How’d I do? Proving Success with Data

So, you’ve just wrapped up the big project, huh? Months of diligent planning, possibly a lot of money sunk into it, and now you can finally take a breath. Except, you can’t. You’re a worrier, and a stresser and Lord knows you won’t be able to rest easy until you’ve got some hard evidence that it was all worth it. After all, what’s a sport without a trophy at the end? What’s the point of a bake-off without a delicious cake to enjoy at the end? I’m not talking about glory here, I’m talking about tangible evidence that your efforts weren’t for not. It’s time for one more phase of your big project and like all the others, data and analytics are here to help things go easier, make that worry wart, a little less, worrisome. 

Now, it really doesn’t matter what your project was, I promise, there’s some sort of data out there to help validate things. Maybe it was an advertising campaign to increase web-traffic, you have to justify to a client. Well, by now you know all the ways Google Analytics can help you there. Maybe your goal was to change perception of your brand. You’ve spent months working on PR and now you need to see where you stand with the public. Well, meet your new best friend, social listening. As discussed in the last post, there are tons of social media analytics platforms out there, and many of them include social listening in its functions. Without going into too much detail, social listening monitors online mentions of your brand (or whatever keyword you desire) and analyzes the tone and context to give you an idea of the sentiment around that phrase. Now you’ve got hard numbers telling you how the public feels about your brand.

Those are just two examples of how analytics can help you prove your awesome and all that hard work has paid off. More than justifying yourself to your boss or a client, these tools help justify yourself to… yourself. They help you take that easy breath at the end of a project because there’s something to show it’s the end of a project. No more ambiguity. Not more feeling or intuition or hoping for the best. You’ve got your trophy.