I’m delighted to be speaking at Live! 360 Orlando and I’m presenting a workshop on From Business Intelligence to Business Analytics with the Microsoft Data Platform. The conference is held on November 17-22, 2019 at the Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando in Florida.

Data becomes relevant for decision making when we start to use it properly, so this workshop will demonstrate the use of analytics for real-life use cases. This means that you can make use of the knowledge you learn from the session when you go back to the office. In this workshop, we will make analytics relevant to your business so your organization will feel the benefit. If you’d like to register, please click here to register and please use code SPKLIVE87 and receive $400 off the standard pricing for both the 6-Day and 5-Day Packages.

Here are the topics we’ll cover:

• Introduction to Analytics with the Microsoft Data Platform
• Essential Business Statistics for Analytics Success – the important statistics that business users use often in business spheres, such as marketing and strategy.
• Business Analytics for your CEO – what information does your CEO really care about, and how can you produce the analytics that she really wants? In this session, we will go through common calculations and discuss how these can be used for business strategy, along with their interpretation.
• Analytics for Marketing – what numbers do they need, why, and what do they say? In this session, we will look at common marketing scenarios for analytics, and how they can be implemented with the Microsoft Data Platform.
• Analytics for Sales – what numbers do they need on a sales dashboard, why, and what do they say? In this session, we will look at common sales scenarios for analytics such as forecasting and ‘what if’ scenarios, and how they can be implemented with the Microsoft Data Platform.
• Analytics with Python – When you really have difficult data to crunch, Python is your secret Power tool.
• Business Analytics with Big Data – let’s look at Big Data sources and how we can do Big Data Analytics with tools in Microsoft’s Data Platform.

Power BI and Marketing Data

What kind of applicable analytics will we cover? One important area in data is marketing. The primary aim of a Digital Marketing Analytics Report is to provide Digital Marketing Managers, Product Owners, and other relevant teams and stakeholders with a clear and easily-usable overview of the KPIs related to their campaigns. They should be designed in such a way that whoever is looking at them can interact with them in an easy, productive way. A Digital Marketing Analytics Report will generally have a wide range of visuals, of different levels of complexity, that display data in different ways.

The average attention span is only eight seconds. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to gather your data onto one canvas in a visually-compelling way, rather than relying on a lengthy PowerPoint or a cluttered Excel spreadsheet. Power BI is a hugely effective way of gathering and connecting to various data sources and using them to create a more engaging experience. 

When it comes to marketing specifically, there are some major advantages that come with processing your data in Power BI. Visualizing your data in a Power BI report lets you recognise patterns and trends that might have otherwise gone unnoticed if the data was in a text-based format. It is also an effective way to identify and create your company’s own best practices vs the common best practices of the industry; you can estimate traffic by creating a click-through-rate curve for your site, rather than just using the industry average.

Power BI can also make it easier to answer the questions that your clients and other stakeholders ask of you. Being able to explore and interact with live data means that, when you’re asked a question, rather than responding by saying “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you” you can say “Let’s find out”. Not only does this mean that your client doesn’t have to wait for an answer, but it means that you are showing that you’re being honest and transparent about your data and how you analyse it.

You can also interact with your data in other ways — for example, it’s easy to isolate data from a specific time period in one visualization, and have this be reflected in the other visualizations on the Dashboard. You could select the spendings from a particular week, and have the KPIs from this week be highlighted, allowing you to better see the relationship between these two statistics.

Colour can also be used in a Dashboard to have certain effects, such as showcasing relationships clearly and drawing attention to the most important data, either overall or during user interaction. Colour can also be used to illustrate performance — for example, green statistics to represent above target, yellow for on target, and red for below target.

You can use a Power BI Dashboard to give an overview of impressions, campaign clicks, and average spend for a digital campaign. These statistics combined gives an overview of the effectiveness of and costs related to the campaign — seeing these statistics side by side can give a better idea of how they relate to each other.

Marketers are already learning how to use better tools for bigger datasets, and the environment is quickly evolving. Digital marketers working in eCommerce are experiencing over 45% increases year-on-year (1). People are becoming more digitally literate, and are learning how to search more effectively across more devices — often even beginning a purchase on one device and completing it on a different one. There are more search engines, more sites, and overall more options for users, and many users are responding to this by becoming better, more specific searchers. This means that, as marketers, instead of worrying about 1,000 keywords, you need to worry about 1,000,000. You need to have a much better idea of your marketing initiatives, click-throughs and engagements, and you need to convey this in a way that will be both understandable and engaging. 

If there are larger initiatives or recurring marketing programs that you need to track, it may be beneficial to setup specific reports, but in general, a Power BI dashboard is a great way to share your insights in a way that doesn’t end at a basic display of your data, but allows the data to be further investigated on-the-spot and when needed.

Join me in Live! 360 Orlando to learn more about Power BI and marketing, along with other topics.