How many times have you been in a meeting, asked about a graph trending the wrong way, and been told “I don’t know, can I get back to you next week?” That kills me.  Every time.  When I see something that looks wrong I want to understand it, now, and make decisions about fixing it, now.  But “slow data,” the inability to drill into data real time has often blocked my path.  Fortunately, I found a solution: “fast data.”

Let me tell you a story to illustrate what fast data is.

We had the slow data problem with our website.  The monthly web stats would hit my email like clockwork.   The metrics were presented very clearly, but I could not drill down into any anomalies real time because it was a PPT, it always required follow-up analysis and meetings.

One thing I realized about the web stats I was being given is that the PPT was a meticulously formatted version of what Google Analytics produces natively.  We were paying someone to extract and re-format Google Analytics graphs!

So, I put a stop to the PPT and now we have monthly web reviews with Google Analytics up on the screen. We look at all the same graphs as we used to in the PPT, but now we are doing it in a dynamic tool, not a static slide.  So when we see a metric trending the wrong way we can immediately click into it, interrogate the data real time, and make corrective actions. That’s “fast” data! We don’t go into the monthly meeting anymore to review data, we go into the meeting to take action!

Since starting this Google Analytics review on live data, I have realized that our whole MarTech stack has native dashboards, i.e. we can also dig into email, social, advertising, and leads real-time.  We now make more decisions, on more things, faster than ever before.  All because of “fast data.”

So here are some questions to help you make fast decisions with fast data:

• Which decisions do you wish you could make faster?
• What data can you see in real time that would support those decisions?
• If you don’t have that fast data today, what do you need to do to develop it?
• How would you change your metrics review process to use fast data? Does the meeting agenda need to be different? Do different people need to be in the meeting?

Now, back to the data, and taking action!