As a marketing analyst, I spend half my week answering the same three questions: “What’s working?”, “Should we put more budget into it?”, and “Can you prove it?”. Last month, I explained that to really address digital marketer’s performance questions, Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) wasn’t the best guidance and that instead of reporting on…
Author: Marine Morales
Stop Trusting ROAS and Start Measuring Incrementality
The Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) tells you how many conversions the platform claims you got. Incrementality tells you how many of those would not have happened without your marketing efforts. If you optimise for the first and ignore the second, you are flying blind on actual business impact. As a marketing data analyst, your…
Why Should we Ticket our Analytics Jobs?
While Martech, Sales Ops and Data Engineering teams typically rely on well-defined intake processes, Data Analytics teams often operate without the same level of rigor. During my time as a data analyst supporting marketing and sales functions, I experienced this firsthand. Requests would arrive through vague emails with little to no context, offhand remarks in…
Three Frameworks That Make Your Analysis Aim, Hit, and Trigger Action
As an analyst, your job isn’t just to crunch numbers, it’s to guide your audience through an airtight investigation. Ditch the flood of dashboards, charts, and raw metrics. When you overwhelm, you lose them. Instead, break complexity into progressive, deliberate, and digestible steps. Build your case like evidence in a trial, each point reinforcing the…
My Essential Project Planning Shopping Cart
When I joined a big tech company as a sales analyst, I had to audit the BI and propose ideas to develop it. Structuring this audit and the resulting development project felt like a chaotic shopping trip. I’d grab slides from past presentations, borrow templates from different teams, and piece together documents just to figure…
Crack your Case Like an FBI Analyst: Secure the Win and Lock it Down
A few nights ago, I was watching Law & Order SVU when a scene cut to Morales, the FBI analyst, briefing the team on data he’d pulled from a suspect’s spreadsheet. As he walked them through it, he didn’t bury them in jargon. He made the numbers feel urgent and the data tools matter. That…
Mary Anning, the 19th-Century Paleontologist Who Teaches us about Modern Analytics
When we think of pioneers in data analysis, we often envision statisticians, machine learning engineers, and analysts diligently working through intricate datasets. However, after reading about Mary Anning, the 19th-century fossil hunter known for inspiring the tongue twister “she sells seashells by the sea shore,” I was struck by how her work exemplifies the core…
Crack your Case Like an FBI Analyst: Turn your Evidence into a Compelling Narrative
A few nights ago, I was watching Law & Order SVU when a scene cut to Morales, the FBI analyst, briefing the team on data he’d pulled from a suspect’s spreadsheet. As he walked them through it, he didn’t bury them in jargon. He made the numbers feel urgent and the data tools matter. That…
Beyond Categorization: Rethinking the Partner Scoring Model
As a data analyst working in a tech company, I was tasked with developing a scoring system to rank our business partners worldwide based on past performance and future potential. The goal was to support planning targets and budget allocation, ensuring that resources were directed toward the most valuable partners. At the time, we lacked…
The Pareto Principle of Leadership: What I’ve Learned from the People in Charge
Early in my career, I briefly worked with a manager who completely reshaped my understanding of leadership. She wasn’t the most technically proficient, she often relied on the team for understanding financial modeling, identifying key priorities, and even preparing PowerPoint presentations. She wasn’t particularly skilled in things I once believed defined good management in finance,…