Three rules for a successful analysis

Unnecessary analysis is your organization’s biggest problem, and there is a way to reduce it. Here is my system to avoid performing nonessential analysis.

Step 1

Sit down with the organization’s stakeholders and together develop your daily, weekly, and monthly reporting questions. Determine the needs of the organization and automate the databases and reporting to obtain answers to your questions automatically.

Step 2

Create a template where the organization’s daily, weekly, monthly, and adhoc questions can be listed. I love using Asana for this purpose, which I use to automatically log all my reporting and adhoc analysis questions.

Step 3

Create a template to collect and organize your questions. It is helpful to organize the information such that the background, methods, and results are in one place. This allows you to determine the outcome of the analysis. For example:

1. Background: Although we observe an increase in Swedish traffic on Facebook, we do not see an increase in the number of conversions, and we wish to understand why.
2. The method: By comparing the conversion funnel score for this source against that for other traffic sources, we decide to allocate more funding for Facebook Sweden.
3. Results: After performing our analysis using a Facebook tracker, we see that the issue

has been resolved and the Facebook numbers are back to normal.

Following this method will allow you to focus on actions, obtain meaningful information, and create feedback loops that will eliminate the possibility of performing useless analysis.