The Analytics Power Hour
Michael Helbling, Moe Kiss, Tim Wilson, Val Kroll, and Julie Hoyer
Attend any conference for any topic and you will hear people saying after that the best and most informative discussions happened in the bar after the show. Read any business magazine and you will find an article saying something along the lines of "Business Analytics is the hottest job category out there, and there is a significant lack of people, process and best practice." In this case the conference was eMetrics, the bar was….multiple, and the attendees were Michael Helbling, Tim Wilson and Jim Cain (Co-Host Emeritus). After a few pints and a few hours of discussion about the cutting edge of digital analytics, they realized they might have something to contribute back to the community. This podcast is one of those contributions. Each episode is a closed topic and an open forum - the goal is for listeners to enjoy listening to Michael, Tim, and Moe share their thoughts and experiences and hopefully take away something to try at work the next day. We hope you enjoy listening to the Digital Analytics Power Hour.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Sep 24, 2019 • 59min
#124: Image-ine What the Analyst Can Do Using Machine Vision with Ali Vanderveld
Have you ever noticed that 68.2% of the people who explain machine learning use a "this picture is a cat" example, and another 24.3% use "this picture is a dog?" Is there really a place for machine learning and the world of computer vision (or machine vision, which we have conclusively determined is a synonym) in the real world of digital analytics? The short answer is the go-to answer of every analyst: it depends. On this episode, we sat down with Ali Vanderveld, Director of Data Science at ShopRunner, to chat about some real world applications of computer vision, as well as the many facets and considerations therein! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Sep 10, 2019 • 1h 1min
#123: Ad Fraud with Augustine Fou
What percentage of digital ad impressions and clicks do you think is actually the work of non-human bots? Pick a number. Now double it. Double it again. You're getting close. A recent study by Pixalate found that 19 percent of traffic from programmatic ads in the U.S. is fraudulent. David Raab from the CDP Institute found this number to be "optimistic." Ad fraud historian Dr. Augustine Fou, our guest on this show, has compelling evidence that the actual number could easily be north of 50 percent. Why? Who benefits? Why is it hard to tamp out? Is it illegal (it isn't!)? We explore these topics and more on this episode! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Aug 27, 2019 • 60min
#122: Dealing with Disparate Stakeholders with Astrid Illum
It's 1:00 AM, and you can't sleep. The paid search manager needs to know whether brand keywords can be turned off without impacting revenue. The product team needs the latest A/B test results analyzed before they can start on their next sprint. The display media intern urgently needs your help figuring out why the campaign tracking parameters he added for the campaign that launches in two days are breaking the site (you're pretty sure he's confusing "&" and "?" again). And the team running the site redesign needs to know YESTERDAY what fields they need to include in the new headless CMS to support analytics. You're pulled in a million directions, and every request is valid. How do you manage your world without losing your sanity? On this episode, analytics philosopher Astrid Illum from DFDS joins the gang to discuss those challenges. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Aug 13, 2019 • 50min
#121: Onboarding the Analyst
Somewhere between "welcome to the company, now get to work!" and weeks of tedious orientation sessions (that, presumably, include a few hours with the legal department explaining that, should you be on a podcast, you need to include a disclaimer that the views expressed on the podcast are your own and not those of the company for which you now work), is a happy medium when it comes to onboarding an analyst. What is that happy medium, and how does one find it? It turns out the answer is that favorite of analyst phrases: "it depends." Unsatisfying? Perhaps. But, listeners who have been properly onboarded to this podcast know that "unsatisfying" is our bread and butter. So, in this episode, Moe and Michael share their thoughts and their emotional intelligence on the subject of analyst onboarding, while Tim works to make up for recent deficiencies in the show's use of the "explicit" tag. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Jul 30, 2019 • 49min
#120: Causal Inference with Bradley Fay
Listen. Really. That's what you can do. You can listen to this episode and find out what you learn. Or you can NOT listen to the show and NOT find out what you learn. You can't do both, which means that, one way or the other, you WILL be creating your very own counterfactual! That, dear listener, is a fundamental concept when it comes to causal inference. Smart analysts and data scientists the world over are excited about the subject, because it provides a means of thinking and application techniques for actually getting to causality. Bradley Fay from DraftKings is one of those smart data scientists, so the gang sat down with him to discuss the subject! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Jul 16, 2019 • 45min
#119: What Grinds Our Gears - MAS 2019
Have you ever thought it would be a great idea to have a drink or two, grab a microphone, and then air your grievances in a public forum? Well, we did! This episode of the show was recorded in front of a live audience (No laugh tracks! No canned applause!) at the Marketing Analytics Summit (MAS) in Las Vegas. Moe, Michael, and Tim used a "What Grinds Our Gears?" application to discuss a range of challenges and frustrations that analysts face. They (well, Moe and Tim, of course) disagreed on a few of them, but they occasionally even proposed some ways to address the challenges, too. To more effectively simulate the experience, we recommend pairing this episode with a nice Japanese whiskey, which is what the live audience did! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Jul 2, 2019 • 52min
#118: Ethics in AI with Finn Lattimore
Did you hear the one about how the AI eliminated cancer? It just wiped out the human race! As machine learning and artificial intelligence are woven more and more into the fabric of our daily lives, we are increasingly seeing that decisions based purely on code require a lot of care to ensure that the code truly behaves as we would like it to. As one high profile example after another demonstrates, this is a tricky challenge. On this episode, Finn Lattimore from Gradient Institute joined the gang to discuss the different dimensions of the challenge! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Jun 18, 2019 • 59min
#117: What's in a Job Title? Maybe the Data Shows!
What's in a job title? That which we call a senior data scientist by any other job title would model as predictively... This, dear listener, is why the hosts of this podcast crunch data rather than dabble in iambic pentameter. With sincere apologies to William Shakespeare, we sat down with Maryam Jahanshahi to discuss job titles, job descriptions, and the research, experiments, and analysis that she has conducted as a research scientist at TapRecruit, specifically relating to data science and analytics roles. The discussion was intriguing and enlightening! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Jun 4, 2019 • 55min
#116: Analytics Education at Scale with Justin Cutroni from Google
Remember that time you ran a lunch-and-learn at your company to show a handful of co-workers some Excel tips? What would have happened if you actually needed to fully train them on Excel, and there were approximately a gazillion users*? Or, have you ever watched a Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager training video? Or perused their documentation? How does Google actually think about educating a massive and diverse set of users on their platform? And, what can we learn from that when it comes to educating our in-house users on tool, processes, and concepts? In this episode, Justin Cutroni from Google joined the gang to discuss this very topic! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
May 21, 2019 • 55min
#115: Build vs. Buy with June Dershewitz from Twitch
A simple recipe for a delicious analytics platform: combine 3 cups of data schema with a pinch of JavaScript in a large pot of cloud storage. Bake in the deployment oven for a couple of months, and savory insights will emerge. Right? Why does this recipe have both 5-star and 1-star ratings?! On this episode, long-standing digital analytics maven June Dershewitz, Director of Analytics at Twitch, drops by the podcast's analytics kitchen to discuss the relative merits of building versus buying an analytics platform. Or, of course, doing something in between! The episode was originally 3.5 hours long, but we edited out most of Michael's tangents into gaming geekdown, which brought the run-time down to a more normal length. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
