Purpose of Mining for Insights

After a few weeks of thinking about the vision of this blog, here's what you can plan on seeing. This blog will be about a broad area of topics related to digital analytics; however, they will all have one of two main themes:

• Effective collection and application of data - Something I see clients struggling with the most is how their data is collected and organized. Data sources tend to be disconnected and when they are as such, the value that should be realized from the data is not at its true potential. Creating a well organized structure for data collection and what you do with this cleaner and more connected data is the atom of every digital analytics engagement and project.
• Effective data presentation - More often than not, how data is presented affects the resulting actions by clients and agencies. In my experience so far, this is the topic that has the most influence on whether or not an organization takes action. I'm not currently an expert in the presentation of data, far from it actually. As a result, posts that have effective data presentation as the theme will likely be a sharing of on the job experience and research of thought leaders, such as Edward Tufte.

So look forward to seeing some new/improved ways to tackle data collection and improve your analysis methods. But also look for the extra step that ties it all back in to what ultimately matters, making educated, data driven recommendations that drive change in your organization, and hopefully impact your business' and/or client's bottom line.

Rededication

So it's been nearly a year since my last post (some real dedication I've made to the blog). While I haven't been as dedicated to all things I had in mind, I tend to have problems with setting grandiose goals, I did actually stick to the productivity tracking experiment I set for myself last September. What follows is an overview of the results and the learnings I have tried to incorporate into my daily work life.

For the better part of the last year I have recorded some simple items throughout my workdays, with the intention of identifying correlations between my actions and my productivity. I tracked a number of different things from what I ate for breakfast or the type of music I listened to while working to the approximate times that certain coworkers came into the office. The following had the 3 highest correlations to what I perceived as my high priority days, which I defined as those where I was able to accomplish an above average percentage of my daily tasks.

1. Office mood/tone - This variable was something that became apparent very early in my productivity tracking. Being that the entire team shared one room, when someone was having a negative day, especially the stronger personalities in the room, it would spread through the office rather quickly. Colleagues and myself started pushing aside items that would need group discussion or approval so as to avoid negativity. Over time this became a constant talking point amongst several team members and became a struggle in and of itself for everyone to keep a positive mood while at work.
   
   The fix -  After trying to work out a solution with little success, I decided it was time to find a work environment that was better suited to my personality. As a result, I switched companies and am better able to balance the ebbs and flows of office moral.
    
2. Wardrobe - This one may sound a little odd, I didn't think it would make a large difference when I added it to my list of things to record, but I found that on days I decided to bum it and wear some old jeans, flip flops, and a t-shirt my performance wasn't nearly as high as the days I wore more business casual attire.
   
   The fix - I set a personal dress code for myself and expanded my wardrobe of business attire and make sure to dress more professional at work.


3. Music - This variable turned out to be the most interesting to me. Not because I wasn't expecting to see it have a high correlation (my mood has always been affected a good amount by music), but because my productivity varied between the type of work and the genre of music. For example, when I was analyzing data or preforming a repetitive task, electronic dance music seemed to work best, and when writing case studies or recommendations, classical music or thunderstorm sounds worked best.
   
   The fix - I spent some time creating playlists in Spotify for each type of task I typically do each day. Once I move on from a different set of tasks to another, I just swap out my playlist.

So there are my findings, FINALLY (and for those of you that may want to dive into the data yourselves, sorry for the lack of physical data but the spreadsheet and analysis were on my work computer that got wiped clean once I moved jobs). More to come tomorrow on the direction I plan on taking the blog and the different types of posts to expect.

Dedication

Upon returning from the 2011 Google Analytics Partner Summit overwhelmed with the vast amount of knowledge I gained in just two short days, I became exponentially more overwhelmed on my first day back to the office. At that was necessary was to glance at my to-do list.

For the better part of my professional career, my daily to-do list has been my hydra. After every task that is struck from my list, at least two other tasks quickly find their spot on my notepad's ensuing lines. The pressure and weight of the tasks are crippling at times, bringing all productivity to a halt and causing a death spiral into online news sites and random articles across the web that are anything but my to-do list.

After several days of internal reflection and analysis that I was already thinking about on professional and personal items in my life (where my career is, where I want it to be, am I progressing to where I want to go?, am I balancing my work life with my home life?, and on and on), the stress of my to-do list was too much to handle. I decided something needed to change and that what would make the greatest positive impact on everything is dedication. And not just dedication to my to-do list at work, but an overarching dedication to every aspect of my life. More dedication to my family relationships. More dedication to helping my wife around the house. More dedication to training my dog. More dedication to writing this blog. More dedication to expanding my analytics knowledge. More dedication to sticking to a monthly household budget. More dedication to training for a Tough Mudder competition.

So with this post, I am publicly challenging myself to a higher daily amount of dedication, with the end result being increased productivity in everything I do (side question, is it still a public challenge if no-one reads this blog?). I am also performing a small research study on myself for the remainder of 2011. For the first 5-10 minutes at work each morning, I will be recording a number of variables that I believe factor into my daily productivity, things like 'did I exercise before work?', 'how many hours of sleep did I get the night before?', 'how many meetings do I have that day?', and so on. I will also be recording the number of major tasks on my to-do list in the morning and the number of completed tasks I was able to finish during the day. Once I have three months worth of data I will be analyzing the data to find any correlations between my daily activities or environmental surroundings and my productivity. Once collected and analyzed, I will be sharing the full results on this blog, and integrating these findings into my daily life.

Are you a recovering lifelong procrastinator? What have you changed or done to be more dedicated and productive in bettering yourself?

How I Got My Start In Web Analytics

As a long form of a bio and my inability to discover if blogger allows for an about me subpage, what follows is my first post, documenting my long and winding road to a career in web analytics.

I arrived at college with the simple plans of becoming a mechanical engineer, getting an R&D job at Ford or GM, creating a revolutionary powertrain system, and then eventually working for Aston Martin or Ferrari. Simple enough, right? Fast forward three years into my grand plan and I was nearly certain that if I continued my career path, I would soon be admitted to the nearest sanitarium. I had found out first hand that the passion I had while driving and working on cars didn't exactly translate to the amount of passion required to get a degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech.

What happened next was a semester of exploration. Not the, "I'm fresh out of living with my parents for the past 18 years, let's do the dumbest stuff ever imagined!" type of exploration, but the "I'm taking classes in multiple disciplines to see what it is that truly interests me, what it is that I'm truly passionate about because I haven't a clue!" type of exploration. The answer I discovered was quite a surprise to me. I found myself in Marketing 1101 completely entranced in the "why" and the "what". I had to know why people were choosing a certain product and what was influencing their decision. I decided to continue my path in marketing to see if my new found passion would soon fizzle. It didn't.

After graduation I started my marketing career at a corporation that sells a service/product to ad agencies and corporate marketers. It was here that I received my first taste of search engine marketing. Search marketing was fascinating to me. From performing research into customer's behavior and their expected intent, I could create a campaign and see results in nearly real time. This new medium of marketing (new to me at least) was amazing, it had a mix of all the different aspects of marketing that I loved. And then I began to use Google Analytics.

The sheer power of Google Analytics almost seemed a little unfair to me. It allowed me to see how people were coming to the website, what keywords they were using, what content they liked, what content they hated... It allowed me a glimpse into the "why" and the "what" that I was always searching for and refine my campaigns for greater results.

After completing a number of extremely stressful "marketing miracles" that nearly every corporate marketer is presented with at one point in their careers, double leads while halving the cost month after month while increasing the quality of lead (yes, I was able to pull this off three months in a row using Google AdWords and Google Analytics, however I'm still not exactly sure how), I decided it was time to see what it was like on the other side of marketing. The agency side.

Working within an agency has been, and still is, a tremendous experience. Not because of the awesome perks like beer Fridays, a relaxed (read non-existent) dress code, or less structured work hours. The greatest part of woking in an agency is the ability to impact such a vast amount of people. Early on as a corporate marketer I quickly learned a basic formula first hand. The higher amount of qualified leads = a higher amount of employed people within the company, the lower the amount of qualified leads = a higher amount of salespeople getting their belongings mailed to them after they were fired at lunch. Working for an agency has allowed me to impact all of my clients with the same equation (except on the agency side, it's an email or phone call from the client instead of a lunch meeting). What resulted was more contact requests, more appointments scheduled, and more ecommerce transactions across the board. I was doing what I discovered I loved, making an impact, at what I was good at, search marketing.

But as my experience grew and I became more knowledgable about the web and the different avenues of marketing, I discovered that while the impact I could make within paid search was great, the impact I could make across all avenues was so much greater. The application of insights on a broader scale meant the ability to touch more people and make a much larger impact across all sources of web traffic.

While I have used web analytics in a lesser magnitude throughout my career, I am now a devoted student of web analytics. I hope for this blog to serve as a way to document my path to becoming a true "analysis ninja" and even further. I also hope Mining for Insights is a place where I can share my experiences in growing my career and just maybe influence a search marketer or two to join the great world of web analytics to make a real impact.