Insights from an Analytical Lead at Google: Embracing Data in Digital Marketing (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Katie. I'm an analytical lead at Google. An analytical lead at Google helps advertisers with measurement, testing, and data insights to help build their business. My favorite part about my job is I get to help both my team and the advertisers I work with solve problems. They come to me because they don't understand why something's happening or there's a question they're trying to answer, and then I get to dig through data to try and help them figure it out. And oftentimes, I'm working on something brand new for the first time and getting to learn something new and then help my advertisers and my team learn about it too. There is so much data when it comes to digital advertising, and it gives clients, account teams, agencies insights on ways to improve. There's just so much data available throughout the full experience from going to Google to a client's website, and we can look for ways to improve all along the way. There's conversion opportunities on the client side to make it easier for people to check out or to fill out that form. There's an opportunity at every turn to analyze data and look for ways to improve performance. I was working with a client who was seeing a lot of traffic come from Google, but for one reason or another, the traffic was not converting. We helped do a site assessment to better understand where people were falling off in their conversion funnel and how to make it more simple and straightforward and easier for clients to follow to help increase that conversion rate and drive more orders. Some of the things that we recommended they change were simplifying their checkout process, not asking so many questions in the forms, so it was easier and faster for customers to move through that process, making the call to action on the page really clear and prominent and making it really obvious to clients what the next step was, what they needed to do in order to complete the process. With just a few changes to their website, we saw a big jump in their sales. If you're working in e-commerce, you'll be interacting with data every day too. You will be running ad copy tests, landing page tests, video creative tests. Tests are a core component of digital advertising, and you'll be looking at that data to make decisions and make recommendations to your clients. To anybody starting out in digital marketing, my recommendation would be to really dig in on the data. Some people can be intimidated. I've worked with a lot of people who hated spreadsheets, but it is so important to take advantage of the data that we have at our disposal and look for those helpful insights. It's helpful for your team. It's helpful for your client. It might help you stand out among your peer set, so don't shy away from the data. It's not scary. Numbers are not scary. Spreadsheets are not scary. It's not scary.