing risk he notes that assigning estimates of probabilities to outcomes can be a useful exercise. It is, however, just as important to assess the “stakes associated with the decision” and the “…’optionality’ associated with them” (Brea, 2014 , page 113). By optionality, he means whether you can track your investments as you make them and so abandon failing plans before you waste too much money.
Implementing Marketing Analytics: The Presentation
Brea outlines an entire presentation (Brea, 2014, pages 114-115). I imagine this will be useful to those who lack confidence in their ability to sell analysis to their organizations.
Other notable points are Brea’s explanation of attribution analysis (Brea, 2014, page 97).
He also has a significant discussion of how analytics are political (Brea, 2014, page 133). When is data good enough to release? When are the benefits of allowing ad hoc exploration higher than the costs of allowing sensitive data to emerge? These are political tradeoffs.
Randomized Testing Matters
Brea explains the advantages of randomized testing.
..if you are not randomizing exposures at each request of a web page, and rather showing one version “A” on a Monday and the other “B” on a Tuesday, Tuesday’s lift over Monday might not be due to the superiority of “B” but rather to Tuesday related factors.
Brea, 2014, page 108
He then explains how to counter such objections by reviewing past differences between Monday and Tuesday performance. (If at all possible, however, you really should randomize exposures of your web pages to do a proper test).
If you are interested in implementing a marketing analytics program you might want to read Brea’s book.
For more on marketing analytics see here, here, and here.
Read: Cesar A. Brea (2014) Marketing and Sales Analytics, Pearson, Upper Saddle River, NJ.