I have a love-hate relationship with data. Data is great for helping drive product, messaging, engagement, etc. However, most data ends up as noise. It's noise

I have a love-hate relationship with data. Data is great for helping drive product, messaging, engagement, etc. However, most data ends up as noise. It's noise because it isn't actionable. Ash Maurya wrote this great article on actionable metrics: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/07/3-rules-to-actionable-metrics/ http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/07/3-rules-to-actionable-metri... In the end I think it depends on how you want to use the data. Here are a few things that I find useful: - calculating your ROI on customers by correlating marketing efforts with key metrics. Google Analytics is good for this as you can basically identify the customer origin with a marketing campaign and how they convert for key metrics. - full funnel perspective and cohort charts for AARRR metrics (http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics.html http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics....). KISS Metrics and Mixpanel are great for this, but I still haven't found anything that does the Cohort diagrams that well. - experimenting with messaging using A/B testing tools like Visual Web Optimizer (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/) which has it's own analytics. - retention email marketing is great with Customer.io (http://customer.io/ http://customer.io/) but I have fairly limited experience with that. Other tools include Statsmix (which I think is under-represented); it is pretty good for collecting custom event data. Once you have the money for it, tools like Pardot are great for marketing overall. We just implemented this so I still don't have much experience with it personally. It's a full marketing automation tool and has other competitors with higher price tags.