E196 – Presenting Data With Annie Cushing

If you are looking to up your reporting and dashboard game this is the episode for you. With Annie leading the charge we cover a large number of tools, chart types and ways that we digital marketers are not helping ourselves.

We need to go beyond the same 3-4 chart types and do better and be better. So dig in with us as Annie drops knowledge for almost 45 minutes!

Data Studio vs Excel vs Google Sheets vs Tableau

Annie takes us down her path of finally out growing Excel, finding Google Sheets but also growing past that.

Eventually Annie fell in love with Tableau (this was before Google Data Studio was even available). That said if you want something with a low learning curve that allows you to create elegant visuals, Google Data Studio can be the solution you need.

Data Studio though doesn't offer histograms and lacks the ability to do deep statistical analysis.

Histograms & Box Plots

If you get nothing else from this episode we hope you take a look at these two chart types and look to use them more for your marketing analysis and reporting.

Annie does walk through the upside and when to use these so be sure to listen (starting around the 12 minute mark).

Want some ideas? Crawl data, Web Core Vital Data and other examples are given by Annie.

Note from Dave & Matt

As what happens with guests from time to time we run into sound issues so as you will be able to tell Matt and Dave are turned down and Annie is highlighted. We always try and avoid this but sometimes it happens and we apologize!Dave & Matt

Data, Reporting and Annie's Resources

AnnielyticsMaking Data Sexy BookExcel Chart PickerRegex for Marketers: Plain English, Real World ExamplesBox Plots: The Unsung Heroes of Data AnalysisWeb Analytics 2.0 Book

Full Transcript:

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have you join us on another one of these businesses, digital podcast episodes. And today we have a fun one. Um, I would like to welcome any crushing, any thanks for joining us.

Annie Cushing: [00:00:23] Hey guys, it's a pleasure to join you.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:27] I normally do like an intro or whatever, but like with you, you're an old friend. So, um, it's kinda hard to like put everything that I know about you and then like a five minute or a five second intro as to, uh, you know, um, who you are and what you do. And so maybe just to take a few minutes and just like, so our listeners can know who you are, at least what you want them to pull out you, and then we'll just jump into it and go from there.

Annie Cushing: [00:00:57] Yeah, that sounds great. So I had an interesting journey to the digital marketing world. I actually started way back in the day in editorial and I was working for a publishing company and we just started. Of asking kind of big questions about where the traffic was coming from. And this was back in 2006 and there wasn't an established, uh, analytics field, especially not web analytics.

It was the wild, wild west. So I just started learning everything I could. Like at night and just kind of, you know, experimenting and after about a year or two of doing that, I thought, oh, I wonder if other people have the same questions because there weren't that many blogs at that time. And the ones that were out there were very technical, much more written for developers than marketers and analysts.

And so I decided to try a different approach and it kind of gained traction and. Yeah, my, my brand analytics has started as a joke on Twitter and became a brand, you know, quite accidentally. So, uh, and now, you know, I really focus on data. My tagline is I make data sexy. I wrote the books, making data sexy.

Yeah. Yeah. That was. Bucket list item for me, that was something I had wanted to do for years. And I just wanted to be able to give people kind of a desktop