idea-stack

[How To] Setup Cohort Analysis in 30 minutes using Google Analytics

2013-04-23T14:31:00.005+08:00

[Alert: this article might be Startups-oriented and presume readers to have basic understanding on related areas. Still, no worry, it's totally okay if you're not one, simply skip directly to the "Solution" section and grab the insight as quick takeaway. Then just leave the rest as bed-time story later. ;) ]

Cohort analysis has been a very hot topics in Analytics & Startup era, especial after Eric Ries published his startup bible: Lean Startup. Need not to say, it's a powerful tool (otherwise why a hot topic?). For those who don't know anything about such methodology, originated from Medical field, a cohort means grouping certain subjects (usually people), based on certain common characteristics (says, user experience that we've delivered) within a defined period (ref: Cohort Study - Wikipedia: http://bit.ly/XZn5Fb); and a cohort analysis will be analysis performed across different cohorts. While it might be somehow confusing, simply speaking, cohort analysis allows us to understand behavior of groups of subjects, specified by time, over time.

Got it? No? Don't worry, since we've plenty of articles out there which talks about this topic (see the end of article), i might cover this area more later but not today. Today, we focus mainly on how to prepare proper installation for Cohort Analysis, using Google Analytics & client-side javascripts, in a quick and dirty way.

An Exciting Month Passed, yet Another is Coming...

2012-04-17T18:26:00.002+08:00

Have gone through an exhausting yet exciting month....... and glad that i've survived. Orz

Long story short, i have attended two consecutive events as one of the public speakers, tested a few marketing concepts, played around with Twitter Bootstrap framework for my personal page, and preparing for the upcoming 2nd Startup Weekend in Hong Kong (and not to mention the on-going intensive studying for Omniture stuff.). Would love to share with you guys every single detail of each story, just so little time because of increasing responsibility in my analytic team (a good sign though!). Anyway, here's the list of the highlights of those stuff, do feel free to drop me a comment if anything within interests (or confuse) you, i could discuss more afterwards. :)

Here's today's menu:

[Public Speech] Effective Content Management Strategy

[Public Speech] Trends in Startup Analytics

[Test] Play with Adwords for SEO

[Toy] Have Fun with Twitter Bootstrap

..... and, let's get started. :)

Read more »

Pinterest Analytics - From Strategic Planning to Tactical Measurement Part III

2012-03-19T00:12:00.000+08:00

(Welcome to the last part of the series of "Pinterest Analytics - From Strategic Planning to Tactical Measurement" ! What? you haven't read the previous ones? Why standing here? Go read it now!! XD)

The Last Stop of the Journey

Pinterest Analytics - From Strategic Planning to Tactical Measurement Part II

2012-03-19T00:11:00.002+08:00

(this is the second part of the series "Pinterest Analytics - From Strategic Planning to Tactical Measurement". If you haven't read the previous one, I strongly recommend you to go through it first... and no worry, I will wait you here. :) )

The Gateway

The first step of the cycle always happens on the platform

Pinterest Analytics - From Strategic Planning to Tactical Measurement Part I

2012-03-19T00:10:00.001+08:00

Pinterest is now the star in the tech area, and some startups have already began to explore its potential in analytic field, such as Pinreach and the two-weeks-old Pintics, while the former one aims to recreate a Klout score for Pinterest, and the latter one (hopefully) focuses more in a Facebook Insights style. Regardless their approaches, have or don't have a tool for analytics is just a matter of how to gather the data, particularly the right one. Still, it's never a good idea to engage a platform without a proper measurement plan for business objectives, and of course not to mention the strategy that supports the plan - One could easily name a dozen of KPIs to measure anything, but the importance is the why and how behind. Hence, let's talk about how I would strategize for Pinterest Analytics in this post. :)

[Warning: long post ahead. this is a three-part series so better read this post only when you're in the mood of learning stuff. :)]

The Backbone Strategy

Let's start from something traditional but useful: a simplified sales cycle for online channel.

Old-school but effective. :)

How Marketers Should Engage with Fans on Facebook Timeline

2012-03-05T14:54:00.002+08:00

On Facebook, Timeline for Brands has been here for a while, how much you have explored it? In the past, fan page engagement was all about conversions with fans, but with the new Timeline feature, along with some discontinued old features, Marketers should now take the proactive role to evolve their engagement strategy from now on. And here're the three major areas that matter most of Marketers or Community Manager.

1. Cover Picture Matters

I know, i know, this seems too obvious. Yes Cover Picture definitely the most fancy and eye-catching feature for your brand to demonstrate the character, but what make this beauty even more important is the discard of Default Landing Page. Simply speaking, your Cover Picture will always be the first impression that your fans have. Marketers who traditionally use landing page for fans acquisition would need to rethink their strategy for better engagement.

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[How-to] Benchmarking Competitors on Facebook Timeline

2012-03-04T21:03:00.003+08:00

Competitive Analysis is always a big topic in market research, particularly on Facebook landscape, companies like SocialBaker has been trying to provide analytical insights by clawing and massaging fanpage data automatically, such that they could help you to close the gap between your own Facebook Insights data and your competitors'. The problem is, they're usually not free. :(

True that all these solutions are affordable, but not every marketer may have the budget (or just ask for it) for similar service. Luckily with the new Timeline for Brand feature from Facebook, finally we could spy our competitors much easier.... Facebook has made some of those data opened to us!

Let's start Spying....

5 Lessons DrawSomething teaches on Visualization for Presentation

2012-03-03T16:48:00.000+08:00

5-Lessons-DrawSomething-teaches-on-Visualization-for-Presentation

Draw Something is now one of the hottest apps in the world, and have just secured its 5,000,000 downloads a few days ago. The trend has reached Hong Kong recently, so i have given it a chance and see how it works. The game play is definitely fun and engaging as mentioned by the reviews, but what surprised me is that, the draw-&-guess model, or simply "the Pictionary game", is indeed involving some quite important concept that one could easily leverage for more effective presentation through abstractive drawing. Here's some tricks that you may find useful (for presentation or just getting more coins in Draw Something!!).

Enjoy. :)

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4 Approaches to Estimate Cost for Multi-Channel in Google Analytics

2012-02-28T02:37:00.001+08:00

4 Approaches to Estimate Cost for Multi-Channel in Google Analytics

In last post we have explored how to leverage the Assisted Conversion Reports in Google Analytics for advanced analysis based on ROI. Special thank to Shailendra Dubey in pointing out a missing puzzle in that article, which is, before calculating the Return On Investment, we have to know the Total Cost Spent on each of them. So let's have a quick post to discuss about my practice in estimating the cost of different channels.

In general, we have 4 approaches to deal with the costing problem....

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16 Pinterest-Clones in China (and More's Coming) !!

2012-02-26T16:35:00.001+08:00

16 PInterest-Clones in China (and More's Coming) !!

Everyone knows the legend that Pinterest has made in the last year, and the fire has begun in the China as well - clones are rising up !! So how "heat" is Pinterest in China? Try some casual search on Baidu brings us 17 clones (+1 for Tesent dutu.com!!), including two from IT giants: vancl and taobao!!

(Hey, I have prepared you some "bonus" at the end too !!! XD)

凡客達人 (Name Translation: "Masters of Vancl", sub-domain of vancl.com)

....

Advanced Multi-Channel Funnel Analysis using Google Analytics

2012-02-23T15:28:00.000+08:00

Advanced-Multi-Channel-Funnel-Analysis-using-Google-Analytics
Multi-Channel Funnel has been in Google Analytics for a while. Although by searching "Multi-Channel Analysis" you could find a lot of great how-to articles to leverage this powerful function, but seldom of them have explored the opportunities in using it for better resources allocation decision based on ROI estimation, particularly, using Assisted Conversions. Hence, i have decided to put together my experience in marketing, analytic, and infographic to demonstrate the following analytic model. Enjoy.

(Disclosure: i am currently working at MRM Worldiwide, a Digital Strategy agency under McCann WorldGroup, and hopefully the following model will be used in our service someday.....so........ have fun ! XD)

A Closer Look to Assisted Conversion

Apart from the Multi-Channel Funnel view in Google Analytics, Assisted Conversion Report is the one that we are looking for. If you have some experience in Omniture, you would know that Assisted Conversion is indeed having similar logic as Participation Variable, a way to estimate the potential value that a particular entity, exists within a funnel of process, has driven. For example, if a visitor purchase a dress online after she visit a review on a forum (outside the eshop), both our eshop and the external forum will be entitled to have contributions, in terms of conversions and revenue, counted towards themselves, either evenly (all entities have the same value) or linearly (all entities gain the average of value gained, only in Omniture), demonstrating that how the entity "participate" within the whole conversion path.

A snapshot of Assisted Conversion Report of my groupbuying site: Cheapppy

4 Things Startups Should Learn from Moneyball

2012-02-19T22:56:00.000+08:00

4-things-startups-learn-from-moneyball

Finally have some free time to go through this masterpiece. Just as the poster on the right said: "It's more than a movie...". Despite it talked mainly about how GM Billy fight the long way for his belief in statistical analysis for baseball, indeed, we have so much to learn from this old story in 2002.... particularly, startups.

[ kindly warning: spoilers alert. If you haven't watched this movie yet, skip to the end, quickly! :) ]

1. It's All about Talents

At the beginning of the movie, Billy quickly recognized Peter Brand, a fictional character based on Paul DePodesta, as Peter has been influencing the GM of Cleverland Indians in making decision even though Peter is just a graduate. Billy then talked with this young boy regarding his enlightening insights in analytical approach in baseball: "Buy wins, buy runs, but not players". While by that time Billy was planned to trade players with Cleverland Indians, but he turned out bought Peter, a player analyst instead. Throughout the rest of the movie, Peter proves his valuable supports to Billy and brings Oakland to the winning roads. All these won't happen if Billy haven't treasured Peter's ideas, and most importantly, treasured Peter himself as a special talent.

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6 Steps to Crack a Complex Business Report into Actionable Infographics

2012-02-16T18:10:00.000+08:00

6-steps-to-crack-a-biz-report-into-infographic

After the release of Part 1 and 2 I've so much positive feedback from friends, and the most asked question from them is "When the Part 3 will be released?"... Well, sorry to say, as start getting busy because of a huge analytics project from a key account, plus as in my draft, the last part would involve relatively more images to demonstrate the "Action Triggers" design, so i guess it would take a few more weeks to bake the stuff. But i guess we have no point to cool down and stop learning about this field, right? So let's have a short step-by-step guides as an overview before the last part!

6 steps, are really all we need to make an actionable infographic for analytic.

---------------------------------------

1. Start with something *very* painful

Reports usually act as an essential catalyst within chain of business process for decision making. While in the business class we have learnt that accurate and detail data is the key to make correct decision with precision, yet in reality, the reports usually end up with huge matrix of metrics which is simply too chaotic for human eyes. Some better ones would have bars charts or trends lines to reflect the data in different dimension, yet all those charts could do is, well, really reflecting the fact, they still lack of a true purpose that would like to help the reader to achieve. In short, they're simply visually and mentally painful for a business person to decide the right decision. And this suggest a very good starting point for our cracking process.

[How to] Crack a Complex Business Report into Actionable Infographics (Part 2)

2012-02-04T17:32:00.000+08:00

how-to-crack-a-biz-report-into-infographic-2

Three weeks after the first part, the second part is finally ready!

Last time we have talked about how to deal with the problem by starting from "something very painful" and cracking down stuff by how users read and think, this time, we put our focus into the real thing, designing and drawing.

Enjoy. :)

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If you still remember the Part 1 story, my friend CB had seek for some enlightenment for dealing with a complex business dashboard with simple infographics, and with some experience in such field, I have started to crack the problem using the following workflow:

Start with something *very* painful
Learn no Objective but how Users Read and Think
Nailing down the Metrics and Design
Time to Draw Lines, Circles and Squares
Design Actions Triggers with Arrows
Start Presenting (with or without Real Data) !!

(still remember our painful dashboard?)

[How to] Crack a Complex Business Report into Actionable Infographics (Part 1)

2012-02-01T18:00:00.000+08:00

how-to-crack-a-biz-report-into-infographic-1

Three weeks ago my friend CB, who is currently working as a Logistics Analyst, has somehow given me a "quest" during a late night coffee break: to find a way to "translate" a complicated business report into infographics. Have been an Digital Analyst and practicing consultation using graphical representation for years, I had taken the chance, spent 2 hours on the problem, cracking it and visualizing it with simple charting on a piece of paper, and pens of three different colors. At the end, he looks quite satisfying, although he keeps finding ways to disprove my method with real data that he didn't disclose to me (what a Stat. geek, still he couldn't make it through even till now. haha.)....

Honestly i don't know if that piece of infographic is the best solution to the problem, nor if he would put it into a good use during decision making process (i highly recommend this one though... XD), still i find that "2-hour translation" seems promising to me for future consultation, plus i somehow find no one have formulated any simply framework on this area (apart from the Napkin, yet which i think its workflow still have rooms for simplifying), so i have spent the following weeks to decode it into simple steps, and try to teach it to anyone who have an interest in cracking business problem with infographics. If you're currently reading this, lucky you, you will be the first who learn the tricks behind (LOL).

Let's get started. Enjoy. :)