The Measurement Minute

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Not every metric that can be measured should be measured. Some metrics used as KPIs turn out to be easily gameable – resulting in an arms race to optimize them with nearly always unfortunate consequences. The Measurement Minute looks at the college admissions rate as a good example of a famously gameable metric.

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

California got a little taste of life after the Apocalypse last week and boy did it suck. The latest Measurement Minute reflects on the virtues of cloud infrastructure for business and analytics in the face of natural and man-made disasters…

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

In another interview from the DA Hub, Matthew Wolf from Dignity Health joins the Minute. Since he was recently tapped to head-up a large-scale data governance practice, I ask Matthew about how he felt about the job and how he tackled it. Large enterprise data governance matters enormously but can feel almost impossible to tackle meaningfully. We explore the challenges, particularly for an analytics professional whose first love isn’t telling other people what to do.

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

I may be an analyst by day, but my secret super-hero identity is programmer-guy. Which is why I have to shout out a fantastic article on Slate – 34 lines of Code that Changed the World. With everything from Hello World to the Tracking Pixel, it’s a walk down memory lane and a rare tribute to the most important craft of our time.

 

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

If interviews are going to come to the Minute, why not start at the top? Jim Sterne’s latest work focuses on bridging the gap between Marketing and ML professionals. We discuss the tricky art of great facilitation and the difference between a professional facilitator and an interested professional. We caught up at the latest DA Hub and here is the result – the Minute times 10!

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

The basic principle of most customer VoC is that your sampling needs to be independent of your marketing. You know what violates that basic principle? Website samples. The tricky nature of Website samples and the impact on interpreting virtually every metric from a Web survey is one of the least understood aspects of digital measurement.

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

Traditional opinion research and even Website surveys have been around for quite awhile now. So folks in the enterprise take their accuracy for granted. But precious little work or thought goes into the sampling methodologies in most business VoC and the result is likely terrible and terribly misunderstood data.

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

The two main IoT technologies for shopper measurement are video and electronic sensors. They perform very differently and have very different characteristics in terms of population and journey capture. If you don’t understand the type of sample each generates, you won’t be able to use the data effectively.

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

Given that it’s often too expensive to install IoT-based people measurement fleet-wide, the challenge becomes deciding which stores to measure. That’s a sampling problem of the highest order – one that’s very difficult to solve well. There are so many different factors to balance, but there are some short-cuts that can make the decision-process easier.

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

The real driver of sampling in store measurement is simple. It’s cost. IoT sensor costs for people measurement are part of that, but the truth is that installing equipment in stores often costs more than the equipment itself. It’s a lot more expensive to install equipment in stores than drop a tag on pages – and that usually ends up forcing stores to sample.