This Chart or That Chart?

Tools are only as good as the data and the user behind them. You can have the greatest BI tool or marketing tool, but if you can’t use them to your advantage, they are pretty much worthless. In the video below, the team from Spôrk talks a lot about how to use tools to deliver results and why fusing the power of intuition with data gets the best results!
Video Transcript:
It’s a super trendy saying, it’s not even that trendy now, I mean it’s been around forever, but it seems like now everybody’s got a BI tool, which is one of the reasons we were, “We don’t need to create another tool. We need to help people use their data effectively.”
So, Tableau’s cool because it’s just got a really lot of connecting points. And also a lot of interesting ways that I can manipulate the data within the tool without having to know a bunch of extra things maybe in Excel or some of the others. I’m still doing these deep-dive learning programs to do predictive analytics with.
Tableau has been really helpful to kind of take chunks of data and then present them to my clients or the person I’m doing an audit for in a very dynamic visual form.
So, there’s that study that’s all over the internet and a lot of people have seen it. And we have it quoted on our website. It’s we process images 60,000 times faster than we do text. We’re just visual creatures. It comes out of our, the fact that we’re animals. Okay? We can just admit that we’re all animals here.
So when we create a visualization, it’s like a Tableau. I show a traffic trend, right? Then I also then I overlay bounce rate on it. And you should see this nice gap. So where you have a lot of traffic and a low bounce rate. But then when you can show that you have a lot of traffic and bam, here’s your red bounce rate, which is almost exact the same trend as your traffic rate. And very little space between when people are leaving. Immediately, that goes from, “Hey, your bounce rates high,” to “Emergency, your bounce rates high conversion optimization needs to take place now because people are leaving.”
So that’s kind of one of the cool things I’ve been doing. By taking the data and visualizing it with Tableau. But also even Google Data Studio, been using that too, which is free. And it’s from Google. And you can sync your Google accounts to it and all that, but you also can sync sequel servers to pull your own data into it. And there’s a lot of guys out there doing really crazy visualizations.
But again, reports that make sense. Where people can go, “Oh, okay. That’s what you mean when you say all these weird things to me, Ryan. That makes more sense now.”
Josh:
Yeah. And again, it doesn’t work for everybody, right? So it’s not a one size fit all in terms of, some people like spreadsheets and they want to look at the numbers via spreadsheet rather than a chart or pie graph or bubbles or funnels or whatever it might be.
Ryan:
Yeah. No, yeah, you’re absolutely right.
Josh:
I mean, I don’t know how many people look at funnels, but I’m sure there are quite a few out there.
Ryan:
Yeah, I’m one that I look at flow charts a lot in funnel charts seeing where people are dropping off, but exactly right. I mean, there’s sometimes too, for me, a chart that I’m just starting to actually enjoy are scatter plots.
Josh:
Oh, yeah. Scatter plots.
Ryan:
First four I was, “What the … this is … “ Not to even try and understand. I’m okay, okay, I get the gist of it. But what’s really cool is finding outliers inside of those scatter plots. Like, “Okay, here’s the conformity. Here’s where the conformity’s happening, but let’s find the outlier.” What’s happening out there, because there’s usually something interesting going on with those outlying points.
Is it just a rogue piece of data that just a normally? A normal occurrence? Or somebody who’s got something interesting to add that we’re missing? That could be something that’s totally new instead of just sticking to this, “Well, here’s our confirmed customer base,” which is good. You obviously should, absolutely, love your customers, and nurture your customers, and feed into your customers. But what about that person who had a really bad experience? Or what about that person who had a really good experience, but doesn’t ever want to talk to you. What is going on, on these outlying points that maybe we could learn from if we just kind of sat and thought about it?
If you look at the people that grow businesses, that have grown big businesses, they didn’t do it because they were super lucky. They did it because they were focused on those unique aspects. Warren Buffet reads five hours a day. Five hours a day. And then one of his favorite things to read are actually, old Fortune magazines, which is interesting. And the reason is that he goes, “There are trends.” And it’s totally true. If you look at the pendulum, we have these 80-year swings in cultural movements. And he’s absolutely right.
It’s why the reason that right now I’m investing a lot of my research in what was going on in business and marketing in the late 30’s, early 40’s. Because we’re emotional, at that same point right now in our culture. Or swinging into that. So it’s really cool when you start to see these trends. And Warren Buffet isn’t an idiot, right? I mean, we can all agree that Warren Buffet’s probably one of the smartest men in the world if not the smartest financial man in the world.
Josh:
Well, I would almost say he just works harder.
Ryan:
Yeah, absolutely. What he has is available to us. But are you willing to get up at four in the morning to read for five hours? Some days I am. Some days I’m not. And that’s on me. That’s not to anybody else. That’s on me. And so I select that.
Josh:
Right, going through the pain and being like, “All right. I gotta get up even though I’m tired.” Or I gotta continue to push through late at night. One thing that we’re doing here is, I mean, obviously, you know this, but it’s all about where’s the paradigm shift? What needs to be re-framed? And I think for us, we’re really heavily invested in the retail as well as the healthcare sectors. And being able to understand that a lot better is why we get up early.
Originally published at go.spork.solutions.
