There is a major problem with analytics tools these days that we are trying to solve for at Yirla.
Dashboards have gotten much prettier over the years, but the decisions that result from looking at that data haven't really changed at all.
We call these points descriptive analytics. They tell you what happened, which is fine.
What we have been building at Yirla are what we call prescriptive analytics. These data points actually tell you what to do next.
If you've got any of the following 5-red flags, you're probably still sitting with descriptive analytics. Maybe it is time to start thinking about what your tool should be helping you with vs. just giving you old data.
You're still exporting data to answer basic questions If the first thing you do after pulling a report is open Excel, your analytics tool didn't finish the job. It delivered data. It didn't do anything with it. That's a pipe, not a platform.
It's never told you to turn something off A tool that only shows you what's working is cheerleading. The job is to find what's quietly bleeding budget, the fatigued creative that converted well six weeks ago and hasn't since. If nothing's ever been flagged for the kill list, nobody's minding the store.
Your weekly review ends with "we need to look into this more" That's the meeting failing before it started. You should walk in with a decision half-made and use the review to confirm it. If the data isn't leading to direction, you're paying for a conversation starter.
You're optimizing toward CTR because that's what's easy to see The tool is training your team whether you realize it or not. Surface vanity metrics prominently, and that's what people optimize toward. We see this from leading companies now who are moving from leads to actual deals in terms of their KPI's.
Every performance conversation turns into an attribution debate Some of this is unavoidable in B2B. But if "it depends how you count it" is a common refrain from your team, your tools are generating ambiguity, not clarity. You don't need perfect attribution. You need defensible decisions.
The practical test that you can run is simple. Just ask yourself what did your dashboard tell you to do differently last week? If you can't answer, you have a reporting tool, not an analytics tool.
The bar that we are trying to raise isn't a better looking dashboard. We are awash in them now. We are building a tool that changes your campaigns for the better.
If you want a dashboard that will give you guidance on how to more effectively run your campaigns, sign up for Yirla here.
Source: Gartner (Gartner Magic Quadrant data and the work that they have done on analytics adoption vs. decision quality)