Seerfest 2020 Recap #1: Business Intelligence is More Accessible Than Ever

Seerfest 2020: Worldwide Recap

Our 3rd annual digital marketing conference, Seerfest, went virtual this year for the first time!

For those who missed the event, check out the recap of key takeaways below and keep in mind you can still purchase the full session recordings through the end of this year here. As always, 100% of sales are donated to Coded by Kids!

Business Intelligence is More Accessible Than Ever: Visualizing large data sets in simple dashboards can surface insights that fuel decision-making across your organization.
You Are Not Your Audience: Get to know who your people are so you can cut through the noise when marketing to them.
Marketers of the Future are Generalists: To survive and thrive, marketers must be able to connect the dots between multiple channels, stakeholders, audiences, and technologies.

Takeaway #1: Business Intelligence is More Accessible Than Ever

Today, we have access to more data sources than ever before, while having to make more decisions than ever thought possible. It's critical for marketers to have access to large data sets in simple dashboards so they can surface insights and act quickly.

More Data, More Problems?

Britney Muller, SEO Consultant and Data Science Student reminds us of this during her presentation, “Automate Data Insights” asking [when looking at marketing, web, business, ads, etc. data], “where do we even start?"

To make your data sets easier to manage and analyze, try using an age-old technique to define the types of data you’re dealing with first. Muller breaks this down into three categories:

Descriptive -- describe my website data ← supports SEO strategy with rich data insights built upon mathematical statements
Prescriptive -- what would happen if we changed ‘x’? Or didn’t change ‘y’?
Predictive -- what do we need to increase leads by ‘x’?

Data is Cheap, the Right Questions are Expensive

Even when you’ve defined the data you’re dealing with, you have to be able to ask the right questions in order to make the analysis useful.

There are many tools out there meant to help you dig in and analyze large sets of data. Muller walks through tactics using Colab notebooks, a Google cloud hosted environment to make machine learning accessible to all users.

Britney stressed throughout her presentation that it’s as simple as Shift + Enter when leveraging her GitHub library with Colab.

There are three major steps to take when using Collab notebooks:

Understand the distribution of your data
Clean the data
Explore correlations and insights

Using Seer data, she walked through step by step how to automate insights using Google Search Console data, histograms, and correlation tables. Whether you’re on the hunt for a meta description summarizer, internal link analysis, time series forecaster -- Muller's Colab notebook has it all.

Is it Magic? Transforming Data into Usable Insights

If the DIY methodology of a cloud based coding environment isn’t your speed, not to worry. Cory Henke, CEO & Founder of Variable Media’s session, “Power BI: The DTC Media Buying Advantage” -- perhaps the one that garnered the most enthusiastic feedback from live attendees -- showcased ways to perform data analysis and visualization at scale using Power BI.

Power BI, a free business intelligence software program built by Microsoft, is a Seer favorite and something you’ve heard us talk a whole lot about in the past.

Henke brought a fresh perspective on using it for extracting insights from large amounts of marketing and advertising data. While most people believe business intelligence software can be heavily complicated -- Henke says otherwise.

Anything Complicated, Can Be Simplified

Henke leverages Power BI to combine data sets from what he calls the DTC Duopoly Starter Kit and platforms beyond. If you’re a DTC advertiser or media buyer working in silos, you’re going to want to catch this one.

At the blink of an eye, or a click of a finger, Henke shared how this dashboard ^ allowed him and his team to gather quick insights about their client’s campaigns and audiences across channels.