Google’s Data Studio Updates, Location Ranking & Tinder for Clothes

Google’s Data Studio Just Got a Bit Better

Google’s Data Studio is a pretty sharp (and free) way to create dashboards and visualizations from your Google Analytics data and other data sets. But it’s always been limited in what it can do. However, the program has received some fun product updates in the past few months. My favorite new features are custom data range comparisons and the Tableau-esque ability to drill down in charts. So far, I’ve used this new feature to create more useful maps. Now, dashboard viewers can drill into details about which states and cities their users are located.

Ads, They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

There is a growing interest in the idea of personalization and privacy in the online age. This caught the eye of the New York Times, who decided to conduct its own digital advertising experiment to show how far advertisers go to collect and use our information. My main takeaway is that we have a choice to make: either we all agree to be targeted by hyper-personalized ads that are more relevant to us or we need to create and pass more stringent data privacy laws.

Ranking Beyond Your Location

If your organization is expanding into new metropolitan areas, trying to rank in search for those new locations is tough. But this handy guide takes you through multiple scenarios for how to do it. The answer will be different for each organization. Doing thorough research surrounding Google’s search behavior for your key search phrases, the rarity of your offerings and your competitors will give you the answers you need.

Tinder… but for Clothes

Getting your audience to tell you what they want is often a lot harder than just asking. This is especially true for something as subtle as personal style. Stitch Fix developed a clever data-driven solution. Enter: Stitch Fix’s Style Shuffle. The quiz is powered by an algorithm that pairs “ratings about each item with the feedback it receives when customers get that item in one of their boxes.” And the more data the algorithm has to work with, the more accurate it becomes. As Founder Katrina Lake said, “data science isn’t woven into our culture; it is our culture.”

Social Media Data: Great in Theory, Less in Practice

“What once took the entire careers of multiple researchers can now be done in a few months,” writes data scientist Rachael Tatman about working with social media data. If you’re thinking about analyzing data from Twitter, Facebook or another social platform, this article is a good primer for what you can — and cannot — do with it. The availability of social data sets is a huge plus for organizations that need data but don’t have a large budget. But before you launch into an analysis project, be aware that you can’t be sure who your participants are, there’s inherent sampling bias (certain types of people use certain platforms) and you are at the whim of the API (data limits often apply).

Two Is Better Than One: My Upcoming Webinar

Are you a digital or communications director, grant administrator, or program manager? This webinar is for you! I’ll be teaming up with Brad Caldana of The Digital Plan for a “Impress Your Grant Administrator with Better Data & Insights” webinar on Thursday, June 20. We’ll talk impressing with real insights, not just numbers, practical tips for implementing better measures of your own programs, and innovative measurement solutions.

My Favorite Advice

Low Budget Marketing Tip

It’s summer intern season! This article has good tips for marketing efforts that require time and energy — but not budget. One good intern task is optimizing your website for SEO. This article suggests researching which keywords your audience uses when “they’re looking for products or services like yours online.” Then, get your intern to tweak your web content for those high-value keywords on each page of your website — in copy, headlines, title tags, alt tags on images and meta descriptions. This article provides intern-friendly, step-by-step instructions.

A Very Cool Visualization

Post-Grad Moves

It seems everyone is graduating to college this month, but where are they going after? This cool infographic shows the top U.S. cities for college graduates, with small blurbs about why they flock there. Hint: New York City attracts the most. No surprise there.