#moriah rahamim

When you’re working to grow a business, it’s easy to get caught up in anecdotal evidence and “hunches,” relying on what you can see easily with your eyes and hear easily with your ears. But how can you use data to provide a reality check, and illuminate the factors that are really influencing things like traffic and user activity? Here are a few lessons we’ve learned in putting together some of our own internal marketing reports, from a product manager who loves data. 

1. Look at change over time

Early drafts of our marketing reports looked like a series of tables like the one below (data changed.) These were momentary snapshots of what our site activity looked like right now - say, over the last week or last month. Our team wanted to know, “what do these numbers actually mean in context? How do I know if this is good or bad if I can’t compare it to previous months?” 

Note: Numbers in all tables and charts in this article are illustrative, and do not represent the traffic to any real websites.

For companies both large and small, change over time is more a salient metric than an overall measure of “what things look like now.” 

Say a large company made $2 million dollars last year in revenue, that might be great and all - unless they made $3 million the year prior, which would be a sign of significant problems that need to be resolved to reverse the decline.

If a young startup has 100 users this month, that might not sound like much. But maybe last month they only had 50 users, so their user base has actually doubled in size. If they can keep up that momentum, maybe they’re doing something right to achieve a high rate of growth: a key factor for investors looking to see that a young company has future potential.

Showing changes over time, like in the graph below, is more informative than a static table. Why did the website see a spike in traffic in February, and then go back down in March? Maybe this company can glean some insights into how to shift marketing strategy to get traffic like that every month.

2. Break it down

So, you know that things are changing over time… but how do you figure out why? You need to start by looking at some more granular information. There are a number of analytics platforms out there that can help you determine certain things, like how users landed on your site or downloaded your app. Take advantage of these to break down why or what types of users are behaving in certain ways.

What caused such a huge spike in website traffic in February? Based on the chart below, it likely had a lot to do with successful advertising. From here you can start asking more specific questions like whether the ad content was more engaging that month, if the company posted an ad on an especially relevant platform, or maybe ad spend was simply higher that month.

3. Keep raw data accessible

When you’re sending around an internal report like this to different stakeholders in your company, everybody will want to look at the information from a different angle. A stacked bar chart like the one above is useful in telling one version of the story, but much of the real discovery comes from digging into the numbers once you see these general trends.

Make sure there’s an easy way to open up a spreadsheet with the raw data. Charts are a great way to start thinking about what’s going on, but hopefully they will fuel more detailed questions that can be answered by looking deeply into the underlying information. 

4. Answer YOUR business questions

There isn’t any one “right” way to examine and visualize your data. What questions do you need to answer in order to understand how you’re performing and how to improve? What questions can lead you to actionable conclusions? Start there: Let these key business questions guide what sort of data you collect, and how you present it to your audience (whether it’s co-workers or investors).