Marketing Analytics - Startup Style

This is a visually based summary of marketing analytics I've done in early stage startup settings. As such, it's a bit of a potluck that embodies the phrase 'good and shipped, is better the a WIP perfection'.

Before I jump into the goods, there are a couple overarching context clues:

I spent $0 on the analytical tools to produce these. The only things used that cost money were CRMs.
My primary responsibility in each scenario was not analytics. The analytics done were to increase decision speed and/or quality.

Now without further ado - let's see what we've got!

Website Traffic

The website is a good place to start any marketing analytics endeavor. Our first stop is courtesy of a neat little tool called Narrative BI. It takes about 2 minutes to set up and then produces reports, alerts, and insights without any further effort.

Great low touch way to keep a pulse on what's happening, what/when changes in trends happen, etc. The examples we'll tour are for this website - which is super exciting.

Our next stop is a wider view of website traffic and performance over time. The tool de jour is Equals. A pretty slick BI tool, which can be used for a bunch of stuff - particularly in the startup context. Here I used it to automate plug and play traffic reporting.

The visuals below are not from this website, nickwar.com hasn't been up and running as long as the site shown below.

User Activity & Behavior

Now we're ready for fun stuff. Enter one of my favorite products: Posthog. Incredible tool, flexible, robust, granular, open-source, and great name. The only thing I hate is having to deal with nested JSON data when I push from Posthog to other places. Other than that, highly recommend you check them out.

For these reports, we're back to good ol nickwar.com - domain of the brave, and home of the Nicks.

CRM & Pipeline

Now we're ready for fun business stuff, and the data headache that is HubSpot. To wrangle the mess coming out of HubSpot, we meet another hero in my toolbox: Count.co. Super flexible data canvas, with no code, SQL, and Python operators. The free plan can be slow, but it's also free. Other than that, I love the tool. Great for chaining analysis together. Here I use it mostly for data transformations and modeling in a before DBT/Looker state.

And nickwar.com does not have a CRM, so we are back to exploring mystery data! Very Intriguing. Lastly, I want to re-emphasize early stage startups - so the focus is on acquisition rather than customers.

Leads by Week:

Opps by Week:

Channels & Marketing Mix

We've reached out final stop, at least for now. Here is a smattering pulled from a large marketing document I wrote looking at channels and my marketing mix in detail. The ultimate audience for this doc was the board, dual purpose of being a guiding light for the revenue functions.

These are not a linear story - I picked things I pay attention to and value in most marketing environments. Lots of excel work led to these, plus two of my favorite data science tools: hex.tech and einblick.ai. A data notebook and data canvas tool respectively. Einblick in particular is a big favorite of mine, very unique capabilities, and great team.