In the Headlights, November 18, 2020: Best Time to Post, 2021 Trends, AirBnB Pandemic Data - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

Best time to post, 2021 trends, AirBnB pandemic data

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Don’t reinvent the wheel.

This past week, I was digging around for some data to see if I could visualize usage of AirBnB. I was curious to see how AirBnB usage had changed during the pandemic, on the premise that cities which had more spread of COVID-19 also had more AirBnB usage.

When I went to AirBnB’s website, they did indeed have a developer portal, robust APIs, and documentation for writing code to access their platform. Looking at all the pieces before me, I saw what was probably going to be 20-40 hours of work to get at the data.

On a whim, I Googled “airbnb dataset”. Lo and behold, someone else had done exactly that – InsideAirBnB.com has been collecting and aggregating AirBnB data for years, making it available in easy-to-read CSV files. Had I not Googled for that search term, I might have burned half a working week.

In the long term, if processing AirBnB data was mission-critical, I’d go the route of building my own code, so that something mission-critical had as few dependencies as possible on third parties. But this wasn’t mission-critical – this was a curiosity at best, and the investment wouldn’t have been worth the reward.

The key takeaway here is that one of the first steps in any project, but especially any data project, is to determine if someone else has already done the work and it’s work that can be repurposed (permission to do so, good data quaility, not mission-critical, etc.). If it’s already been done, don’t reinvent the wheel – the value of what you’re doing isn’t the data itself, but the insights and decisions you make from the data.

Get to decisions as quickly as possible without diminishing the quality of those decisions, including leveraging other pre-existing work when it makes sense to do so.

And for those interested in the conclusions, skip down to the Rear View Mirror section.

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we discuss 2021 trends. What are the big trends to pay attention to? We talk privacy, cookies, disasters, and more.

Watch/listen to the most recent episode of In-Ear Insights here

And in last week’s So What? (which airs Thursdays at 1 PM Eastern on YouTube), we show you how to set up a Google Data Studio dashboard to identify the best time to post on social media and other best time questions.

Watch the most recent episode of So What? here!

Coming up on this week’s So What?, we’ll be talking about how to make better podcast audio, this Thursday at 1 PM Eastern Time.

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In this week’s Rear View mirror, we answer an interesting question: what kinds of correlates could we use to potentially forecase COVID-19 outbreaks? Much has been made of big mobility datasets like Google’s mobility index, drawn from their access to millions of smartphones around the world. However, the raw data isn’t available to us, only their summaries. So, in the absence of that data, what could we use?

A proxy for movement is data about destinations, and tech-enabled services like AirBnB share their data. Could we use some of that data to understand the pandemic better?

The answer is absolutely, yes. We see AirBnB usage decline precipitously just as the pandemic starts, and then usage increases over time. Most notably, usage increases correlate strongly with increased COVID-19 cases; Florida is experiencing devastasting case loads, and we see AirBnB usage almost the same volume as the previous year, indicating that people are mobile and going away from home. In Boston, we see usage mostly flat and stable; Massachusetts case loads are growing, but not nearly as explosively as other parts of the country.

In Paris, we see volume tick up substantially in the summer, and France has been a hotbed of COVID-19, the leading caseload in the EU. In Milan, where the outbreak hit hard early on, we see continued low AirBnB volume, and Italy’s cases have not increased nearly as much as other parts of the EU.

Want to explore for yourself? We’ve put up a Tableau Public workbook you can use to explore this data here.

What’s the key takeaway? While we may not have access to Big Tech’s biggest datasets, we still have access to some data available to the public, and we can use that data to understand current events and even begin to make forecasts. With the ability to forecast comes the ability to predict and understand what’s likely to happen. When you’re building your analytics strategy, be sure to remember and identify what credible third-party data you could add to improve the impact of your marketing strategy.

Want the raw dataset itself? Join our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers, for bonus content like this raw data.

Methodology: Trust Insights used InsideAirBnB.com’s AirBnB MSA database of more than 100 metropolitan areas’ AirBnB reservations and reviews around the world. The timeframe of the data is January 1, 2020 – October 26, 2020. The date of study is November 18, 2020. 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.

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The Academy is designed for manager-level and above marketers, and largely caters to non-technical audiences, meaning you do not need a background in analytics, data science or programming to understand and apply what you learn. One registration gives you unlimited access to all the courses, an invitation to a members-only Slack Instance, and access to new courses every quarter.

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Shiny Objects 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

Get Back To Work

We’ve changed things up in Get Back To Work, and we’re looking at the top 310 metro areas in the United States by population. This will give you a much better sense of what the overall market looks like, and will cover companies hiring in multiple locations. Want the entire, raw list? Join our Slack group!

What do you do with this information?

By looking at this data, you’ll see what the most popular titles are; use any of the major job/career sites to ensure your resume/CV/LinkedIn profile matches keywords and phrases for those titles. For companies, search job sites for those companies specifically to see all the open positions and apply for them.

You can also hit up LinkedIn and see who you know at companies listed, and see if your connections have any inside tips on hiring.

Top Marketing Positions by Count, Manager and Above

Marketing Manager : 218 open positions
Digital Marketing Manager : 170 open positions
Social Media Manager : 100 open positions
Account Manager : 68 open positions
Director of Marketing : 68 open positions
Marketing Director : 61 open positions
Communications Manager : 54 open positions
Demand Generation Manager : 50 open positions
Vice President of Marketing : 48 open positions
Marketing Operations Manager : 41 open positions

Top Marketing Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above

Pearson : 127 open positions
Amazon.com Services LLC : 66 open positions
New Relic : 36 open positions
Google : 34 open positions
Thermo Fisher Scientific : 30 open positions
JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. : 29 open positions
Cozymeal : 27 open positions
Deloitte : 25 open positions
Interdependence : 22 open positions
Amazon Web Services, Inc. : 21 open positions

Top Locations of Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above

New York, NY : 399 open positions
San Francisco, CA : 224 open positions
Remote, NA : 223 open positions
Atlanta, GA : 197 open positions
Boston, MA : 194 open positions
Austin, TX : 184 open positions
Seattle, WA : 156 open positions
Denver, CO : 132 open positions
San Diego, CA : 123 open positions
Dallas, TX : 118 open positions

Methodology: Trust Insights uses the Indeed.com API to extract open positions from a geographic area focused on marketing analytics, marketing, social media, data science, machine learning, advertising, and public relations, with a filter to screen out the most junior positions.

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Join the Club

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Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

Agorapulse Twitter Summit, November 2020, virtual
MarketingProfs Double Header, November 2020, virtual
MadConNYC, December 2020, New York City

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

Want some private training at your company? Ask us!

Stay In Touch

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?

Required FTC Disclosures

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

Trust Insights maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Talkwalker, Zignal Labs, Agorapulse, and others. All Featured Partners are affiliate links for which we receive financial compensation. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which we may receive indirect financial benefit.

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