Also available as a Podcast:

My guest on this week’s episode of Suds & Search is Michelle Robbins, Senior Director for Data and Analytics at Clearlink. Michelle is a veteran digital marketer, product developer, software engineer, and marketing technology executive.

Prior to joining the team at Clearlink, Michelle held leadership positions at Aimclear and Third Door Media, the publisher of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and the company that puts on all the SMX events.

This episode is a departure from some of the typical SEO and PPC topics we cover each week on Suds & Search.

I heard Michelle give an excellent presentation with a potentially controversial title – “Data is a lie.” Michelle makes a persuasive argument that much of the data digital marketers use to make strategic decisions are flawed. Facebook data, search console data, data in Google Analytics…it all has flaws.

And it’s not just the data we are given from big technology companies. As marketers, we bring our own biases to the table when we’re examining data. Marketers themselves create data problems with selection bias, response bias, and feedback loops.

The end result is that instead of using data to make empirical, objective decisions, marketers are often looking at data that has been badly compromised.

What should we do to clean up our data? Is the effort to get better data hopeless?

I’ll get answers to these questions and many others during this episode.

Grab something cold to drink and join me for a conversation with Michelle Robbins. We’ll talk about how to interrogate your data, an interesting approach she calls Agile Data Product Development, and we’ll spend a little bit of time talking about Star Trek fandom.

article by

Mark Bealin

Founder and Principal

Mark Bealin is the Founder and Principal at SearchLab, which was founded in March 2017. Under his leadership, Clutch and Manifest both named SearchLab one of the top agencies in Chicago in 2018 and 2019.

Mark has been helping small and medium-sized businesses with SEO and PPC since 2007. He is an in-demand speaker and contributor at events throughout the country, sought out for his expertise in SEO, Paid Search and Analytics.

He is a board member of EO Chicago and a guest lecturer at DePaul University. Mark lives in Chicago with his wife and three children. He's a former varsity high school football coach and remains active at St. Ignatius College Prep.

Read more of Mark's posts
Watch more episodes of Suds and Search