CWI#61 - 📊 Practical With Analytics & AI 📊

Being sceptic about AI is fine. Getting insights on the practical stuff and what you can do with it TODAY to help solve marketing and growth related issues, is ACE! And that’s what I’ve learned last week. On top of that, some insights I’ve got by attending MeasureCamp in Brussels last saturday. Interesting week. Hope the topics below translate to you in any form of value. If not, let me know and how I can fix that for you.

But first… allow me to start with some sad news earlier this week. Eric Ward might not ring a bell? Eric was to many the best link builder out there. Earlier this week, he left behind his family and kids at the age of 58. 

I’ve been fortuned to briefly work with Eric on a client back in the days with bSeen (SEA/SEO company from Marnik D'hoore & Stefan Audenaert, a few years back). 

I was amazed by his level of professionalism and extremely easy to communicate with. Easy going. Gentle & supporting. Transparent. I think comforting might be the best word to describe the feeling. A very rare combination in this world. 

Good bye Eric.
Thank you for the inspiration.

My first measurecamp and definitely not my last one. Nice to meet and see people again within the twitter/analytics space. Over 40% of the attendees were from abroad! Didn’t expect that. wow. Russia, Denmark, UK, Australia, USA, France, Germany, Romania, … 

The board got filled rapidly for this unconference. So lots to choose from. Missed out on a few interesting topics apparently. I skipped the technical talks as I don’t want to get distracted from building my own GTM Framework(s). More on that within a few months, I hope.

It really made me happy to hear Peter O'neill talk about the misconception and bullshit (thanks to Adam Greco - ex Salesforce.com, Demystified Analytics) attribution really is. We simply can not do it properly due to the lack of data and what kind of efforts translate into the uplift of shift of attribution (channel + marketing or other efforts). A very hard puzzle too solve that has no value for your customer!

If you’re interested, feel free to scroll through the tweets to get a grip of what was cooking during that day. I think the slides will come online later this week. I’ll share them on my twitter & linkedin. Here’s already a first one by Yves-Marie Lemaître from Ensighten. 

Graphs & visualization. Highly underrated. At MeasureCamp, another analist talked about pie charts being hated in the industry but he didn’t knew why. Well… Pie charts are one of the worst items to show data that has any form of relation. It shows no relation between the data and has a discomforting level to understand (ex: 4 categories at 25%, 25%, 24% and 26% for instance) within one blink of an eye (rule of thumb for exploratory viz). Always avoid pie charts. Use bar charts instead!

It was mentioned in the course and mentioned by Steven Van Belleghem in his last video. But here’s the main thing. All headlines are about the biggest and unachievable (yet) sorts if AI by average companies. General AI. The far-out most advanced type of AI you can get within the next 10 years or so. So… we skipped that part as it needs computing power (and the knowledge) only a few on the planet have access to, at this moment. Pls… check the article. You’ll understand. 

So… in the course we focused on types of vertical AI. The kind of techniques you can use and apply to marketing and growth related questions, TODAY!

So… depending on the type of business your in, meaning, B2B or B2C, different algorithms will be used. B2B is the most easy part as the most variables are fixed. Variables such as CAC, Pricing of your product and thus Churn & CLTV. For B2C, that’s a whole different ball game. There are so many variables in B2C, especially e-com, which happens to be the most communicated AI related business opportunities. But… there the hardest to solve too. No one talks about that, don’t they? :)

Shit is fucked up out there. 
B2C data is more complex, more personal and more single customer and product type driven than B2B. Every product, every category, every price, every size, every colour, every channel, every client, etc. is different. And, than on top of that, you have the behavioural data of Google Analytics. 

If you need any help figuring out what to do with B2C, hit me up by hitting the reply button. That’s it.  I think I can help you to get to those first steps & come-up with a first case and improvement. 

Any how… getting into this thing is extremely high on my agenda, no matter what and I’m going to use it everywhere I can, whenever I can. 

See you next week.

d