Data Analysis

Data analysis techniques, statistical methods, and analytical insights (134 posts)

134 posts tagged with "Data Analysis"

Easy ways to prepare your BigQuery warehouse for AI

You’ve probably heard that AI is coming to make our lives easier, especially in tools like BigQuery. But here’s the thing: AI isn't magic. If you want it to be accurate and useful, you need to set it up for success. One of the best ways to do that? Improve the metadata in your BigQuery warehouse. Metadata is like the index or contents page in a book, it quickly tells you exactly what’s inside and where to find it. Creating clear metadata means AI can more easily understand your data warehouse

Katie Kaczmarek•23 Apr 2025

Data pipeline optimisation with Google Cloud and Dataform

In our recent engagement with a client, we went on a journey to transform their data pipelines, tackling inefficiencies in performance and cost within their Google Cloud BigQuery environment. Our efforts culminated in a comprehensive optimisation strategy that used Dataform, improved SQL practices, and implemented tailored solutions for significant performance gains and cost savings. Here’s a deep dive into the highlights of our project. Identifying inefficiencies in BigQuery workflows We beg

Prasanna Venkatesan•22 Apr 2025

How to set up a Dataform repository with GitHub & Google Cloud integration

Setting up a Dataform repository can be challenging without the right steps. Whether you’re new to Dataform or want to optimise your workflow, this guide will show you how to seamlessly connect it with GitHub and Google Cloud (GC). What is Dataform and why use it? Dataform is a powerful tool for managing version-controlled SQL workflows in a collaborative way. GC incorporates BigQuery and GitHub integration, providing an efficient way to organise and maintain complex data pipelines. Let’s bre

Katie Kaczmarek•27 Nov 2024

What is offline event data import in GA4?

Offline event data import in Google Analytics 4 allows you to upload event data that was acquired outside of your website or app, such as in-store purchases, contact centre interactions, or CRM data. This can be critical for businesses seeking to bridge the gap between online and offline user actions, resulting in a more complete picture of customer behaviour. How to import offline event data into GA4 You can upload event data into GA4 through a process called Data Import. This can be done ma

Nasima Khatun•22 Nov 2024

Integrating siloed data: Springer Nature marketing and sales case study

The Springer Nature Group is an academic publishing company, with brands dating back to 1842, that advances scientific discovery by publishing robust and insightful research, supporting the development of new areas of knowledge, making ideas and information accessible around the world, and leading the way on open access. The challenge The sales and marketing teams depended on incomplete data, which didn’t capture the entire customer journey due to different systems in use. Transactions and re

Mark Rochefort•7 Aug 2024

Behind the Cloud: Using Generative AI in the GCP

In this episode of Behind the Cloud, Matthew delves into the world of generative AI in the Google Cloud Platform, highlighting how Google has integrated generative AI features into its various services. Matthew explores the ways generative AI can be used within BigQuery, such as generating SQL queries and Python notebooks! Video transcript Introduction to Generative AI in Google Cloud [00:00:00] Matt: Hello and welcome to another episode of Behind the Cloud. Uh, today we’re going to cover g

Matthew Hooson•30 Jul 2024

Grand Designs: "The Warehouse to CDP conversion"

Opening scene: A large meeting room at BigCorp. A systems architecture diagram with lots of boxes and arrows flowing from left to right fills a large whiteboard. Kelvin joins Jan (marketing director) and Joe (head of data) at the table, earnest expression, hands clasped in front of him. Kelvin: So, Jan, Joe, tell me a bit about the history of the warehouse. Joe: Well, going way back, it was originally an on-prem system, which was replaced back in 2019 with an Oracle data warehouse as part of a

Steven Elliott•14 Mar 2024

Behind the Cloud: What Google Cloud tools should you be familiar with?

In this episode of Behind the Cloud, Matthew aims to answer the question: what are the Google Cloud Platform tools of the marketing analytics trade? And more specifically, what are the tools that you should care about in Google Cloud. For a more in-depth write up on Google Cloud tools, check out Matt’s blog post. Video transcript [00:00:00] Matt: Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Behind the Cloud. We’re going to try and answer the question, what are the GCP tools of the marketing analyt

Matthew Hooson•13 Jan 2024

Call propensity analysis for Sanderson – bridging online data and call centre insight

Sanderson Design Group designs and manufactures wallpaper and fabrics, with a history stretching back more than a century. It trades under several brands including Arthur Sanderson & Sons, Morris & Co., Zoffany and Harlequin. The analytics team manages 5+ sites and over 20,000 digital transactions per month. The challenge Sanderson has recently launched a new B2B ordering system, aiming to streamline order generation and reduce customer service calls. Following the implementation, call volum

Mark Rochefort•5 Oct 2023

Customising GA4's reports menu using the report library

By now you’ll all have GA4 up and running (I hope!) but now the realisation is kicking in that you have to actually start using the UI and I don’t know about you all but for me, it didn’t quite feel right. Let’s talk about the UI, where the hell did all my reports go?! I miss Universal Analytics UI! There I said it. GA4 is fantastic and I love some of the new features they have brought out like creating and modifying events from within the UI and the additional layer of user acquisition; howev

George Mendham•29 Aug 2023

The Derelict Data Warehouse

A well-maintained and utilised data warehouse is a thing of beauty. Imagine all your data from disparate sources autonomously extracted, loaded and transformed into nice neat reporting tables. Picture, if you can, impactful analysis, company-wide data-driven decision-making, a true understanding of return on ad spend. It’s enough to make anyone weak at the knees. But therein lies the problem. Companies (or ambitious individuals) can be too desperate to reach the promised land and rush headlong

Matthew Hooson•24 Aug 2023

The sun is setting on Universal Analytics

It’s finally happening. Google has announced the sunsetting of Universal Analytics, or more specifically, the date when UA will stop processing new hits. The 1st of July, 2023. For those without a calendar to hand, that’s fifteen and a half months from now. So plenty of time still to think about migrating to Google Analytics 4, right? Wrong. Well, wrong if on 1st July 2023 you want to be able to compare your latest GA4 data with comparable data from the previous year. And what analyst wouldn’

Dara Fitzgerald•16 Mar 2022

Customer segmentation: how to get to know your customers better

In marketing, it’s vital to know your customers and how they interact with your brand. You need to know what they buy, when they buy, how often, how much... But why? Because if you know their habits and behaviours, you can tailor your marketing tactics and even personalise your customers’ journey. In doing so, you can maintain and even raise engagement between your customers and your brand. So how do we do this? Before thinking about any targeting strategies, you need to get to know your cus

Oli Paterson•22 Jan 2021

Product affinity analysis: discovering what items customers buy together

Understanding what customers buy together Being able to answer the question ‘which of my products do people regularly buy together’ with ease and simplicity can be invaluable. Market Basket Analysis, also known as association analysis, is a way of mining shopping data to establish a set of rules that describe purchasing patterns. This analysis can be conducted using a wide variety of software such as SAS, Python and R. Why association rules matter The reason for investigating association is

Katy Beckett•11 Oct 2019

Next‑Generation measurement with Google Analytics 4

Why GA4 has us excited This announcement has us rather excited at Measurelab. It has been a long time coming and represents the beginning of a completely new shift in how we use and think about digital measurement with Google Analytics. Leaving the old pageview model behind What we are effectively looking at here is a move away from Google Analytics as we know it, which inherited its underlying data collection schema and methods from Urchin Analytics; the analytics software product Google bo

Mark Rochefort•2 Aug 2019

Toot toot... All aboard the Measurelab train!

In the last couple of months we've had three new starters and I'd like to give them a little nod of recognition, if I may. First up is (Doctor) Dave, who joined us as a Data Scientist in the Summer; he popped along to one of our Brighton Analytics meetups and it just went from there. Dave's background is in terribly clever machine vision stuff - he was recently working in Barcelona (at Universitat Pompeu Fabra) doing Postdoctoral Research involving adaptive image processing algorithms (wher

Mark Rochefort•16 Oct 2018

Firebase Analytics demystified

<span style="font-weight: 400;">After a steep learning curve into the world of Firebase Analytics or Google Analytics for Firebase, it seems that a blog post about it would be much valued and appreciated. I’ve compiled a list of the most frequently asked questions.</span> 1. How does Firebase Analytics define a session? Firebase Analytics defines a session as a user engaging with your app for a minimum amount of time (10 seconds by default) followed by your user not engaging with your app

Alex Cirstea•5 Feb 2018

The Problem With Google Tag Manager Triggers: Those Shiny New Built-In Options (And a Possible Solution)

Hey folks. The shiny new Built-In Triggers for things we used to have to use big old Custom HTML tags to track before—Youtube tracking! Scroll depth! Element visibility!—have had a bit of time to bed in now. We had a look at changing over to the new built-in solutions everywhere we were using Custom HTML—if it's being done by Tag Manager itself, it has to be better, right? Right? Wrong. This issue is related to a fact that I've discovered through experience but not seen actually documented exc

Adam Englebright•18 Jan 2018

When GA just isn't enough - my #measurefest talk

<span style="font-weight: 400;">I spoke at <a href="http://www.measurefest.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">#Measurefest</a> in the Barbican last Friday. Here are the slides from my talk but I wanted to write a quick summary to give a bit more context as the slides on their own don’t tell the story. </span> When GA just isn't enough from darafitzgerald The title of the talk was "When GA just isn't enough". For some that know me this might sound like an unexpected title. I sp

Dara Fitzgerald•24 Nov 2016

Data Visualisation with Power BI

Since the recent(ish) announcement of <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/analytics/360-suite/data-studio/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google Data Studio 360</a>&nbsp;(Google's answer to&nbsp;Tableau), we wanted&nbsp;to&nbsp;see where Data Studio 360 will fit into the mix by trying to compare what little we currently know about it with&nbsp;other data visualisation tools that are already on the market. Fast forward a few weeks, and to cut a long story short, Microsoft Power BI

Daniel Perry-Reed•6 May 2016

R for analytics beginners: part 4 – building graphs and analysing data

Earlier in this series we reviewed several R libraries for Google Analytics. Then we started using RGA. Next we pulled data from Google Analytics using RGA. What now? I’m reaching for my university notes, because we’re getting into proper R territory. Diving into graphs with R Let’s start with graphs! Who doesn’t love a good graph? It just so happens there’s a lovely R library called ggplot2 that does really excellent graphs of all shapes and sizes1. We’re probably best looking at a few speci

Adam Englebright•19 Feb 2015

R for analytics beginners: part 1 – getting started

Two years ago, or thereabouts: I was introduced in my statistics lectures to a programming language and software environment called R. I took to it immediately, preferring it by far to the simpler software we’d used before, and also to the proprietary software (SAS, SPSS) we used in addition. Flash forward to: A couple of months ago, sitting in the audience for the talks at MeasureFest, and then we had what was, I think, by broad agreement, the best talk by Ela Osterberger, about using R with

Adam Englebright•22 Jan 2015

How to use the Google Analytics Embed API: guide & examples

When I started at Measurelab, way back in July, one of the items on my List Of Things To Do was to look into new and exciting ways of visualising data for clients. A few weeks ago I spent some time experimenting with dc.js but then, Mark and Dara went to MeasureCamp in London (I was going to go but I had other commitments) and came back bearing glad tidings of great joy for all analytics consultants, because unto Google, in the town of Mountain View, was born an API, and the angel Justin C

Adam Englebright•1 Oct 2014

GA Summit 2013: Key Google Analytics updates & insights

The theme of this years summit is a focus on helping customers in three areas: Access, Empower, Act. The slide above was shown by the GA team to summarise the 3 part theme. Babak Pahlavan (Director of Product Management, Google Analytics) let the crowd know that GA have made 70+ releases in 2013 so far, which makes sense on reflection given how busy the year has been. This has included major updates such as the global roll out of Universal Analytics, the introduction of the Attribution Modellin

Dara Fitzgerald•2 Oct 2013