7 Pitfalls That Will Ruin Your Analytics Data and Prevent You from Getting Any Insights
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(1) The document discusses 7 common pitfalls that can ruin analytics data and prevent insights. These include: having no plan or strategy, poor naming conventions, tracking too much data, using too many tools, locking data away, lack of data maintenance, and being too data-driven. (2) Pre-implementation mistakes include having no tracking plan, unclear event and property names, and attempting to track too much data without prioritization. (3) Post-implementation mistakes involve restricting data access, not maintaining data over time, and relying too heavily on data instead of user feedback.
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7 Pitfalls That Will Ruin Your Analytics Data and Prevent You from Getting Any Insights
- 1. 7 Pitfalls That Will Ruin Your Analytics Data and Prevent You from Getting Any Insights Ruben Ugarte, Founder at Practico Analytics
- 3. Thue is the Kissmetrics Webinar Wizard and Marketing Ops Manager. Before joining forces with Kissmetrics, he was a Lyft driver in SF, which is also how he ended up as a Kissmetrics marketer. Whenever Thue is not trying to automate everything around him, you can find him hiking in the Sierras. THUE MADSEN Marketing Operations Manager, Kissmetrics @ThueLMadsen RUBEN UGARTE Founder, Practico Analytics @ugarteruben Ruben is the founder of Practico Analytics which helps companies use data to grow their companies and products. You can usually find him longboarding to his next meeting while listening to the latest pop hits.
- 5. 1 Introduction to Event Driven Tools 1. Lack of a Plan or Strategy 2. Poor Naming Habits 3. Tracking Too Many Things 4. Too Many Tools 2 Pre-Implementation Mistakes 3 Post-Implementation Mistakes TABLE OF CONTENTS #Kisswebinar 5. Locking Your Data Behind Doors 6. Lack of Maintenance for Your Data 7. Being Too Data Driven
- 6. (1) Introduction to Event Driven Tools
- 7. Events have two component: the event name and the properties INTRODUCTION TO EVENT DRIVEN TOOLS #Kisswebinar Event name: Registered Event Properties: a) plan: Pro Annual b) account type: Facebook
- 8. INTRODUCTION TO EVENT DRIVEN TOOLS #Kisswebinar An example report from Kissmetrics.
- 10. Mistake 1: Lack of a Plan or Strategy
- 11. LACK OF A PLAN OR STRATEGY #Kisswebinar
- 12. Brian Balfour Reforge I estimate that greater than ⅔ of data efforts at companies fail. This is trouble because data plays a key horizontal role in the growth process and mindset. Without good data, it’s not possible to run a legitimate experimentation cycle. “
- 13. LACK OF A PLAN OR STRATEGY #Kisswebinar The solution is to create a tracking plan.
- 14. Mistake 2: Poor Naming Habits
- 15. POOR NAMING HABITS #Kisswebinar Good event names should be logical to the point of being obvious. This helps new team members get familiar with the data quicker. Almost all analytics tools are case sensitive so these are completely different to analytics tools.
- 16. Mistake 3: Tracking Too Many Things
- 17. TRACKING TOO MANY THINGS #Kisswebinar
- 18. TRACKING TOO MANY THINGS #Kisswebinar Use “Phases” to prioritize your events.
- 19. Mistake 4: Too Many Tools
- 20. TOO MANY TOOLS #Kisswebinar Common analytics “stack”. Choose one of each. 1. Analyze marketing traffic 2. Analyze user behavior 3. Engage users through email, SMS or push notifications
- 22. Mistake 5: Locking Your Data Behind Doors
- 23. Karen Church, Sr Manager, Product Analytics Intercom Of course, educating people takes some overhead early on. But we noticed that once people got the first leg-up, they started analyzing data for themselves… As a result, there are a number of teams and individuals within the company who are building their own dashboards to track key metrics that they care about. “
- 24. 1. Company wide education sessions. 2. One on ones with key team members 3. Slack channel (#tracking) where people can post specific questions e.g. how do I create this report or what data do we have for this question? LOCKING YOUR DATA BEHIND DOORS #Kisswebinar
- 25. Mistake 6: Lack of Maintenance for Your Data
- 26. LACK OF MAINTENANCE FOR YOUR DATA #Kisswebinar Mistakes in tracking will screw up your data.
- 27. Mistake 7: Being Too Data Driven
- 28. BEING TOO DATA DRIVEN This gives me some ideas on what this user is thinking but sometimes it’s better to actually talk to them. #Kisswebinar
- 29. THUE MADSEN Marketing Operations Manager, Kissmetrics @ThueLMadsen tmadsen@kissmetrics.com Questions? RUBEN UGARTE Founder, Practico Analytics @ugarteruben ruben@practicoanalytics.com
Editor's Notes
- Our presentation today is split into 3 sections: Section 1: I’ll provide a short introduction to the world of event driven analytics tools. Section 2: I’ll cover 4 mistakes that tend to happen before you implement your tool Section 3: I’ll cover 3 mistakes that happen after you implement your analytics tool. Every slide contains notes and links to anything that I mentioned.
- Most analytics tools use events to capture and store data. Events are used to track “actions” that users take inside of your product unlike pageviews which simply track when a page loads. What did the user do after the page loaded though? Common actions include signing up, viewing a video, download a file, uploading a picture, etc. Events are combined with event properties and users to get a complete picture of what is going on. An overview of these three pieces here: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/people-events-and-properties/
- Events have two components: event names and properties Event names simply state the action that a user took e.g. they registered or signed up for our product. Properties give us more information on that action e.g. they signed up under the Pro Annual plan and they used Facebook to do that. Events get sent to tools like Kissmetrics, Mixpanel or Amplitude using different programming languages like Javascript, Ruby, etc. Example: Kissmetrics Javascript language: http://support.kissmetrics.com/article/show/24036-javascript-library Libraries for Ruby, PHP, etc here: http://support.kissmetrics.com/container/show/other-code-libraries
- This is how the data would look like inside a tool like Kissmetrics. We can segment our general event/action (Registered) by its properties to get this funnel report. We can then do a bunch of other cool stuff like see a funnel of different actions, send messages based on certain events, etc.
- Rushing an analytics implementation is the biggest problem I see companies do all the time. You’re bound to make mistakes in what you track, how you track it and the possibility using the data. Mistakes becomes obvious 3-6 months after when you try to answer a simple question and you can’t because you’re missing data or your data is incorrect.
- Brian Balfour from Reforge, source from http://www.coelevate.com/essays/growth-data-mistakes Data efforts fail for multiple reasons but bad initial implementations are a big time waster on resources and motivation. More than 50% of the companies who reach out to me do it after screwing up their first attempt 6-12 months before.
- The solution is to use a tracking plan Capture event names, properties and user attributes You can edit this document multiple times which is easier than re-writing code. You can download the tracking plan that I used with clients + a short video on how to fill it out here: https://practicoanalytics.com/kissmetrics-webinar/
- Event names and properties should be obvious to anyone familiar with your app. Watch out for case sensitive issues. Story: data that had obscure naming scheme “zzzXXz” before and after events. Clever but not needed.
- Most companies experience a version of FOMO where they want to implement events ”just in case” More events = more work to maintain them + more work to get some insights out of those events Story: I fought against this for a long time and I now have a better way to handle this fear by letting companies plan out all events possible in a tracking plan BUT implement them in phases.
- The solution is to use a tracking plan for ALL of your events. Go crazy. Use phases to prioritize what you actually want to implement After each phase, force yourself to use that data to start making improvements. You might never implement all phases. You can download the tracking plan that I used with clients + a short video on how to fill it out here: https://practicoanalytics.com/kissmetrics-webinar/
- I seen companies with 5-10 tools at once. So many tools that you’re starting to really slow down the performance of a page. You can experiment but you want to work off a common “stack” of tools.
- Segment.com: manage all of your data Google Analytics: analyze marketing traffic Kissmetrics/Mixpanel/Amplitude: analyze user behavior Intercom/Customer.io: send messages Tools like Kissmetrics are now adding email engagement so you don’t have to get a standalone tool like Intercom or Customer.io.
- The whole reason why you would go to all this trouble is so your own team members can analyze data on their own. Tools like Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, etc are designed to be more user friendly than options like SQL How Intercom delivers better product analytics: https://blog.intercom.com/4-ways-to-deliver-better-product-analytics/
- Education is key here. Consider doing company wide sessions at the beginning and one on ones in the 3-6 months after implementation. Creating a Slack channel Eventually, you’ll have everyone in your company mining for insights relevant to their work. Story: company has a #tracking channel where everyone is posting questions. There’s no excuses for getting the data that you need and everyone is getting answers within hours.
- Mistakes and errors will happen. You simply need to be aware of them so you can find them and fix them. If you’re lucky, the mistake will be obvious like this one. If not, it will be subtle like a lower conversion rate. Story: client keep having issues with data until someone in the development become the owner. Make someone in your development team the ”owner” of tracking. They are responsible for ensuring that any product changes have the proper tracking in place.
- Data will give you a lot of helpful advice. You’ll know exactly where to focus your energy but sometimes you need to talk to real people. You can learn more in a 10 minute interview than sorting through data points.