The Analytics Power Hour

Attribution is like a box of chocolates. It can be really expensive, or it can be really cheap. It requires making a lot of decisions as to how you actually want to consume it. It may leave you feeling ill! Join the guys for a 45-minute walk across the attribution landscape. And back. And back again. Because mama always said you shouldn't stop at the last click.

What better time to ask Big Questions about analytics than the start of a new year? In this episode, Gary Angel from EY joins us to talk just a little bit about his new book, and to talk a lot about digital transformation: what it means, what's holding large enterprises back, where digital analysts fit in the effort... and a whole-whole lot of thoughts and ideas that aren't nearly as lofty and nebulous as the first part of this description sounds! This is our longest show to date. It's a power hour transformed into 59 minutes (or 39:20 if you play it at 1.5x speed).

People, places, and things referenced in this episode include:

• Measuring the Digital World: Using Digital Analytics to Drive Better Digital Experiences (Gary's new book)
• measuringthedigitalworld.com (Gary's new blog)
• Gary's old blog
• Midi-chlorians

One year of shows. It was our initial Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and we did it. We hoped you had as much fun this year listening as we did recording, and we'd like to take a chance to reflect. Did we hit our initial KPIs (because of course we had them)? Did we have a favorite show? Is there something we'd like to do next year? Tune in and end 2015 by listening to a podcast about a podcast. We think our navels look awesome. Come gaze with us!

We had a hypothesis that our listeners might be interested in hearing an expert on digital optimization. In this episode we test that hypothesis. Listen and learn as Kelly Wortham from EY runs circles around the lads, and brings them to an understanding of what digital testing means in 2015. In an hour so optimized it only takes 45 minutes, it's 2015's penultimate episode of the Digital Analytics Power hour.

People, places, and things mentioned in this episode include:

• Taguchi vs. Full Factorial test design
• kelly dot wortham at ey dot com (to get added to Kelly's twice-monthly testing teleconference)

Have you noticed that neither Michael, Jim, nor Tim are women? They did! But that didn't stop them from taking on the subject of women in digital analytics (with diversions into the subjects of women and scotch, and women in professional poker). Joining them for this episode (because they may be a little misguided at times, but they're not absolute morons) was Krista Seiden from Google. Krista is a notable woman in analytics...but that is the LAST way she ever wants to be described. Luckily, she made an exception for us just this one time.

People, places, and things mentioned in this episode include:

• I'm a Woman in Tech: How It Helps Me and Hurts My Gender (blog post by Krista on her blog, bloggerchica.com)
• @kristaseiden
• Whisk(e)y Distilled: A Populist Guide to the Water of Life by Heather Greene
• @jimsterne
• Lagavulin (scotch)
• eMetrics
• An Ace up the Poker Star's Sleeve: The Surprising Upside of Stereotypes (podcast episode)

From a sophisticated analysis of the names and timestamps of many of our commenters, we discovered something that surprised us: digital analytics is a profession that is practiced outside of North America! This fact blew our minds, but ,curious analytics types that we are, we set to work finding someone with whom we could chat about digital analytics in Europe...and found Matthias Bettag. Join us for 47 minutes (that's 47 minutes in metric) discussing the subject.

People, places, and things reference in this episode include:

• Digital Analytics Hub (conference)
• iWebtrack
• AT Internet
• Yandex
• Piwik
• Safe Harbor decision
• Angela Merkel
• Europe (band)

It's hard enough keeping up with the times when digital analytics is exclusively Desktop/Mobile/Tablet devices. Now, what if we had to work with data that came from everything? Join us this episode where we lean heavily on the wisdom and experience of Intel's David McBride, and talk about the Internet of Things, Measurement, and perhaps Millennials - all for the low low price of 50 minutes of your time.

People, places, and things reference in this episode include:

• Kickstarter wearables projects
• Faraday Cage
• IFTTT (If This Then That)
• Maker Faire
• Qualcomm
• MIT Media Lab
• Tom Emrich
• Intel Curie
• Raspberry Pi
• SMS Audio

In this episode, we've simulated a lobby bar at the end of Adobe Summit, with Ben Gaines dropping by and everyone temporarily tapped out on talk of eVars, s.Props, derived metrics, and classifications for a bit. The result? A conversation that quickly turns to an adjacent passion of many digital analysts: sports analytics. Baseball, basketball, football, e-sports, the CFL, and even a fairly obscure game played on ice with a stick. Surprisingly, the discussion loops back to the parallels of sports analytics to digital analytics time and time again. This Power Hour clocks in almost 10 minutes shorter than a regulation NBA game.

People, places, and things referenced in this episode include:

• Moneyball
• Fivethirtyeight.com
• Nate Silver and The Signal and the Noise
• Grantland
• Nylon Calculus
• stats.nba.com
• baseball-reference.com
• nhl-reference.com
• The Ottawa Redblacks

Sometimes...well...MOST times...a lobby bar conversation starts on one topic and ends up somewhere entirely different. In this episode, our intrepid trio initially tackles the relationship between data and corporate creativity, and then veers off into a discussion of corporate culture and what that means for the modern digital analyst (a discussion that doth not apply to the medieval digital analyst!). To illustrate their own creativity, they show how a Power Hour can clock in at 38 minutes and 10 seconds.

References in the episode are made to:

• Patrick Glinski
• Todd Yuzwa
• Built to Last, by Jim Collins

In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day (and by popular demand), we donned our eyepatches, poured ourselves a few tankards of grog, and commandeered the wisdom of Eric Goldsmith from TED (maybe you've seen one or two of their videos?) to explore the whats, whys, and hows of R. If we'd recorded this episode with Excel, it would have taken an hour, but, with R, we pulled it off in 42 minutes.