Inflation: A hidden danger

Inflation: A hidden danger

ObservePoint ObservePoint DataAssurance

Inflation is a disease, a dangerous and sometimes fatal disease, a disease that if not checked in time can destroy a society. — Milton FriedmanConsider this scenario.

Six months ago, your company rolled out a completely new version of your web app. Product management claims the rollout has been a great success, customer feedback has been positive, and they’re now pushing to sunset the old version. As the analyst, you’ve been asked for a few reports including total visitor sessions for the new version vs. the old version over the last month. You dutifully log in to your web analytics tool and pull some reports, and start building the comparison.

Don’t stake your good reputation on bad data.

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It seems that sessions for the old version aren’t as low as they ought to be in comparison to the new version. Total visits are lower, but only slightly. And a few other key metrics are higher! You look at a few other reports, and unfortunately, the numbers don’t support Product management’s recommendation.

You present your findings and recommend against sunsetting the old version for now because the metrics show that user adoption needs work. Product management glares at you from across the table.

You are shocked by the numbers






In a recent omnibus audit including 200 top Internet Retail web sites, ObservePoint found that across the board, data quality problems are rampant. Missing data, data inflation, and data leakage are experienced by even the most sophisticated digital marketers.

One lesser-known data quality problem, data inflation, is exactly what it sounds like: digital data that is reported inaccurately high. Inflation can affect web analytics data such as traffic counts, advertising data such as clicks and impressions, sales attribution data, or a variety of important metrics. And as the data gets passed up into other systems, the effects of the inflation are magnified. The cause of digital data inflation is the instance of duplicate tags.

What’s going on?




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When more than one instance of a tag fires on a page, data inflation happens. Each time a tag fires, something gets counted, and when tag fires more than once, the thing is being counted more than once as well.

Digital marketers have become much more disciplined about tag placement. In the past, tags might be placed anywhere on the page – in the header, in the body, in the footer – in both, all three, just anywhere, or maybe we were lucky if tags made it on the page at all.But sometimes tags might be coded to multiple places on a page, transposed from other pages, or duplicated in some other way. Regardless of the process that causes it, once the tag is duplicated, you’ve got data inflation.

Duplicate tags inflate data






More common today – especially among the advanced digital teams – is the deployment of a Tag Management System. But no TMS can prevent the old-fashioned deployment of tags directly to pages (either on purpose or on accident), or control tags that aren’t inside the TMS.

Our omnibus audit uncovered web sites where a TMS was deployed yet duplicate tags existed for some digital measurement tools. This is a problem, since there might be a temptation to mentally ignore the tags if they’re not represented inside the TMS.

Due to the sheer number of non-stakeholder code modifications to digital properties all tag deployments erode, decay, and fall out of compliance with the initial “clean” deployment over time.Maintaining accurate tagging is ultimately your responsibility as a digital marketer.

Common causes of data inflation






Around ObservePoint, we have a mantra: The only thing worse than no data is bad data. This is a shared conviction between our founders and every ObservePoint employee.

I should note, the scenario at the beginning of this article is a true story. After the fact, we were asked to audit the sites in question. We found that the old product pages had 300-500% data inflation caused by duplicate tags, and the company came to the belief that the company’s new product release was probably a success.Unfortunately, this knowledge wasn’t available at the moment the data was being used. Executives made a revenue-impacting decision, based on bad data.

You Must Be Vigilant Against Inflation




Data & Analytics

Inflation: A hidden danger