Is More Data Always Better?

One of the most common problems we help solve at Futurety is, “My data isn’t giving me actionable insights.” In today’s data-driven business culture, we all look at our existing data to help us find new markets and differentiate from competitors; but what if the problem isn’t a lack of data, but a lack of good data?

We’ve all heard the age-old innovation story about Henry Ford choosing to build a car, instead of building a better horse. This is somewhat of a tired refrain in product development but opens up new worlds when we apply it to data problems. What if, rather than organize, systematize, analyze, and strategize our existing data (that hasn’t helped us so far anyway), we can find new opportunities faster, cheaper, and better by obtaining new data on the problem we’re trying to solve?

Here are a few examples:

1. Not sure why users are visiting your e-commerce site, but not buying? Stop your team over-analyzing pages per session, time on site, and funnel completions, and try surveying existing customers to see where they had trouble before purchasing.
2. Having trouble justifying an expensive display campaign that maybe is driving search traffic, but also maybe isn’t? Validate the campaign by identifying similar geographic markets and A/B testing by turning off the campaign for 30 days in all the B markets.
3. Can’t figure out why certain products on your site aren’t selling? Install Google Tag Manager and see how far people are scrolling on the page and what buttons they’re clicking on to identify a pricing or photography issue.

Generating new, actionable data isn’t the resource-hungry process it once was. Tools like Amazon Mechanical Turk, affordable and flexible survey options, Google Tag Manager and Optimizely, and many more are making high-quality data much easier to come by, and in a matter of days rather than weeks or months.

If your past data projects have been underwhelming, maybe it’s time to rethink your data sources. Contact us for a free data strategy audit with one of our analysts, and let’s find out what ideas we can create together!