8June 2020OVERCOMING "THE MINIMAL ANALYSIS TRAP"By Dennis Ritell, Director, Ad Systems and Operations, Zillow GroupOne evergreen topic that continues to showcase its importance surrounds ensuring that attention is on the right things and automation is occurring for everything elsewhere business cases are justified. We have found ourselves at an inflection point where the frontline skills required for a successful company have far surpassed the days of data entry and repeatable tasks. Frankly, these jobs in the digital space are going away and it continues to force talent to transition to higher caliber functions. This is not doom and gloom for those pursing management or operations positions,in fact it reinforces that the opportunity lays with them to drive automation and efficiency.For many companies a significant opportunity is capitalizing on accessible data. Though even with data "accessible"the frontline continues to spend more time locating, organizing and pulling data than analyzing it. With data storage becoming increasingly cheaper,accessible data is on the rise and analyzing more of it introduces increasedlatency into the production of comprehensive insights for clients and internal stakeholders. This is a weak spot for management and operations teams because data aggregation can be automated, and where human contribution is most significant in providing context and perspective on the results is where the least time is spent. This behavior is what I refer to as The Minimal Analysis Trap (TMAT), where the effort to assemble data is so fatiguing that the conclusion reached about the itis only simple and cursory.There are a variety of ways that the frontline can find themselves in TMAT. The first and most common is caused by a lack of management clarity around which metrics are important to the business and how they should be measured. While commonsense in nature, this does require leaders to take a step back to review the lowest level metrics and determine which of them represent a subset of a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that warrants monitoring and focus. If you're a media buyer it might be Return On Ad Spend. If you're a publisher it might be Revenue per Thousand Impressions. Regardless of which KPI is important to a business, often the frontline is littered with an excessive number of data points to analyze. Without clear direction the conclusions reached about data can be incomplete resulting in frontline revision grinds or a general acceptance from leaders of low-quality output. Take for example a metric like Click Through Rate where there In My Opinion
< Page 7 | Page 9 >