A few months ago I had the opportunity to chat with my friend and work partner Feras Alhlou, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at E-Nor & Co-Author of Google Analytics Breakthrough. Feras and I have known each other for almost 10 years, and it is always great to hear more about the work that he and his first-class team are doing. Here are the questions we discussed, checkout the answers in the video below. I have also added some of my favorite highlights from the interview after the video.

1. [01:05] What’s the process that you use to make sense out of data?
2. [02:41]During this process, what do you actually do when you start working with data?
3. [04:07]When analyzing data, how can we make sure that we are looking at the context to understand what is happening around us?
4. [07:24]How can Data Studio and better data visualizations help companies make more data-driven decisions?

We believe analytics is a business process. We start with an audit, both from the business side and the technical side – we want to engage the stakeholders to understand how to measure what matters most to the business. Once we have the data in place, we go to the reporting layer – how do we report on this data? Then, we start to be able to analyze the data and find some actionable insights. Last, we can move to testing and personalization – that’s when you really can have an impact on the business. Read more about E-Nor’s Optimization Framework

There’s a whole lot of data these days, right? Life used to be simple for marketers: one device, a few channels – now there’s data everywhere, mobile, social, web, and of course backend data. I think one of the first things we need to do is to understand the context around that data, focusing on the following:

• The integrity of the data: is it clean, was it collected properly, is it raw or aggregated? Understand the data collection, how the data was put together.
• Having a set of meta data, information about the data: if you’re looking at Google Analytics metrics, knowing more about the user. For example, if you have a subscription based model: Is it a premium user? Is it a standard user? Having that additional data gives a whole lot of context, to the person who’s consuming that data.

I would definitely advice to have a data road map. Start with what you own, web and mobile analytics data. Then, start augmenting reports with basic social data, maybe you can get a little bit into the qualitative aspect with that. And last but not least, a great product that was recently introduced by Google as the Surveys product. There are surveys we can do on our own properties to understand the voice of the customer. But also use it to do market research – it used to be expensive and cumbersome to do it, but now you can easily run a Google survey and do a lot targeting.

And here is Feras and me having fun in the Google Analytics studio!