In The Headlights: August 14, 2019 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

You collectively voted, and we heard you:

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Rear View Mirror Data stays as a regular column. We’ll move it just below The Bright Idea for this and future issues of the newsletter in its new home. If you’re interested in how we did the polling, it’s a very straightforward process. Google Analytics automatically tracks all URLs, including query parameters – which is anything in a URL that starts with a question mark and all the information afterwards. You’ve seen these used for Google Analytics itself, with its UTM tracking parameters.

Query parameters are arbitrary – you can make just about any kind you want, as long as it follows the format of ?key=value. In the example above, we used ?vote=yes and ?vote=no as our query parameters, both of which led to a single landing page that had Google Analytics running on it.

Borrow this idea for your own newsletters, social media posts, etc.! It’s an easy, free way to track responses, and it puts your data in Google Analytics, where you can then monitor and extract it for dashboards and reporting.

The Bright Idea

This week’s Bright Idea is our introductory remarks at the IBM Watson Customer Experience Center, on ways AI projects go wrong. Watch the video here on our YouTube channel!

Click/tap here to watch the video and if you like it, please share it.

Rear View Mirror Data

In the rear view this week, we turn our eyes towards Facebook. What are the engagement numbers for Facebook brand pages? We examined the posts from 2,517 Pages in the last week* to find:

The median number of page likes for this group of brands is 476,205.
The median engagement rate, which is all reactions plus comments and shares, is 0.0236%. For context, that’s 23.6 out of 100,000 followers, about 17x LESS than brand engagement on Instagram.
The median number of reactions was 77 per post for brand posts, with a median of 13 comments per post.
The median engagement rate of sponsored posts for these brands is 0.015%, or 15 out of 100,000 followers.
Sponsored brand posts made up approximately 1% of all brand posts.

Methodology: We selected 2,517 Facebook brand pages using Facebook Audience Insights for English-language locales (US, UK, IE, CA, AU) to identify the top 100 pages in each province/state-level market and then extracted data using Facebook’s Crowdtangle software. The sample of posts is 129,647 unique posts by brands. The timeframe of the study is August 3, 2019 to August 10, 2019. The last 3 days of the dataset were excluded (August 10-13) to allow for post engagements to mature, due to the newsfeed algorithm.

Media Landscape

YouTube in numbers: Monthly views, most popular video, more fun stats!: According to some reports, users watch five billion videos on YouTube every single day, which translates to roughly 150 billion per month.
Canadians listen to radio and podcasts more than streaming services: Despite the rise of emerging media, radio (online radio) and podcasts still stay as the leading music sources for Canadian listeners, says data analytics company Neilsen.
Ninja disgusted with Twitch after pornography appears on his channel: The Fortnite pro criticizes the video streaming giant for using his offline channel to promote content across the site.

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

IBM Research launches explainable AI toolkit: IBM Watson IoT Center Munich IBM Research today introduced AI Explainability 360, an open-source collection of state-of-the art algorithms that use a range of techniques to explain AI model decision making.
Why Python is getting more popular…and how to use it with SQL databases: Two audiences will benefit greatly from learning how to connect the two: developers wanting to use information in a SQL database; and SQL database users wanting to learn how to get value out of data with Python applications.
A Comprehensive Guide to Build your own Language Model in Python: A language model learns to predict the probability of a sequence of words.

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

Heres how anonymized personal data should be used to create better services: Data can be used for much more than just ad targeting (how some major data-holding companies make the bulk of their money).
Animated map shows how cats spread across the world: One-third of American households have at least one cat. That’s roughly 93.5 million house cats in the US, alone.
The Evolution of the Data-Driven Company: What does it mean to be a data-driven company?

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Googles rivals opt out of search engine auction, calling it unethical and anti-competitive: Alternative search engines that focus on privacy or specific causes are unlikely to be able to competitively bid in this suggested auction set-up, the company said.
Google heralds a new era of Deployed AI to transform businesses: The company then used Googles AutoML Natural Language service to replicate this process in a matter of weeks for more than 40 of its other brands, creating a custom, ready-to-use content classifier for each one based on existing data.
How to Improve Your Keyword Rankings in Google: If your website is difficult for users to navigate and search engines to crawl, your keyword rankings will likely be negatively impacted.

Business and Leadership

Advice that tech leaders would give their teenage selves: The answer to this commonly-asked interview question tells us what we want to learn from the people who have, in our eyes, made it.
AWS is not at fault for Capital One hack but can do more, experts say: However, she says, AWS could do more to teach customers about how to approach the problem of securing their cloud infrastructure.
3 ways IoT will impact our future: Smart cities are in the near future

Join the Club

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Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

Content Marketing World, September 2019, Cleveland
INBOUND, September 2019, Boston
MarTech East, September 2019, Boston
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2019, Washington DC

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.