Just A 12 Year Hibernation

Has it really been 12 years since my last blog post??  What happened?  Life & work, I suppose.  Before I start a new chapter on diving back into analytics topics on my freshly titled 'Analytics Avenue' blog, here's a rundown of my work experience and insights from the past 12 years...  

Yahoo: Yahoo Web Analytics

After 8 years at Yahoo, where the company had battled a hostile takeover attempt (Microsoft), fended off activist investors, tested multiple revenue generating strategies (thanks to five CEOs in 7 years), reimagined search (project Panama), struggled to unload its huge stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (worth an estimated $30B), and on and on and on....they finally started closing down offices to cut costs.  Unfortunately, our small satellite office in Carlsbad, CA was one of the victims.  

Yahoo Web Analytics (the rebranded IndexTools platform), was no more.  It would be packaged up in the search deal with Microsoft and I never heard what they ended up doing with it.  Too bad.  It was such a powerful product.  

When Yahoo acquired IndexTools, I had pushed for it to go public like Google Analytics (as it competed more with Omniture than Google Analytics), but management decided to keep it in house.  Lost monetization opportunity in my view, but I was able to extract a large amount of additional ad spend from our advertisers thanks to YWA's solid return-on-ad-spend and early attribution features.  

Pictured Above: Yahoo Founders Jerry Yang, David Filo and Farzad Nazeem with some of our team in Carlsbad

SimpleSavr: Start-up

Towards the end of my career at Yahoo, employees were given the opportunity to spend 10% of their time working on new project ideas.  I developed a use case for leveraging Yahoo's search results to generate a coupon offer when a visitor searched for branded terms such as McDonalds, Wendy's, Carl's Jr, etc.  If you clicked on the "Coupon" search result link, within the search ad result, a scannable QR code would drop down.  You'd scan the QR code on the screen with a 3rd party QR reading mobile app and it would redirect you to the merchant's web site to access the coupon (this was before our phones had QR code readers built in).

I entered my project into a company wide "new ideas" contest, made it through the first 3 rounds of judging, and got into the final.  Then, one of our new CEOs came onboard and wiped the whole contest off the table.  Bummer, but that was just part of being on the rollercoaster ride of a Yahoo employee. 

With the contest now dead, two of my coworker friends got wind of my project and approached me about an idea they had been nibbling on.  It involved two parts:

1) For Merchants: Develop a content/ad management platform, we named MOCA (Merchant Online Coupon Ads), that stored all of the merchant's coupon information and packaged it up into a single unique QR code 

2) For Consumers: Develop a mobile coupon wallet app with a built in QR code scanner, that would allow a customer to scan these unique merchant QR codes, which in turn pushed the coupon into our app for easy access at any time.  

For merchants, we were looking to drive a higher % of foot traffic into their place of business, as research showed us that digital coupons drove a 10x higher redemption rate vs. their paper counterparts.  For consumers, we were looking for a simple way for them to store and mange their coupons digitally.  All they had to do was download our app and scan the QR code.  The technology did the rest.    

As a business opportunity, our research showed that revenue generated from digital coupons was forecasted to reach $43B by 2016, up from $5B in 2011 (a 760% increase).  We immediately hired a developer and negotiated the development of the ad platform and mobile app, from scratch, for an amazing $3500!  For revenue generation, we devised a pay-per-scan model (similar to pay-per-click models from Yahoo and Google). 

Pictured Above: MOCA platform and mobile app examples.  We even turned boring static paper coupons into live motion ads/coupons

So was it a hit?!?!  Not exactly.  We spent about 9 months or so getting the product built and about another 12 months pitching it to merchants.  While some Quick Service Retail (QSR) establishments like El Pollo Loco were interested in the concept, they weren't ready to test because they were already investing millions of dollars in their own mobile restaurants apps.  Smaller mom & pop establishments weren't interested because they we happy with their current traditional coupon marketing strategies.

We were also a bit too early to the game.  At that time, mobile phones had yet to add the ability to use the camera app on your phone to scan QR codes.  Consumers couldn't simply scan the QR codes and be directed to our site to download our app.  They had to have a 3rd party QR code scanning app or be using our app.  With that, we were unable to sustain viable company growth in a desired timeframe and SimpleSavr was abandoned.

Anthem (now Elevance Health): Adobe Analytics

With my entrepreneurial start-up experience in the books, I was hired by Anthem (the second largest health insurance company in the US) to help play a pivotal role in steering the launch of their new internal analytics team.  Management had settled on leveraging Adobe Analytics after realizing that partnering with 3rd party analytics consulting companies was getting too expensive for their needs.   

Anthem was looking to become a better data driven company and had a plan in place to reimagine all of their top web sites (internal, secured, and public facing).  They needed team members with prior experience in the digital analytics space who could take the reigns and build out a new analytics program, from scratch.  I was the 3rd hire on the team.  

This was also my first introduction into Agile.  Attending organizational wide PI Planning (Program Increment) events, learning about scrum, estimating, implementations, reviews, retrospectives, two week releases, and having to use A LOT of Post-It notes for story boarding.  Part of our role on the analytics team was to come up with a plan on how to integrate analytics (mostly implementations) into the agile process where features were being delivered in two week increments.

The vast majority of my time at Anthem was spent on reporting and analysis.  Developing unique custom dashboards within Adobe Reporting (what transitioned to Workspace), translating the insights to internal stakeholders/partners, and in many cases making recommendations on how to best leverage the insights.  Working with my team, we were very successful at leveraging Adobe Analytics to improve enrollment and registration flows, increase marketing campaign conversion rates, drive better SEO/SEM effectiveness, A/B test content designs, discover gaps in end-to-end journeys, and train internal teams on dashboards/insights.

I also got to spend a good amount of time in other analytics platforms such as Quantum Metric (a session-replay and user struggle solution) and dove into Voice of Customer (VoC) survey platforms such as Medallia (customer feedback).  Being able to combine the data and insights from these two solutions with Adobe Analytics, made our reporting analysis so much stronger.  Many times when I found it difficult to answer the "why" questions from my business partners, these solutions helped deliver the answers by providing a different view into our customers' behavior.     

By the time I left Anthem (6.5 years), I was managing reporting and analysis for 18 sites.  We had built the analytics team to 12 strong by adding several Reporting Managers, Implementation Managers, QA Analysts, a Program Manager, Marketing Analyst, etc.  As a team, we had become stronger in executing on the needs of our partner's business goals while the company, as a whole, improved tremendously by letting the data drive the decision making.

Pictured Above: State Capitol Richmond, VA.  Home to several Anthem agile trainings and organization meetings

Blue Shield of California: Google Analytics, NPS, Data Integration  

I finally got my chance to lead a team of data analysts when I was recruited by the VP of Data & Analytics at Blue Shield of California.   As a Senior Manager, my team's responsibilities included managing reporting/analysis for our web sites using Google Analytics and managing reporting/analysis for our Net Promotor Score (NPS) surveys.  In addition, my team was responsible for managing data requests from our business partners/stakeholders and delivering the reporting and insights via Tableau.  It was quite the eclectic mix of platforms and analysis.

Managing Google Analytics was an interesting experience because I had just come from Anthem where we had a team of 12 people supporting all of the Adobe Analytics work.  When I came over to BSC, we only had 1 person supporting GA!  One employee was managing all of the implementations, all of the reporting and analysis, and delivering all of the trainings and business partner feedback, for 12+ sites.  All while migrating the platform to GA4.  He was an absolute rockstar but it was way too much work for one person to handle at such a large company (more to come on this in a future blog post)!  My top priority was to find him some much needed help so he could focus more time on running deeper analysis for our business partners.  In the end, we had a lot of success improving registration rates, enrollment conversions, web site optimizations, and overall companywide use of data.

NPS survey reporting and analysis was another interesting experience because Blue Shield had a company wide goal of meeting or exceeding the score metric every year.  Meeting the NPS score made up 25% of the company bonus (no pressure, right?).  I had never been at a company that placed so much emphasis on meeting a customer loyalty metric.  Modeling out a NPS score every year is very tricky because there are several variables that have to go into the algorithm in order to predict what the score "should" be.  In addition, sometimes there are not enough survey responses to calculate a statistically relevant score, so you have to add weighting to the whole algorithm.  And even when you successfully plot your scores for various groups/channels and figure out the reasons for the low scores, you still have to have a team in place to go fix the issues for the lower scores.  And it's not guaranteed that your scores will go up once the issues are fixed.  But similar to Google Analytics, I had a rockstar analyst running the algorithms and dealing out the insights to the proper teams to get the issues resolved.  At the end of 2023, we delivered a 23% increase (a company record) on the customer satisfaction score.   

Lastly, was the data integration.  Having spent so much time in digital analytics platforms like Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, IndexTools, Yahoo Web Analytics, etc., the raw data integration process was a fairly new experience for me.  My team had to take the KPI requests from our business stakeholders and translate those requests to a Data Solutions partner.  That Data Solutions partner had find the proper database where the data was held (usually in a data sandbox warehouse we had access to), query the data (usually leveraging SQL), and table it up.  My team then had to work with our Data Visualization partners to take the queried data and design a dashboard in Tableau (BI solution).  Finally, it was my team's responsibility to present the data and insights back to the stakeholder partners so that they could make better informed decisions.  Like all my employees, I was blessed with an excellent project manager that knew the ins and outs of the data integration flow and we delivered some excellent reporting.  One of our better data integration wins was partnering with the marketing team to deliver a $2.5 million reduction in marketing expenditures, in 2023, by identifying and segmenting members who preferred paperless communications. 

Pictured Above: Blue Shield of California's beautiful view of the Bay area from their downtown Oakland, CA office

What's Next?

Like so many other companies these days, Blue Shield has gone through several layoffs and I was unfortunately caught up in one.  Currently exploring my next analytics opportunity (managing another team of analysts is at the top of my list), spending time with family, working out a lot more, and getting back into blogging about analytics!  

If anybody has a good lead for a Sr Manager of Analytics role, feel free to reach me at: mlillig2002@gmail.com

Cheers!