Course Content
Competitor Intelligence
our competitors’ secrets are just a click away. Discover what works and what fails so you can optimize your marketing activity.
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How To Analyze Your Competitors
Analyze what's working for your top competitors and identify opportunities to improve your content strategy.
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How To Help Teams Get More From Data: 3 Hacks For Analysts
Delivering a data analysis that both motivates and enables marketers to take action is where the rubber meets the road in analytics.
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Online Content Analysis 101: How To Do A Content Audit
When many companies talk about their “content strategy,” they’re really just talking about further content creation.
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Competitive Analysis Specialist Course
    About Lesson

    Lead the Viewer’s Eye to Conclusions From the Data

    Goal – Help the team follow your storyline.

    You know you’re being a Rupert if your team has read your file and they’re still asking you questions such as “What do you suggest? or ”Why do you say that?”

    Fortunately, it is easy to be as loved by all as Anna-Lisa.

    She always aims to make her reasoning clear by using subtle visual clues that allow her to minimize the amount of text. To follow suit, use the following data visualization hacks.

    Size & Distance

    The main concept to follow is to add strong visual clues where you’d otherwise use numbers only. To apply this, you can enrich a dull table with bars. Alternatively, add a line to your time series that compares to a site-wide benchmark. Then, when you’re showing multiple scores, enrich each with bars.

    BuzzSumo’s trend line in their exportable content analysis charts quickly put engagement numbers in perspective.

    Color

    To leverage color, highlight a time series to make a chart stand out in a grid. Or enrich your table with a heatmap that uses shades of one color (multi-color heat maps get hard to interpret).

    Order

    First, show a row with channel comparison of per session value. This will show which channel has the most valuable clicks. But to really know whether the channel is worth a budget increase, you need to consider the volume of its potential. So as a second element, include a row with channel comparison of volume.

    This will help you validate the opportunity and show where new revenue can come from – without compromising revenue sources that are already established.

    Look at the order of the whole Data Studio embed below to get inspired by its intention. We like to follow the order of:

    1. Start broad to introduce what’s going on
    2. Narrow down to break down why it’s going on and point out action items
    3. Add insight to validate your recommendation for what to do about it. This makes it easier to estimate the outcome.

    Bringing It All Together

    Trying to be more like Anna-Lisa, we’ve put together the following analysis in revenue opportunity analysis template in Data Studio.

    Feel free to copy it and use as a template. All you’ll need to do is to add your own data source based on a Google Analytics property that collects ecommerce data.

    Conclusion

    Our process is to first create visualizations for our own analysis. In this step, you get creative, make an analysis loaded with charts while it’s for your eyes only. You explore. Then you trim it down big time, so you only keep elements that directly contribute to answering the main question. Any ancillary questions have to support the main question and its answer. Once you trim it down, you get a file like the one referenced here. For example, the report above was originally part of a larger file. Analysts must find a balance between making their analysis quick to digest and backed by enough data. The rule of thumb is: “Can I do without this chart in order to answer the question and inform action?” Encourage action by making it as simple as possible, but not simpler (that is not a Spiderman quote, it’s by Albert Einstein indeed). Some of the linked charts were first created when creating reporting solutions for MashMetrics. For more inspiration and best practice, check out data viz makeovers by Evergreen DataPrimp Your Slide by Lea PicaGoogle Data Studio Gallery, and bkingdigital.com/#how.