In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with John Napoleon-Kuofie, a senior business intelligence analyst at Farfetch. In this conversation, we talked about how John's career led him to Farfetch, a traffic dashboard he's built for his stakeholders at Farfetch, and how Excel was his gateway into SQL and the wonderful world of data. One of the reasons I enjoy conversations like these is because you get to learn from someone who is in the data trenches, as it were.

The path to Farfetch

Farfetch is an e-commerce company focused on boutique fashion companies. Before landing at Farfetch as a customer insights analyst, John was studying mathematics at university and thought he was going to work at a bank after graduation. He ended up working at a media agency where he help built statistical models demonstrating the value of advertising for the agency's clients.

What's so great about this part of John's career (and many entry-level analysts) is that you get to do a little bit of everything. John was working in Excel, R, and other bespoke tools. During this phase of your career, you are constantly learning and experimenting with new tools to figure out what type of career you want to end up in. John wanted to stay focused on analytics for his company's customers.

Storytelling may be more important than the data itself

Data storytelling is both and art and science. It's not just doing the number crunch and creating the analysis, but pulling the salient points out and creating a compelling story with the data. This skill is so important that big news outlets like the New York Times have created data bootcamps to help its journalists become more proficient in data analysis.

John discusses working with a telecoms client at his former media agency, and the client was cycling through different creatives in their online ads. Each ad had a different celebrity, and John noticed that the efficacy of their ads could be improved. Using data and a bit of marketing, his team convinced the client to adopt a more consistent advertising strategy with one celebrity instead of multiple. In marketing speak, this led to stronger brand recall and the numbers backed it up.

I think many online classes teach you how to use all the knobs and switches in Excel, R, SQL, and Python, but the real value analysts can provide is creating these data-driven stories to make decisions. (I'm really passionate about this subject and have an online class about this topic).

Self-service "traffic" dashboards

In order to help its clients generate sales, Farfetch utilizes multiple marketing strategies including pay-per-click advertising, affiliate advertising, and SEO. In order to help internal stakeholders figure out the proper marketing mix to maximize sales, John created traffic dashboards in Looker and Tableau. The key to these dashboards are that they are self-service so that his colleagues can slice and dice the data they way they want.

An example of a metric these dashboards track is website visits. The dashboards allow people to find out which channel is driving the most traffic so you can figure out whether to invest more or less into that channel.