How to Start Your Analytics Journey: The Essential Projects for Success
3 MIN READ
JESSICA KENTCH, FOUNDING PARTNER, ABLAZE ANALYTICS & COLLECTIVE
Embarking on an analytics journey can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re not sure where to start, which projects to prioritize, and in what order. At Ablaze Collective, we’ve worked with countless firms navigating this path, and we’ve learned that the most successful analytics implementations follow a clear and structured approach.
If you’re just getting started, here’s our step-by-step guide to kick-start your analytics journey, maximize your investment, and see faster returns. By focusing on the right projects in the right order, you'll unlock the full potential of your data.
1. Map Out Your Customer Journey and Key Metrics
The first step to building a successful analytics strategy is understanding your customer journey and identifying the key metrics that matter most to your business.
Customer Journey Mapping: Start by visualizing how your customers interact with your business—from initial awareness through to conversion and beyond. This map will serve as the foundation for how you track success at each stage and provide insights into where you can optimize processes or improve customer experiences.
Key Metrics: Once your customer journey is mapped, identify the metrics that are most meaningful to each stage. For example, if you’re in a CPA firm, key metrics could include client acquisition cost, average client lifetime value, or billable hours per client. These are the numbers that directly impact your business and guide your decision-making.
By understanding how customers move through your funnel and defining the most critical metrics, you'll be better equipped to measure success and adjust your strategy as you go.
2. Build Your Data Stack
Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey and defined key metrics, the next step is to build your data stack. A strong data stack acts as the foundation for your analytics strategy, ensuring that all your data is collected, stored, and analyzed in a way that drives meaningful insights.
A well-organized data stack includes:
Data Collection Tools: These are your data sources, such as cloud accounting platforms like QuickBooks, Xero, Plaid, or marketing tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads. These tools capture the raw data you’ll need to analyze.
Data Storage: Decide where your data will live. Data warehouses (such as Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift, or Snowflake) are commonly used for scalable storage of large datasets.
Data Integration Tools: Platforms like Fivetran or Stitch help automate the process of pulling data from your various sources into your warehouse, making it easier to analyze without manually doing the work.
Analytics Tools: Choose your BI tools (like Metabase, Tableau, or Power BI) to help visualize and analyze the data you’ve aggregated. These tools allow you to generate dashboards, reports, and insights that will drive decision-making.
Building your data stack doesn’t need to be a massive, time-consuming project. Start with the core tools that will give you the foundational structure to grow your analytics capabilities over time.
3. Create Core Performance Dashboards
Once your data stack is in place, it’s time to build core performance dashboards. These dashboards should be designed to measure and track the key metrics identified in step 1. This is where you’ll see the value of your data come to life and where you can quickly assess your business performance.
Your dashboards should focus on the following:
High-level business metrics: These could include overall revenue, profit margins, client acquisition costs, and client retention rates.
Customer insights: Visualize how your clients are interacting with your services or products—what’s working, and what needs adjustment?
Operational performance: Track the health of your operations, such as how efficiently projects are moving through your pipeline or how billable your team is.
Having a clear set of performance dashboards in place ensures that you’re not just collecting data for the sake of it—you’re using it to make strategic decisions that impact your bottom line.
4. Focus on Marketing
Once your data infrastructure and performance metrics are set, the next priority should be to focus on marketing analytics. With a strong foundation in place, your marketing efforts will be more effective, as you’ll have access to real-time insights into your marketing campaigns, customer behavior, and ROI.
Key areas to focus on in marketing analytics include:
Attribution: Identify which marketing channels (e.g., paid ads, social media, email) are driving the most valuable customers.
Campaign Performance: Track how well your marketing campaigns are performing and make adjustments based on real-time data.
Customer Segmentation: Use data to understand your customer segments and tailor your messaging to each group’s needs and preferences.
By focusing on marketing after building the foundational analytics infrastructure, you ensure that your marketing budget is being spent wisely and that your campaigns are optimized for success.
Why This Approach Works
Starting with customer journey mapping and key metrics allows you to focus on what matters most to your business—customer outcomes. Building your data stack and core performance dashboards provides you with the tools and insights necessary to measure and monitor those outcomes effectively. Lastly, when you dive into marketing analytics, you’re armed with the data needed to optimize your campaigns and drive higher customer acquisition and retention.
This approach will ensure a faster return on your investment by giving you clear visibility into your business performance and providing actionable insights that directly impact growth. And the best part? It will highlight the true benefit of owning your data—enabling you to make smarter, more informed decisions that fuel your business forward.
In Summary:
Map out your customer journey and identify key metrics.
Build your data stack to consolidate your data and make it actionable.
Create core performance dashboards that focus on measuring success.
Focus on marketing to ensure your campaigns are optimized and generating ROI.
Taking this structured approach will not only help you get started with analytics, but it will also set you up for long-term success by making data-driven decisions a part of your company’s DNA.
If you’re ready to take your analytics journey to the next level, Ablaze Collective is here to help. Reach out today to learn how we can help you extract meaning from your data, just like we do for CPA firms, fintech founders, and other data-forward businesses.