User Acquisition And Growth Analysis - Issue 29
Expert Spotlight on Data Analysis for Growth Marketing
Hello analysts and welcome to a free-edition of the Data Analysis Journal newsletter, where I write about data analysis, data science, and business intelligence.
If you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:
✨ In today’s newsletter:
Expert Spotlight on Growth Marketing: Nicholas Scalice - Funnels Or Loops?
The biggest hack attacks and data breaches in 2020.
New data science competition and hackathon launch.
Podcasts on data analysis and data science.
🔥 What’s new this week
Amazon Redshift announced support for JSON and semi-structured data processing. This is big news for analysts who has to work with unstructured data. If you use RedShift (or any other RDBS) you can apply json_extract_path_text via SQL. But this news means that RedShift will support new unstructured schemas of arrays (or tables) that you could query with SQL. Exciting!
SEO and Marketing experts won’t be surprised, but I was fascinated by Google Search Trends in the 2020 report - Coronavirus, Election results, and also Tom Hanks, Parasite movie, Dalgona Coffee, and other unexpected top searches.
An interesting recent write up for data engineering - Kafka Is Not a Database describes the difference between streaming infrastructure and data storage:
Instead of reading and writing a traditional database, you append events to Kafka, and read from downstream views that represent the present state.
📈 Your Next Data Science Project
A new competition is launched on Kaggle for medical research enthusiasts with a $16,000 prize for the first place - Classify the presence and correct placement of tubes on chest x-rays to save lives.
An open-source data testing tool great_expectations is hosting a series of virtual hackathons over the next few weeks. The hackathons are aimed at both students and professionals. You will be working with the most common problems that data scientists and engineers face, across all industries and tech stacks: row counts, missing values, sets, ranges and distributions, DateTime formats, and others.
📚 Weekend Longread
Hackers never sleep. Covid doesn’t affect them. And unsecured databases don’t stop them either. Here is a list of the biggest hack attacks in 2020.
Some of the data breaches:
The Texas school district lost $2.3 million during a phishing scam.
5 Microsoft servers used to store anonymized user analytics were exposed and open on the Internet without adequate protection.
The taxpayer-identification numbers of 1.26 million Danish citizens were accidentally exposed.
Marriott disclosed a new data breach impacting 5.2 million hotel guests.
160,000 Nintendo users were affected by a mass account hijacking.
EasyJet airline revealed a data breach exposing data belonging to nine million customers, including some financial records.
The University of California SF paid $1.14 million to hackers in order to save COVID-19 research.
AWS mitigated a massive 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack.
Google mitigated 2.54 Tbps DDoS attack.
A hacker put the records of 142 million MGM guests online for sale.
🧭 Expert Spotlight on Growth Marketing
Nicholas Scalice is one of the strongest experts on Growth Marketing. He is a Google Partner, Zapier Certified Expert, CallRail Agency Partner, and also the host of one of the top-rated Growth Marketing podcasts called Growth Marketing Toolbox, which has featured world-class marketers such as Seth Godin and attracts over 10,000 downloads per month.
There is a lot of overlap between marketing and data analysis. Very often, data analysts are placed into marketing or growth marketing teams to tackle user acquisition and growth, evaluating marketing campaign performance, user source traffic attribution, affiliate impact, as well as managing CAC and other marketing-related conversion metrics. Read my recent interview with Nicholas - Expert Insight: Nicholas Scalice - Funnels Or Loops? to learn his perspective on good and bad marketing strategies, frameworks, must-know applications, and metrics for measuring and scaling user growth.
If you're interested in getting into growth marketing, the best thing to do is start with the foundational elements. Don't worry so much about tactics right away. Learn about growth flywheels and how to create compelling offers. Learn about data-driven approaches to growth, and what it means to create a culture of testing within your organization. A more specific resource would be my weekly newsletter called GrowthMarketer Weekly, where I share my favorite growth marketing news, tools, and insights, which you can subscribe to for free.
🎧 Podcast
New interesting podcasts on data analysis.
For my podcasts fans, here are some interesting recent podcasts on data analysis or data science:
Data Alone Is Not Enough: The Evolution of Data Architectures
Empowering Women in Data Science: Navigating a successful career path
🍸 Drink and Mingle
Upcoming free events, meetups, talk, and webinars.
Jan 27, Anaconda: Visualizing Big Data
Jan 27, PyLadies: An introduction to FOSS contributions
Jan 28, Luma: Bitcoin Prediction with AI
Feb 4, Pinot: Using Apache Kafka and Pinot for User-Facing Real-Time Analytics
Feb 8, Galvanize: Intro to NLP
Feb 8, WWC: Introduction to AWS
Feb 16, DSS: Applying AI&ML to healthcare, finance, & tech
Feb 17, Anaconda: Common Pitfalls in Using Cloud Object Storage
Feb 25, DDS: Simplifying MLOps with Model Registry
⚙️ Try It Out
It just might solve all of your problems
PlotJuggler is an open-source tool for visualizing time series data. It is intuitive and simple to use with the ability to connect live streams of data (or via CSV file upload) and visualize them. Download from GitHub.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Until next Wednesday!