While many of our team members aren’t officially working this week, our insights engine is still hard at work monitoring all our clients’ data to determine when something unusual is happening and alert them when there’s good or bad news.
To do that, the engine has to know when the values for a particular metric (like today’s New Subscribers, or eCommerce orders, Video Views, Donations, etc) are newsworthy and then whether that’s good news or bad news for the client.
To determine the newsworthiness of a particular data point, we look at recent averages, thresholds, and statistical significance to determine if a metric is higher or lower than we’d expect. And then we examine the common breakouts a client uses to review that (by Country, Network, Billing Platform, or Title) and analyze if there’s an unusual skew in the contributions of that metric.
But to figure out if something is good news or bad news, well, that’s where Liana Finck’s cartoon for the New Yorker comes into play.
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Sometimes you need to teach the algorithm that no news is good news (like with Cancellations, Refunds, Errors, or App Crashes) and other times that it’s bad news (like with New Orders, or Video Viewers). We like to think that our platform is powered by AI enriched with business common sense – just like the cartoon. Our graph might not be as funny (we use a Neptune graph-database to power the insights understanding of correlation between metrics and dimensions, so please excuse the bad dad humor pun) but it does help us (and our clients) rest easy over the holidays knowing that we’ll deliver any good or bad news that’s important.
Happy New Year from all of us at Pickaxe
