In the tech world, there are some people who believe that product features are critical and others who believe less is more. The former believe that software products will be outdone by competitors if new features aren't continuously added. Hence, why many vendors are rushing to add AI to their products right now. The latter believe th...

I recently learned about LinkedIn's new Newsletter feature. This feature allows you to publish content to an audience that has opted-in to your newsletter content. When you publish content, instead of just appearing in the LinkedIn Feed (which is very noisy), it sends a LinkedIn notification to subscribers. I imagine that LinkedIn is o...

When I joined Amplitude, I started using a cool new sales product called Gong. For those who haven't used it, Gong is a product that records online meetings (e.g. Zoom meetings) and does the following: 1. Splits out all participants and allows you to see talk time by participant (including % of talking time per person) 2. Transcribes t...

As someone who works remotely and presents a lot, I have grown tired of normal Zoom meeting presentations and have started using Mmhmm. Mmhmm, which is a strange name to be sure, is a different type of presentation software that provides a bunch of cool features. In this post, I am not going to explain how the app works (you can learn ...

As some of you may know, I have been an advisor to Decibel Insight for the past few years. Decibel provides a platform that allows you to determine if your digital customers/prospects are having good or bad experiences. Decibel does this by recording digital experiences and applying machine learning to determine if the exhibited behavi...

As they say, all good things must come to an end. As we conclude this blog series on being successful in digital analytics, I hope that these posts have been helpful. Over twenty posts, we have discussed many (not all) of the key aspects of digital analytics and I have done my best to share tips and anecdotes that will hopefully provok...

As we begin to wrap up this blog series on improving digital analytics at your organization, I’d like to spend some time talking about your most valuable resource – your team. While we have discussed many different aspects of digital analytics in this series, at the end of the day the actual analysis that your team provides is what mat...

Throughout this blog series, I have talked about the importance of building executive support for your digital analytics program. This started with the identification of business objectives so that your analytics program could be aligned with the priorities of your executives and the organization. The other technique we discussed was m...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I talked about how better documentation can help your end users understand your implementation. While you may take your implementation for granted and know all of its ins and outs, your business users don’t have that same luxury. Just a small amount of eff...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I shared my thoughts on training internal customers on digital analytics and some of the associated challenges. As I described, teaching people who don’t do digital analytics for a living how to get the data they need and use it correctly can be a monument...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I discussed a few different approaches to providing digital analytics support to internal customers. Many of the potential models involve training internal customers on how to access and utilize digital analytics data. In this post I will share some of the...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I shared my thoughts on how to approach conducting analysis. Having the right mindset can go a long way towards driving the overall perception of your team. In this post, I’d like to discuss the way that your team supports the organization in terms of digi...

Over the last few posts in this series on being successful in digital analytics, I have covered how to structure your implementation, add new items to your implementation and focus on data quality. In this post, I will talk about moving into the analysis phase of digital analytics. While reading the posts in this series may have seemed...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I shared my thoughts on why I see so many data quality issues and why data quality is so important to digital analytics programs. Much of it has to do with the perception of your data and of your analytics team. But addressing data quality takes time and m...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I showed how to update your SDR as you implement new items. That is one way to boost your overall implementation scores with respect to the percentage of business requirements that can be addressed. The other way you can boost your scores is to ensure that...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I covered why it is important for you to have people that know the correct way to translate business requirements into analytics tool solutions. If you collect the data incorrectly, everything downstream will be problematic! In this post, I am going to sho...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I showed how you could use the newly created requirements driven SDR to identify the development work needed to address your highest priority requirements. Many of those items will require new data points to be added to your implementation. In this post an...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I showed how to convert your old, useless SDR into a new one that incorporates business requirements, objectives and scores for each requirement so you can see where you stand in terms of meeting the analytics needs of your stakeholders. In many cases, the...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I showed how to score your business requirements and determine how many could be answered today. If the scoring showed that you can only answer a subset of your full requirements list, that means you need to either fix existing data points or implement bra...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I walked through how to create your list of business requirements. By combining the needs of your team, reverse-engineering what is in your current analytics implementation and interviewing your stakeholders, you should now have a good handle on what your ...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I explained why business requirements are so important to your digital analytics implementation. In this post, I am going to walk you through the process of creating business requirements. If you did your homework from the last two posts, you should have a...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I shared my thoughts on aligning your team with its stakeholders/executives around website/mobile app business objectives. That is akin to making sure that you are all on a boat or plane and agree on the destination. But there are many different ways to ge...

In the last post of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I discussed why your old, outdated Solution Design Reference (SDR) will not help you get to the next level in digital analytics. The main reason for this is that the SDR only tells you WHAT you are tracking, but not WHY or HOW you are tracking it. This is ...

In the last installment of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I discussed why your team should strive to be a profit center versus a cost center within the organization. The profit center vs. cost center concept will be a recurring theme in this series, but in this post, I’d like to talk about the infamous Sol...

In the introductory installment of this blog series on being successful with digital analytics, I outlined the problem at hand – too many organizations that are not deriving value from their investment in digital analytics. Common symptoms of the problem include poor digital analytics implementations, poor data quality, overwhelmed tea...

It is hard for me to believe that I have been working in the digital analytics field for almost twenty years now! It seems like yesterday that I first learned about log files and putting snippets of JavaScript code on the website of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in order to analyze visitor behavior. A lot has changed since then. Digi...

Many organizations have one product and wonder if they should keep using it or migrate to a new one. They’re often attracted by the promise of a brand new implementation and great new product features. However, since there are so many good analytics tool options, the best approach to choosing an analytics tool begins not with an eye to...

Life is full of risks. So are technology projects. If you ever saw the Ben Stiller movie Along Came Polly (maybe binge-watching movies during the pandemic), you got to meet Rueben Feffer, a man who assesses risk for a living using a risk management software program. In some ways, I can relate to the movie’s risk management character. A...

In my last post, I told my saga of going from an old Corvette that didn’t work much, to a custom one that did work, but cost a lot of money. As I asked at the end of my last post, why doesn’t everyone go the custom route? Why is the norm purchasing cars that come off assembly lines? Obviously, the answer is that custom cars are more di...

I recently went through a three-year process of having a custom car built. It was a long, expensive, and exhausting (no pun intended!) effort. During this time, I noticed many similarities between what I went through and what many organizations go through when it comes to their digital analytics implementations. So, I thought I would s...