The Meares Digital Analytics File featuring Stories about Voice Analytics from Google and Adobe and the Creation of #Measure Slack

Christopher Meares
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

Every other week I will be providing readers with interesting happenings in the digital analytics field from around the web. At times, I will also provide links to other articles that might not be 100% digital analytics focused, but which will include extremely interesting and useful information. I hope you enjoy the articles and wrap-ups.

If you want to receive the Meares Digital Analytics File on an ongoing basis, please feel free to follow me on Medium, where I will post a new article every other Thursday. Also, if you want to get updates on a more frequent basis you can follow me on Twitter, @chris_meares, where I send out information daily.

5 trends driving Big Data in 2017

Usually I am not a big fan of “trends” articles. I feel like they are mostly clickbait. However, this article does bring up two things that I hope will continue to be trends and not just around the “Big Data” buzzword. These trends are data governance and DataOps. All organizations can benefit from having a data governance plan which can help analysts and data scientists spend less time cleansing data and more time driving the business forward. Adopting a DevOps-like model for your data projects will also allow your organizations to become more agile when dealing with the deluge of data you collect daily.

Google’s New Voice-Activated Analytics Fueled by AI Will Simplify Data Queries

This week I have two stories about voice activated analytics but they couldn’t be more different. This first story is about Google adding a voice activated navigation to Google Analytics that will be fueled by artificial intelligence. This will allow you to ask questions about data and receive the data in return. It is an interesting idea but I am not sure if most analysts I know are ready for this. I also haven’t had the greatest success with Google Assistant or Siri for that matter so I will be interested to see if this works as intended.

New Adobe voice analytics will capture data from all the major virtual assistants

Here is my second story about voice activated analytics but this one is about capturing data from the many voice activated devices available on the market such as Amazon’s Echo, Siri, Cortana or the aforementioned Google Assistant. Adobe Analytics has launched a way to capture this data and report on it in the same way you report on your digital properties. For the limited number of applications that are using these voice assistants, this could provide valuable information to help drive the usefulness of their apps.

Data Driven Decisions: Respect the Numbers, Then Make Your Choice

There are many times that I hear fellow analysts talk about how all companies should be making data driven decisions. In this article, Stephen Levin makes the correct statement that data driven does not mean data directed. My favorite line from the article is “Your data analysis is only as good as your ability to learn from it and use it.” I couldn’t agree with him more. You should read his article and learn more about how to not only use data but also how to use your gut to make decisions.

#Measure Slack — How It All Started

If you are in the digital analytics community and you are not a part of the #Measure Slack you are missing out on so many good conversations, ideas, and discussions. (If you aren’t signed up you can do so here) I always wondered how this community came into fruition and lucky enough for me, Lee Isensee wrote this article about how it was all started. I have been a part of the community for a long time and to see how it all began was very interesting.

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