We can measure almost everything, especially in online marketing. However, we need insights from the data, and we can also get overwhelmed with too much data. According to an article on the business2community.com website, we visualize data in order to:
- Be able to digest large amounts of data at scale
- Reveal trends, compare and contrast
- Reveal insights and questions that we otherwise wouldn’t notice
Moving beyond tables
Tables aren’t the most effective approach to data visualization. It's rather difficult for us to compare rows and columns that aren’t close to each other. Using the exact same data, we can turn a table into a bar chart easily.
For example, let’s take a metric called impressions. It tells us how many times an ad was seen by the visitors of a website. This number by itself doesn’t tell us much. If we add a dimension – for example a city, we can see how many times and in which areas our ad was seen. Now we start getting a more insightful dataset.
After few steps, the authors of the article found out that there are two cities in the UK where people can see the company's ad, but there is no close branch. These actionable business intelligence insights allows us to uncover business opportunities.
The key to data visualization is to know which questions we need to ask. Constantly look for holes in your dataset and what to do about it.
-jk-