Death by ... Data?

So you’ve gotten momentum behind your efforts to become a more data driven winery.  Not only do you track the key business measures but you also have dialed in the leading indicators from marketing efforts like tasting room visitors, email open rates, digital engagement and more.  On top of that, you keep a close eye on customer behavior to monitor new customers, lapsed customers, club membership shifts, days to second purchase, and more.  You’ve gotten so much momentum and important data you now face a new challenges.

To break out of the whirlpool of metrics you need to monitor your data, not just report it.  But wait, don’t you have dashboards exactly so you can monitor the data?  Yes and no.  Yes, you have dashboards so you can see snapshots of your data.  We call this “reporting” on your data.  Where is it today?  The dashboard can tell you.  Is it up or down compared to last week/month/year?  The dashboard may tell you that as well.  However, the dashboard can’t answer “did anything significant happen?”  You could slow down, analyze the results and try to determine that yourself, but for how many of your metrics?  How do you know if you focused your attention on the most important areas?  Those are all the shortcomings of reporting metrics as you put more and more of your data to work for your winery.

Monitoring works differently and unwinds this knot.  Using statistical analysis over time, we can flag metrics with significant change.  This essentially sifts through all your data, looks at everything across time, and flags the areas with relevant change.  Now you bring your focus to only those parts of your reporting where something out of the ordinary has happened.  Perhaps you had a spike in website visitors outside the normal weekly/monthly fluctuations.  Maybe you had an unusually high number of new club memberships over the past 8 weeks.  Wait, what is happening with social media?  The monitor says you’ve had a statistically significant drop in engagement on Instagram even though you posted the same amount of content as normal.  Maybe it's time to look at the content strategy or use of photography with the posts..

The point being, if you just build more dashboards you eventually overwhelm your ability to use them.  Even if you stay on top of your dashboards, they only provide a snapshot in time.  It is too easy to get caught reacting to a short term change that doesn’t accurately reflect the real trend.  It is the classic “signal vs. noise” issue, but the dashboard doesn’t tell you the signal.  You need something with a broader view and understanding of how the metrics move over time.  That is why Winealytics uses monitoring in our work with wineries.  We keep an eye on all the key drivers for your success and judiciously bring your focus to the areas of most importance.