THE PUSH & PULL OF ANALYTICS
Modern marketing needs more pragmatism – and less abstraction.
With most businesses already ‘sold’ on the importance of embedding data into marketing practices – how do they get there? Many companies start their analytics journey unsure how to create and nurture a data-driven culture.
This post will focus on the first step to data maturity: getting customer data into the hands of people making decisions with push and pull reporting.
To make the most of their data, ecommerce organisations need to do both.
PULL ANALYTICS
Enabling localized teams (e.g. the ecommerce team) to pull specific and hyper-contextual data that informs decisions.
SCENARIO
Consider the below example:
Context: Sales are increasing over time. But retention rate for new customers is ~15% over a 3-month period.
Decision: To reduce churn, the ecommerce team decides to compare cohorts of customers with higher retention rates vs lower retention rates.
Success criteria: An increase in lifetime value after 3 months.
PULL ANALYTICS OUTCOME
Our hypothetical team notices that lifetime value is closely correlated to the second purchase. When customers make a second purchase, not only do they spend more, but they’re more likely to make a third, fourth, etc. purchase.
Our heroic team digs deeper and notices that customers who purchase product X have higher 1st-to-2nd repurchase rates. They also notice that second purchases tend to happen 4-6 weeks after the first purchase.
Armed with this data, the savvy team adjusts acquisition activities to focus on product X. And doubles down on weeks 4, 5 and 6 for retention activities.
SUMMING UP: PULL ANALYTICS
Whilst it’s a simple example, this kind of insight is rarely surfaced in off-the-shelf dashboards. Deep (profitable!) data exploration requires self-serve investigation by subject matter experts such as your ecommerce team.
PUSH ANALYTICS
The goal of pushing data is to make sure that everyone in a team or company is aware of a set of core metrics (KPI’s).
These metrics should closely correlate to desired business outcomes. They should also be metrics that can be optimized so that data is actionable.
It’s important to send this data to stakeholders on a cadence that matches decision-making processes. This usually takes the form of custom reports or dashboards that can be easily referenced on any given day, week, or other time period.
Commonly, dashboards are bookmarked, emailed to inboxes, or shared on messaging platforms such as Slack.
Dashboards require maintenance (such as when data pipelines are updated, or when business requirements evolve), so that they always represent a ‘source of truth’ for core business metrics.
SUMMING UP: PUSH ANALYTICS
It’s crucial only to push data that changes behavior. Focus on giving stakeholders starting points that prompt further investigation and action.
BRIDGING THE DATA→BUSINESS DIVIDE
Push Analytics (automated dashboards) provide value by surfacing the performance growth metrics without data wrangling.
But inevitably, these reports invite follow-up questions (even when they closely align with business outcomes). Such questions can be answered with Pull Analytics to drive real outcomes.
This is why push and pull analytics need to be combined. Only then can data be operationalized on a consistent basis.
Push/Pull analytics is the first step on the journey to becoming truly data-driven. At a high level, the ‘data journey’ for online businesses looks like this:
1. store and centralize data from multiple sources into a data warehouse (a data engineering task);
2. combine and model the data to make it analysis-ready (analytics engineering task);
3. surface the data into data visualisation tools (analytics engineering task).
4. analyse and activate this data – incorporate into regular workflows (marketing task).
Host Digital builds data pipelines & bespoke dashboards for ecommerce marketing teams and institutional investors; then we actively help to operationalize this data. Lean more about our Data-As-A-Service offer and schedule a dashboard demo here: https://hostdgtl.com/features/.