Ilkka Peltola

ETL takes time and it's a lot to maintain. Sometimes it breaks when you didn't expect a string to contain emojis. You might decide the transformation needs to be changed, which means you need to refresh all your data. So what can you do to avoid this?

So you've read about how to optimize your marketing efforts through data . With that, you should know the kind of users different marketing campaigns are bringing in. Some campaigns might be bringing more high-quality users than others. Can you do that now?

We've been surveying our customers since forever, but recently we've started to become more and more hungry on data. As an invoicing service provider for micro entrepreneurs, Zervant's  customers are of all varieties. One interesting data snippet we've found out is that roughly half of our customers are part-time entrepreneurs. But which half is it?

Prioritizing new features requires intuition, but it can definitely be made better by using data. As there's always a limited amount of bandwidth to do stuff, you need to relentlessly prioritize what to do next. An easy way to fail is to be too busy doing the wrong things.

The girl (or guy) you're dating has called you on average five times a week lately. As a neurotic analytics enthusiast/stalker you happen to know this. Now it's been three days without a call. Should you be worried?

How does a company become data-driven? Here's what I've learned at Zervant. Radiate information If you want to turn the culture more data-driven, radiate information. You'll never know what will stick. Radiating information also has the side-effect of evangelizing the work of analytics: people will remember you exist and they will take analytics into consideration more easily. Oh right, when we're building this we need to talk to analytics about what to measure!  Write an internal blog, give short presentations about an information nugget, etc. Frequency is more important than the perfect quality of content. Teach People love to learn new things. They will first tell you they're in no way analytical-minded and far from technical, but they will eagerly learn. De-mystifying analytics will help everyone in your organization to speak the same language and be on the same page about what analytics can do for them. As I've held workshops on analyt...

Are you satisfied with your sign-up rate? Or activation rate? Do you think it could be higher? What do you think you can do to improve them? How do you know that? One of the most powerful things that you can do to improve your activation rate is to watch what your users are doing: what confuses them, what path is logical to them and where they fail. When you do that, you will find out that your call-to-action is too mild, your layout is confusing, your responsive design isn't adapting well in all cases or that the navigation path you thought everyone  takes isn't common at all. You cannot solve what you do not know. Luckily most of your issues are likely low-hanging fruits you can find easy remedy to. There are a gazillion services you can use, HotJar  being perhaps the biggest name. But it wasn't the right choice, at least for me. HotJar lets you record towards a quota and you can define pretty flexibly who you want to start recording and when. But HotJar doesn...