The Seotistics newsletter is written by Marco Giordano, a Data/Web Analyst with the goal of combining business and web data. Tired of the usual boring Analytics content without any business impact? Seotistics teaches you how to use Analytics, web data and even content in your workflow while helping you with Strategy.
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ππ‘ How To Give Context To Metrics For Business Value
Published 4 months ago β’ 7 min read
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Use Data Or Be Used By Data!
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The December 2 issue of Seotistics is here for you!
Last time we saw metric trees and analyzed why visualizing your metrics is important.
Today, I show you the importance of giving context to metrics!
You can list down all the cool stuff you want but you need context!
It took me a lot to write this one, let me know what you think of it!
P.S. Before we start I remind you tomorrow is the last day of limited offers for my products!
Please move this email to your Primary inbox or reply to it. This is to prevent Seotistics goes into spam by accident. Gmail users can read this tutorial to do it.
If you are tired of being puzzled by Web data, I can help you:
β Python notebooks and SQL code to learn the hard skills
β SEO Processes and Examples to convince stakeholders and become actionable
β Hands-On session BigQuery + GSC/GA4 data to analyze any website
β Processes and tested blueprints that can be applied to any website
Expanding On Metric Trees
As we have seen last time, metric trees are helpful companions for visualizing how a business works.
They are rarely static in reality and you will have to change them once in a while.
For example, you may notice that you are missing an obscure influence you forgot about.
Once you have created your nice tree, it's time to ask the right questions.
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It's not as hard as you see, consider this as a mental framework to exercise your brain muscles.
The DuPont Matrix
If you have a background in business administration like me, you will recognize that this concept isn't exactly new.
In 1919, this model was created to break down ROE (Return on Equity).
Documenting Your Work
From this, I recommend building a dictionary with your metrics and other information:
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Here's an even better example:
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The calculation field is necessary to make it practical. β You can get more creative than what I showed and even explain which dashboards or use cases rely on those metrics. β The Breakdown field tells you which dimensions to group by.
Skipping this step will give you future headaches and increase complexity.
Once you are comfortable with a method, it will become much easier to work on projects...
and you will get more confident in what you do.
Evaluating Chaos
In reality, many businesses already have dashboards and cool artifacts and they are barely used or useful.
This is normal, some tasks are executed just because they must.
Better for you, this is an easy win!
Before you get into action, you should ask what's already there and if they have existing processes.
If not, forget about working, you will produce extra work and make the usual mistake of starting with a solution.
This is a common mistake when evaluating big websites:
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Starting from #3 without considering the real problems and defining priorities is a common agency mistake.
The obsession with order is pointless if you don't know what to actually do.
Chaos is a great companion for unlocking new opportunities:
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Marketing VS Product Analytics (& Why It Doesn't Matter)
There's a key distinction between Marketing and Product.
The first is for acquiring customers, the second is for keeping them.
You can say that it's for improving the product based on event and user data.
Seotistics is clearly oriented toward #1 but it doesn't shy away from taking some concepts from Product, if needed.
How you view things is vastly different!
The tree we used puts revenue as the North Star. β
People with a background in Product will cringe because they think there are better measures. β
That's because revenue tells you what happened in the past, it's lagging. β
And that's what a tree is supposed to represent, actually.
The majority of us work with "traditional" companies, not startups or cool tech companies.
As shown by Count, a leading SaaS for data analysis and metric trees, it's fine to use revenue.
Remember, do what works for you, never copy others because they do it!
Dashboard Trees
You can take these concepts to the next level and monitor your dashboards across an organization.
This concept was developed by my friend Ergest Xheblati in his newsletter Data Patterns:
The Seotistics newsletter is written by Marco Giordano, a Data/Web Analyst with the goal of combining business and web data. Tired of the usual boring Analytics content without any business impact? Seotistics teaches you how to use Analytics, web data and even content in your workflow while helping you with Strategy.
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