For the end of 2011, many around the blogosphere are forecasting what will be on hype next year. I often read that big data and mobile BI are on the hype. In this article, I will discuss about those technologies. Don’t believe the ads, those technologies aren’t game changer at all.
Measuring and managing return on marketing investment, that’s the promise of the book from Guy R. Powell. A famous quote in marketing is : Half of my advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half (John Wannamacher). Indeed, how many marketing initiative are rigorously evaluated? No doubt price cuts increase volumes, but how often does it to improve the top line, not even talking about the bottom line. This book is about putting some analytics in marketing and knowing the truth.
Predicting the number of sales representatives on a particular time on a particular store is harder than expected. If you instrument the whole process, you could know the activity of your representatives (number of customers, average time of a transaction, activity rate, …). We could then predict the number of required representatives. We know the cost of having set too much of them but what is the cost of having to few representatives? How to value a missed opportunity, a customer unsatisfaction of the quality of service, the behaviour of a too much stressed employee?
It’s a damn good question which should be tightly correlated to your salary in an utopic world. In other words, how do you justify your existence?
Supposed you are doing a new product version (a software, a website, a car, whatever). It can be used internally to your enterprise or sell to client. In the later case, you guess you can look at the sales to see if your work was valuable. You can think the difference in benefits (positive at minimum) is a direct consequence to your work. Considering your salary and other costs, you can compute your ROI. If you don’t sale it, people which will use your new products could be instrumented, i.e. you can see if they improved theirs sales or benefits. Not so easy.
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Actionable Web Analytics : Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions is a marketing book like Competing on Analytics. A lot of sentences to say simple things. Here there is even sometimes copy and pastes. Nevertheless, this kind of book are sometimes interesting. This one is to some extends.