The document summarizes key challenges and best practices for making better decisions through data. It discusses pros and cons of providing universal data access versus limiting it to analysts. While universal access democratizes data, it can also be overwhelming without critical thinking skills. The presentation recommends enabling all employees as analytics professionals through training and role-appropriate reporting. It provides tips for building effective dashboards, including keeping them concise with 3-4 data points from a single source, regular releases, and detailed annotations to properly contextualize the data. The overall message is that data should drive decisions, but only when supported by assumptions, testing, application of learnings, and willingness to continuously improve.

1. Making Better Decisions Through
Data
Houston IMA Luncheon, 24 April 2019

2. Name: Keith Goode
Position: Sr. SEO Strategist, IBM
Experience:
• 20+ Years in Online Marketing
• 10+ Years of Experience in In-
House SEO
• Previous Employers: AMD,
HomeAway, Dell, seoClarity
• Appearances: Pubcon, SMX
West, Digital Summit
• Follow: @keithgoode

3. Some Light Housekeeping
* Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are my own. No forward-looking statements regarding IBM
have been included. None of IBM’s secret sauce has been revealed. Statements made in this
presentation have not been tested by the FDA.

4. Getting to Know You
How many in the audience today
are analytics professionals?

5. Data Challenges
Organizational Challenges in a Data Heavy World

6. Who Gets Access?
Everyone? Just Analysts?

7. Access for Everyone
Pros
• Data democratized
• More eyes on the data
• No need to wait for
reports
Cons
• Overwhelming,
directionless data can be
intimidating
• A lack of critical thinking
can lead to the wrong
decisions

8. Random Stats; Bad Decisions
50%

9. That 50% of ALL Life
• Smart people as well as that cousin you’re
embarrassed to be related to
• Half of your biome
• Half the trees and plants
• One half of the last two of a species we’ll
never know

10. How’s that Different from…?
• …the CEO who sees 100 million pages in
Google’s index and wants that reduced by
20%
• …the CMO who cuts funding for all paid
spend because of one particularly bad month
• …the company president who sees no value
in brand plays

11. Limited Access
Pros
• Analysts get to tell a
consistent story
Cons
• Bandwidth issues with
limited staff
• Deep dives limited

12. Democratize Your
Data
• The pros far outweigh the
cons
• A multitude of different
angles of the data
• Instant access to the most
important data
• Faster decisions
• Better decisions
• Iteration

13. Efforts at IBM
• A unified analytics hub
• An enablement hub with education portals
• On-demand access for anyone in the org
• Decisions through Data training (Critical
Thinking)

14. SEO Data
• Organic analytics
• Google Search Console data
• Ranking data
• Backlink data
• Competitive data
• Social media data
• Crawl data
• Keyword research
• …and More

15. Breaking Down Silos
• PPC data
• Quality scores
• Conversion data
• End-to-end funnel
• Sales verbatims
• User feedback
• Heatmap tracking
• …and more

16. Everyone Is an
Analytics Professional
• Data is at the core of
every decision we make
• Data-based decisions are
based on:
• Smart assumptions
• Thorough and continuous
testing
• Application of learnings
• An unwillingness to
stagnate and settle

17. Enabling Your New Analysts
Enablement and Critical Thinking

18. How to See Data
Is this graph showing:
• 50% loss in traffic
after every Friday?
• A weekly spike every
Friday that more than
doubles traffic?
• After a spike, an executive might
panic
• Expanding the date range and
comparing ranges can show
seasonality

19. Role-Appropriate
Reporting
• Share of Voice might be more appropriate for the C-
Suite
• Shows trended data against your organic
competitors
• Could indicate you’re targeting the wrong keywords
• Encourage
executives to avoid
the minutiae of
ranking reports and
daily analytics
• Build dashboards that
address their specific
needs

20. Unifying Your
Marketing Efforts
• Too expensive?
• Improve quality score
• Improve ad relevance to the
content
• Low conversions?
• A/B Test CTA
• Recognize the keyword may
be more of a top-of-funnel
query

21. How We’re Combining Efforts
Win Rooms
• Attempts to understand
and tap into the Buyer’s
Journey
• Builds a unified experience
across multiple facets of
that Journey
• Improves performance
across all channels

22. Dashboards
How to Build them and What to Avoid

23. Data Drawbacks
• How can we display this
data so that it shows a
positive story?
• Where did we see
improvements? (to the
exclusion of any negative
data)
• CYA

24. Data versus Dashboards
Ask your data what story it’s telling, then use
Dashboards to visually represent that story in a
concise, logical format.

25. Building Executive Dashboards
• 3 to 4 data points max
• Consistent data source
• Regular release schedule
• Summarize
• Annotate, annotate, annotate

26. Annotations
• Known Google algorithm
changes
• Known downtimes
• Code pushes
• Redesigns
• Content retirement
• Etc.

27. Q&A
Any questions?

28. Thank you!!