INBOX INSIGHTS, August 18, 2021: Prioritization, GA4 Attribution, News Headlines - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: Prioritization, GA4 Attribution, News Headlines (8/18)

Learn how to prove the ROI of your marketing work and deliver better reports in our new on-demand class »

How Do You Prioritize Yourself?

I have a giant pile of work that I need to do. It feels like an unclimbable mountain. It’s the type of situation where feel the need to put on a hat to keep my brain from spilling out from the top of my head.

This morning, I prioritized a Peloton ride with a friend who was celebrating some milestones (happy birthday CM!). Then I took my dog for a walk, and (poorly) sang some Fall Out Boy at the top of my lungs.

What about all the work I need to do? It was still waiting for me. Is this irresponsible of me? Not at all. Before I decided to procrastinate (and yes, it’s a choice) I weighed out all my options.

Setting priorities is a series of trade-offs with a dash of risk assessment thrown in. In this case, I made the choice to push off my work until a little bit later in the day to enjoy the morning. The trade-off? I’ll have to work later into the evening than I usually do. The risk? Low to medium. Low – because the time-sensitive items are well underway and the larger items are not due until later in the week. Medium – because know that tasks for Trust Insights get pushed farther down the list in favor of client work. Can I live with this? For now, I can.

We all operate this way whether we realize it not. We make choices around what is important and what isn’t. In this case, I’ve decided that working on my business isn’t as important as other things this week.

Let’s put this in the context of annual planning. When we sit down to think about the year ahead one of the first questions we tend to ask is “what are the priorities?” What we’re asking is what is going to get done and what isn’t? In an ideal world, we could do all the things. In a more realistic one, we have to make some choices.

How do you decide what’s going to get done and what isn’t? One way is to think about the business impact. This could be revenue, growth, or reputation. Take each tactic and map it to business impact. The farther away it is from having a direct impact the less of a priority it likely is. It’s sort of like playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon. For what it’s worth, I’m two degrees away.

Another metric to consider is effort. When I worked with software developers we would break things down first by t-shirt sizes (XL, L, M, S). This helped put context around the task. From there we would break it down father into trackable milestones. The larger the effort, the more difficult it was to break it down into small, measurable pieces.

The third metric is resources. Do you have the team and budget to execute these tasks? Do you need to hire or bring in an outside company? Do you need to bring in a certain amount of money before you have the funds to start working?

Lastly, ask yourself, “what happens if I don’t do this thing?” This will help you assess the risk. Will people lose their jobs? Will customers be unhappy? Will nobody even notice?

When you put all this information together, you should have a good idea of what’s important. Your list should is now comprised of what is getting done now and what can wait. The caveat is that as you get new information, priorities can change. What was important yesterday might be long forgotten by tomorrow.

How do you prioritize yourself? Drop into our free Slack group and let me know!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

Do you have a colleague or friend who needs this newsletter? Send them this link to help them get their own copy:

https://www.trustinsights.ai/newsletter

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris walk through the new attribution modeling in Google Analytics 4. Watch as they explain the details, the different settings, which built-in model you should use most of the time, how to visualize your funnel, and explore some anomalies that might require you to use more than one attribution modeling source.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last week on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show, we looked at stable and unstable trend analysis – how do you know when you can rely on a trend or not?

Watch/listen to this episode of So What? here »

This Thursday at 1 PM Eastern, we’ll be diving into solutions in search of problems. Watch us do product marketing development live!

Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

Need a reminder?

Data Diaries - Interesting Data We Found

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s look at an application of natural language processing (NLP) that we didn’t have time for on last week’s So What? episode. One of the challenges of things like subject line testing in email marketing is that we often don’t have enough data to do substantial statistical analysis about what works and what doesn’t. By the time you have enough data, several years have gone by (especially if you send only monthly or less frequently).

So how do we determine what might be appealing in a subject line? We turn to content headlines – specifically page titles of well-trafficked and highly-visible pages. As an example, let’s take the topic of “marketing automation”. We’ll extract about 10,000 headlines and the associated traffic for those pages and score them by how many referring domain inbound links they get, how much traffic they get, and how much social media interaction they get. A headline that scores well across all three measures is probably something that has broad appeal.

One of the challenges of headline analysis is that they’re not very long, so traditional NLP techniques may not apply, such as removing stopwords (a, and, the, etc.). These might play a real role in what causes a piece of content to do well. We also want to look at phrases more than individual words, to see if there are specific phrases that do well.

click/tap on the image for a full-size version

The algorithm used in this particular analysis is SVM, support vector machines. In layman’s terms, it tries to separate out good from bad in a dataset and then identify what factors contribute to the good/bad split – ideal for understanding the words and phrases in headlines. Above, we see that phrases such as:

The top x
Best practices with
What it is
State of the
Why do you

Scored very highly for overall content engagement, while phrases like:

How to make
VP of marketing
Can make your
On social media
How to generate

Scored very poorly.

A warning: don’t assume these phrases hold true for any topic other than marketing automation!

What do we do with this information? If you’re creating content around marketing automation, test these exact phrases! See what does well and what does poorly. If you’re creating content on a different topic, use this overall methodology plus the SEO/data tool of your choice to extract and analyze the data for the topic of your choice, and then get testing!

Shameless plug, if you just want someone to do it for you, contact us. We’re happy to help.

Methodology: Trust Insights extracted 11,458 unique content posts on the topic of marketing automation from AHREFS Content Explorer, limited to the English language, working links, with explicit content and duplicates filtered out. The timeframe of the data is January 1, 2018 – August 8, 2021. The date of study is August 17, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

Here’s some of our content from recent days that you might have missed.

Get skilled up with an assortment of our free, on-demand classes.

This is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

Data Science and AI

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Content Marketing

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 1900+ like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today. Members also receive sneak peeks of upcoming data, credible third-party studies we find and like, and much more. Join today!

Do you want to understand data science better as a marketer? Would you like to learn whether it’s the right choice for your career? Do you need to know how to manage data science employees and vendors? Take the Data Science 101 workshop from Trust Insights.

In this 90-minute on-demand workshop, learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey. You’ll learn:

How to build a KPI map
How to analyze and explore Google Analytics data
How to construct a valid hypothesis
Basics of centrality, distribution, regression, and clustering
Essential soft skills
How to hire data science professionals or agencies

The course comes with the video, audio recording, PDF of the slides, automated transcript, example KPI map, and sample workbook with data.

Get your copy by clicking here or visiting TrustInsights.ai/datascience101 »

Interested in sponsoring INBOX INSIGHTS? Contact us for sponsorship options to reach over 18,000 analytically-minded marketers and business professionals every week.

Where can you find us in person?

MAICON, September 2021, virtual
MarTech Conference, September 2021, virtual
Content Marketing World, September 2021, Cleveland, OH
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2021, virtual
HELLO Conference, October 2021, New Jersey

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

Want some private training at your company? Ask us!

First and most obvious – if you want to talk to us about something specific, especially something we can help with, hit up our contact form.

Where do you spend your time online? Chances are, we’re there too, and would enjoy sharing with you. Here’s where we are – see you there?

Our Featured Partners are companies we work with and promote because we love their stuff. If you’ve ever wondered how we do what we do behind the scenes, chances are we use the tools and skills of one of our partners to do it.

Read our disclosures statement for more details, but we’re also compensated by our partners if you buy something through us.

Some events and partners have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them. Read our full disclosures statement on our website .

Thanks for subscribing and supporting us. Let us know if you want to see something different or have any feedback for us!

Need help with your marketing AI and analytics?

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter

Pin It on Pinterest