INBOX INSIGHTS, June 12, 2024: Universal Analytics Data, Processing Unstructured Social data - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: Universal Analytics Data, Processing Unstructured Social data (6/12) :: View in browser

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Do You Need to Keep Universal Analytics Data?

In case you weren’t aware, your access to Universal Analytics (UA) data is being cut on July 1, 2024. To that, your UA property stopped collecting data on July 1, 2023. In a nutshell, UA has been sitting dormant for almost a year, and you won’t be able to get at the data in a few weeks.

If I had to wager a guess, you haven’t thought too much about your UA data. Until now. Until you’re reminded that it’s about to be taken away from you. NO!!

Well, hold on. Do you need that data or do you want that data? There are some companies that have requirements to hold onto their historical UA data. Those companies have likely already exported that data into a different system. For the rest of us procrastinators, we’re likely exchanging “should we” emails with our IT team.

Depending on the structure of your company, extracting the data could be simple or highly complicated. The IT team will have questions and concerns. And I would also guarantee that it’s not their highest priority. Especially given that it’s last minute.

Before getting ahead of yourself, let’s walk through how to determine if all this is necessary.

We’re going to use the Trust Insight 5P Framework to audit our need to preserve UA data.

The 5Ps are Purpose, People, Process, Platform, and Performance. The framework is an efficient decision-making tool. Rather than spending hours creating piles of documentation, the 5Ps can walk you through what’s most important and where to focus.

Purpose: Define Your Objectives

Before you start any project or initiative, you should have a well-defined purpose. Without one, you could potentially waste time, resources, and budget. So, let’s try not to do that.

What is the primary reason for accessing historical UA data? This is the question you need to start with to define your purpose. This is where you’ll suss out whether you want or need the data.

A good starting place is your business goals. What are they? Does Google Analytics support those goals? Where does GA fit into your tech stack and reporting process?

When Google switched from UA to Google Analytics 4, many companies stopped using the data. The system felt cumbersome, and the data untrustworthy. The new system doesn’t cleanly map to the old data set. This is where you’ll look at the kind of reporting you’re currently doing. Are you doing trend analysis? Do you have year-over-year comparisons? How reliant are you on the data from Google Analytics.

If the answer is that you’re not using it, that is where you can stop your audit. You don’t need to export and retain the historical UA data.

However, if you find that you do need the data, let’s keep walking through the rest of the P to see how to approach extraction.

People: Identify Stakeholders and Responsibilities

First, who needs access to this data once you’ve extracted it? This information will help when you get to process and platform.

User stories will help with gathering information in this section. A user story is a simple, three-part sentence.

“As a [persona], I [want to], so [that].”

For each stakeholder, develop a user story. You may find that there are stakeholders who don’t need to be as involved. You may also find that there are team members who have larger needs. For example:

As the IT lead, I need a secure place to start historical UA data, so that the company can meet compliance standards. As the marketing manager, I need easy access to historical UA data, so that I can use it in reporting. As the analyst, I need access to historical channel data, so that I can continually measure marketing efforts.

The IT team needs the data to be secure, but the marketing team needs it to be accessible. That might mean you need more than one solution.

Be sure to capture all those user stories before moving on to process and platform.

Process: Outline the Workflow

Using the information from the user stories, you can outline the extraction process.

Questions you should answer with your process development are:

What data is most important?
Do you need all the metrics and dimensions or a select few?
How far back should the data go?
How often will we need to access the data? What is the frequency? Do we get ad hoc analysis requests?

Platform: Evaluate Tools and Infrastructure

When faced with a decision that is time-sensitive, the default is to choose tools first. However, we’ve already seen that we need a tool that is both secure and easy to use. This could be a platform you already have in your tech stack, or a new tool that you need to bring on.

Questions you should answer with your platform evaluation:

How secure is the tool?
Does it meet our compliance standards?
What are the import/export features available?
Can a non-technical person easily extract data from it?
How well does the platform integrate with the existing tech stack? Does it need to?
How will you ensure data quality? Performance: Measure twice, export once

How do you measure success? Go back to your purpose. Why do you need UA data?

Your easiest performance measure is whether you’ve solved the problem. Are you meeting compliance standards? Are you able to continue trend analysis or year-over-year reporting?

Also, you want to set up milestone measures to track your progress. Given that you only have a couple of weeks before you lose access to this data, this might be your most important measure. Did we do it before July 1, 2024?

If you find yourself on an email chain or sitting in a meeting asking “should we save our UA data?” – start with the 5Ps. Walk through them with your team and use the framework to get everyone on the same page. Assess the need or want. Use the data to make a measurable plan.

Happy extracting!

Are you preserving your UA data? Reach out and tell me, or come join the conversation in our Free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers.

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the importance of subject matter expertise when using AI for marketing tasks, such as analyzing backlink data. You’ll learn why relying solely on AI-generated insights without understanding the underlying data can be risky. Katie and Chris explain why training your team members first, then training your AI, leads to more accurate results and better decision-making. Discover the crucial steps you need to take to ensure your AI is working with you, not against you, and that your marketing efforts are successful.

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

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we walked through optimizing podcasting workflows with AI. Catch the episode replay here!

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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s walk through a recent example of how generative AI can help us understand real-world data, taken from our Generative AI for Sales webinar. For our example, we wanted to understand how employees themselves may affect sales, especially in a B2C retail environment.

The first question we have to ask is, where could we get this data? Certainly, there are official sites like Glassdoor where people can leave ratings and reviews of employers, but the challenge with Glassdoor is that it doesn’t have a public API. It used to, but they locked that down in 2021.

So where else could we go? Well, if you apply for a free developer API license from Reddit, you can use Reddit. I applied for one and got it within the hour, and it allows you to do small data extracts. By small, I mean being able to download the entire contents of a subreddit in an hour or less, as opposed to getting a raw data feed of all of Reddit (which would be the use case for a software company).

That’s my starting point – Walmart has an unofficial employee subreddit, so I extracted 90 days of posts and comments from it using Python (which Google Gemini wrote for me, because my Python skills are 💩). Now, this data is almost completely unstructured:

We get the post title, the Reddit username (which is often a throwaway account for good reason), the date, number of comments, a link to the original post, and the post content itself. The goods are in the title and post content, but parsing that data would take ages. 90 days of posts is about 90,000 words. 90 days of comments is more than 550,000 words – about the length of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Thankfully, generative AI tools like ChatGPT 4-omni, Claude 3 Opus, and Google Gemini can hold more than 700,000 words in their working memory, which makes them ideally suited for processing this kind of information. We can use them to summarize the information at a high level:

And this toy example using just the posts is still actionable; if you worked for Walmart, this data would give you an action plan and a starting point to understand what impact employee morale has on sales:

Again, these are toy examples of prompts and responses; if we actually worked for Walmart, we’d want to break each of these major categories into sub-categories, and perhaps even build an enterprise-level system that could process them on an ongoing basis.

The key takeaway here is that generative AI tools give us superpowers for processing and understanding the data we already have. They’re incredibly powerful for helping us turn analysis into action.

Here’s a roundup of who’s hiring, based on positions shared in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group and other communities.

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 3000+ 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!

Imagine a world where your marketing strategies are supercharged by the most cutting-edge technology available – Generative AI. Generative AI has the potential to save you incredible amounts of time and money, and you have the opportunity to be at the forefront. Get up to speed on using generative AI in your business in a thoughtful way with our new offering, Generative AI for Marketers, which comes in two flavors, workshops and a course.

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