In The Headlights: July 24, 2019 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

Before we begin, a special announcement. We’re holding a half-day Google Analytics for B2B Marketers Bootcamp in Washington, DC on October 15, 2019. Come get your analytics in shape in this half-day, hands-on event. Click/tap here to learn more and register.

Correlation is not causation.

We’ve heard this axiom repeated so often that even non-statistical, non-analytical people can repeat it. It’s become so common that it’s had an unwanted side effect: analytically-minded marketers have come to believe that correlation is not useful or even bad.

Is it bad?

The textbook example of correlation vs. causation is an examination of the mathematical relationship between ice cream sales and drowning deaths. As sales go up, so do drowning deaths. Intuitively, we understand that there’s a third, hidden variable at work: summertime temperatures. As temperatures go up, people consume more ice cream, and people go swimming more (and a few folks unfortunately drown).

So this correlation is bad, right?

Not necessarily. If you worked in, say, public health, and you wanted to forecast drowning deaths, do you need to know the third hidden variable? As long as ice cream sales and drowning deaths continue to march in lockstep, you could make the valid prediction of drowning deaths based on ice cream sales data.

It sounds funny – why wouldn’t you just use temperature data for the forecast? In this example, we would. But there are clearly times when we don’t have access to the underlying variable. As long as we can test for statistical validity of a correlation, for the purposes of prediction, we don’t necessarily need to establish causation.

For example, as privacy regulations increase, we will have less and less attribution data to work with, especially in tools like web analytics and marketing automation software. We will know what we did – what we posted, where we shared, where we ran ads – but we may not be able to attribute website visitors to a specific source. As long as we have our activities documented and counted, and we have the end result – website traffic – a correlation may be enough to help us understand what’s working.

Think about your own marketing data and what you’d like to predict – lead generation, website visitors, sales. Do you have the necessary ingredients – data – for the prediction, regardless of causation? If so, then I’d encourage you to start testing for statistical validity and building a predictive model.

The Bright Idea

This week’s Bright Idea is a look at the media and agency landscape. How many people work in newspapers? Radio? TV? Ad agencies? We look at the last decade of data to show what’s growing and what’s fading.

Click/tap here to see the framework (no form fill required), and if you like it, please share it.

Media Landscape

YouTube cracks down on stream-ripping sites that pirate music: Though stream ripping isn’t limited to YouTube, Google’s service is the biggest single source of music online.
Ad agencies’ acquisitions raise potential for conflicts of interest: IPG’s chief data and technology officer Arun Kumar, for his part, said in addition to selling data to marketers, agencies can also use these data companies to help marketers build products and practices to capture first-party data.
Here’s how e-commerce stores can sell smarter on YouTube, Facebook and Amazon: To even run shopping cards on your video ads, you have to select the Product and Brand Consideration campaign goal.

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

Adding these Chrome and Firefox extensions puts your privacy at risk: The extensions we found selling your data show just how dangerous browser surveillance can be.
How AI companies can avoid ethics washing: Ethical AI leaders at Accenture, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce shared their thoughts on how to deploy AI systems that work for everyone and avoid ethics washing.
Want Responsible AI? Think Business Outcomes: In our experience across industry after industry, the most responsible AI occurs when company leadership is fully engaged, when applications are defined by clear business outcomes that are central to the company mission, and when IT and leadership collaborate to confront business and ethical quandaries together.

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

Why do 87% of data science projects never make it into production?: I’ve had data scientists look me in the face and say we could do that project, but we cant get access to the data, Leff says.
Making sense of chaos? Algos scour social media for clues to crypto moves: Howard said his bitcoin investments using an algorithm beat funds simply tracking the price of the cryptocurrency by 54% in the year to June 24, adding that funds in New York and Taipei had tapped him for help in developing their own analysis.
How to Get Started with NLP: We can use the gensim.utils class to import the tokenize method for performing word tokenization.

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

How to set up Google Analytics annotations to show Google updates: Generally speaking by adding annotations to your Google Analytics account you will be able to see more clearly if you have been affected by any Google updates.
Canonical Tags: A Simple Guide for Beginners: For example, if page A is canonicalized to page B, which is then canonicalized to page C, replace then canonical link on page A with a link to page C.
Google gains ground in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure: It also lacks a big base of managed service providers, and its sales coverage remains thin, Gartner said.

Business and Leadership

You Ask, I Answer: Increasing the Chances of Being Hired with Certifications?: So portfolios of work are really, really important for being able to demonstrate that you not only can do the thing, but you have done the thing.
What tech entrepreneurs need to learn before getting into healthcare: He said about half of the people trying to build healthcare companies drop out at that point.
Restaurants believe digital channels more important than consumers say they are: Retauranteurs are more likely than restaurant patrons to say digital marketing channels and reviews influence customers restaurant choices.

Join the Club

Are you a member of our free, private Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 300 like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today.

Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

BACon, August 2019, Chicago
Content Marketing World, September 2019, Cleveland
INBOUND, September 2019, Boston
MarTech East, September 2019, Boston
Google Analytics for B2B Marketers Bootcamp, October 29, Washington, DC
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2019, Washington DC

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

FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.