Data Storytelling With Analysis Workspace

Hi, my name is Trent Thain. I’m a senior consultant at BlastX Consulting, and I’m here today to talk to you about how we can go beyond traditional reporting and start to tell better data stories using Adobe Analysis Workspace. What we’re going to cover today is all about how storytelling can really help drive impact towards your stakeholders. So the first thing we’re going to talk about is why storytelling matters in the first place. Then we’ll jump into five tips and five strategies that you can use to help improve your dashboards and turn them into real data stories. Then we’ll discuss quickly about the importance of presentation in all of this, and then we’ll finish up with some resources and some key takeaways. But first I want to tell you a little bit about myself. I’m based in Boise, Idaho. As I said prior, I work with BlastX Consulting, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with many clients through them like the NBA, NASDAQ, Cinemark, just to name a few. My wife and I have been married for seven years, and we just had our first baby back in May, and we’re so excited. When I’m not working, one of my many hobbies is photography. My wife and I are actually traveling wedding and elopement photographers on the side, and one of my favorite things to do at those weddings is to shoot on film. This last picture here, you can see me shooting on one of my favorite cameras that actually comes from the 1960s. This old piece of vintage tech can actually still produce stunning images. So to jump into our topic today, I want to share some images that I’ve taken in the last couple of years that I think help convey the importance of storytelling. These are a couple of photos I really like. This first one is one from Kauai. I took this earlier this year, and it’s part of a black and white photo project that I’m currently working on. This next one is a picture of Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts. I love baseball, and it’s actually one of my goals to make it to every baseball stadium in the nation. This was an amazing experience being able to go and see the world’s oldest, America’s oldest ballpark and be able to take in the game there and enjoy the full experience of Fenway Park. Now both of these images have a lot of meaning to me. Outside of that, they’re pretty standard photos. They’re well lit, they’re nicely composed, but they lack that emotion. They don’t really tell a story. This is something that I’ve been trying to do more of with my photography recently. I found it to be really difficult, but I do have a couple images that I think really tell a story and carry a little bit more emotion than these standard images. With these images, I feel like you can stare at them and you can really start to build the situation in your mind. You start to think, you start to process. This first photo is one that I took on a ferry ride out to a wedding in the San Juan Islands in Washington. This is on a ferry where it’s a public space, it’s a social space. Typically, you would think there’s a lot of people talking here, groups of friends all together having a good time. However, what I found was the exact opposite. There were lots of groups like this where people were just on their phones, nobody being social. And I thought this was a great opportunity to capture what life is like in 2025. This next image is one that I took during an elopement in Yosemite National Park last year. This couple had just been married an hour prior to me taking this photo and I crafted this to showcase them looking out this new stage of life, enjoying the view, but also being able to visualize and see an older couple also there at another stage of life. Being able to capture this whole image that really goes across those stages of life and shows that growth that people go through. Now these images, they have emotion, they have context behind them. There’s something that you do want to stare at, like I said. Now, I found my time working in analytics that this is often what’s missing from our dashboards, that emotion, that context, and that narrative that truly drives a story and makes these interesting and fun to look at. So just like those first couple of photos I showed you, a dashboard might be well designed. It could look like this. It looks great, has everything we need on it. However, it doesn’t carry that emotion. And that’s a problem because our stakeholders don’t act on data alone. They act on insight, urgency, and emotional relevance. And that’s why data visualization alone does not equal data storytelling. And as a side note, I want to mention that not all dashboards need to be a data story. You need to determine as the builder of the dashboard whether you are building a dashboard or a data story. What is your end goal? What do you need this to accomplish? Because there’s a place for dashboards and there’s a place for data stories. So when you get a request, figuring out what is the need. Now I love this quote by Jonathan Gottschalk, talking about how when we have dry and factual arguments, people have their dukes up. They don’t necessarily want to hear that. They become critical and skeptical. Our stakeholders, oftentimes when we just throw them the facts, throw them the data and say, you need to fix this. They don’t like that. They get defensive and they don’t want to be told they need to be changing that everything they’ve been doing isn’t working, that it’s wrong. But when you put them into a story, they drop that intellectual guard. They get that emotional movement and that makes them defenseless and allows that impact to truly cause them to drive action. I’m sure a lot of you have seen something similar to this graphic here of the iceberg, especially when talking about data analysis. But I like to look at this as well in the form of our dashboards. Visualization is just the tip of the iceberg. Well, narrative, that emotion, that context, all what lie beneath and that’s what’s going to impact. Those are the crucial things that we need to include. That’s what separates a dashboard from a data story. So with that, I want to walk you today through five concrete and actionable strategies that you can apply in order to transform your dashboards into those compelling data stories. Now alone, these things can be helpful, but when you really put them all together, that’s when you really start to build that data story. So let’s dive in. The first thing that is data story is a strong visual hierarchy. Good storytelling has a good structure and when you’re building a dashboard and analysis workspace, you should also have one. A strong narrative arc is often followed in movies, TV shows, books, any kind of story. You have set up, tension, and resolution. I love to use the example of Finding Deimos. You have a dad and his son. You’re set up, you’re shown their home, their life together, and how happy they are. Then the tension comes. Nemo swims away. He goes on an adventure of his own. He leaves. It creates that tension and really drives that emotion and then it all finishes as we know with the resolution. Nemo comes, gets back together with his dad. His dad finds him, saves him, and they’re able to be happy back together again. This is how our data stories need to be. They need to have that set up, that tension, that resolution, that drives the emotion, and eventually leads to action. You got to start out with that set up, a key stat, or some sort of situation that a user’s in, and then dive into the tension. Dive into the why you’re seeing this. Why we have issues. Where are we struggling? And then present that resolution and how you recommend solving the problem. This layout is crucial to a strong data story. You want to guide the user through just like they’re reading a book, just like they’re going through a story of their own. Align them with the dashboard. Make them read through it. Follow that narrative arc and that’s when you start to build this context, this emotion, all this that leads to impact.

The next thing to focus on is visualizations. Now I know I said that visualizations aren’t data storytelling, but they do play a crucial piece. Adobe Analytics and CGA have lots of visualization options, many of which are actually underused. I encourage you to go in, learn some more, and look beyond the typical bar chart or line chart that we see flood our current dashboards. I’m not going to spend the time today going into them, but I recommend you go in and learn about some of these other options that you have at your fingertips. Learn about cohort tables. Learn about tree maps, these more advanced tables, these more advanced charts that you may not be familiar with because these are what can really start to make it visually interesting. Gain that interest of your stakeholders, make them look at it and go, this is something I haven’t looked at before, and creates a new way of thinking. You’ll find that this will really help engage your audience.

Now one of the best ways to engage the audience and convey that emotion and the context that we find so important is through journey-based visualizations. Analysis workspace has freeform and flowcharts, and if you have CGA, you have the ability to access journey canvas as well. These can be super powerful visualizations that truly help put the user in front of the audience’s mind. It allows you to tell the user story. This adds even more narrative, even more motion and context in your dashboard because now it’s not just about you as the data storyteller, but you’re putting them in the shoes of the user, the one that truly matters on the website and looking at the data from their point of view and allowing to see how they’re using the site. And this is all really going to build even more emotion, even more narrative that makes it even more interesting to our stakeholders. The third tip that I have is about adding context. The best way to do that is through text itself. I often feel like when people build dashboards, they try to make it as clean and as simple as possible, and that’s all good. You should have a good clean and good looking dashboard. However, some additional text can really go a long way in telling your story. As you can see here in this example, I’ve added a simple text visualization to the left of my trend line with a simple question that shows the audience what I want them to be thinking about while they review this chart. I’ve made it as big as I can get it, as bold as I can get it, and easy to read. This will help guide the stakeholders, guide the users, and tell the story that you want to tell. Otherwise, you’re throwing a chart in front of them and they’re going to get distracted. They’re going to find their own things they want to talk about, and all of a sudden, you’ve lost the audience and you’re not able to focus on what you want to tell from these pieces of data. I’ve got some other question options here that could also fit in. It really depends on what story you’re trying to tell, but I put these in here to help you understand that these questions don’t need to be complicated. They don’t need to be complex. They just need to help the user understand or the audience understand what you’re trying to tell with the data in front of them. Now, if you’re having a hard time coming up with these questions, I encourage you to use AI to help you come up with these questions specifically tailored for your stakeholders. Now, be mindful of the privacy settings within your AI tool, but it can be as easy as uploading a screenshot of the chart that you’re looking at, telling the AI what context behind it, what you’re trying to convey, and just like that, you’ll have plenty of options to choose from and plenty of options that will help you get your mind thinking about what a good question could be in this scenario. The next thing that I want to encourage you to do early on in the process is to ask why, and then I want you to ask why, and then I want you to ask why again, and then I want you to ask why even one more time. All of this is going to help you dig deeper into those surface metrics that you’ve identified. Start with your initial finding and then start to dig deeper. Think about this. You get an email one day and you have somebody asking you, why is our email traffic dropping? The immediate answer might be because, well, you don’t have tags on some of your landing pages that have just come out, and so naturally, it looks like with these new landing pages that your traffic is actually dropping. You could stop there, create a dashboard, and move on. Show that, yep, it’s because we’re missing tags, we don’t have all these pages, and this is why, and move on. This is a process that a lot of us go through every single day, but what if we dive deeper? What if we start to ask, well, why are we missing these tags? Maybe we come to find out that we’re not missing them because the tagging’s wrong or the tag’s off. Maybe it’s because users aren’t opting into our consent banner, and then you ask, why aren’t users opting into our consent banner? Maybe it’s because we haven’t optimized it properly and it’s in a weird spot on the site, and so it’s frustrating the user, and now they’re just hitting reject all. Now, instead of why, you start to ask, so what? So now you have these data points that can be used to tell a story about these users who are getting frustrated, and you can share their journey, share their frustration, and make a recommendation about how to improve it and how to make those users care more about your product. Before, you had a dashboard that just showed email traffic dropping and your reasons why. This page had a tagging error or a tagging issue for a couple days. That’s what you had before. Now you have a story that carries that emotion in context. It takes your stakeholders on the journey of the user all because you asked why, and you’ve been able to identify the real issue at the heart and identify how you can fix that so that it not just as a temporary fix but improves the overall experience for the user. Lastly, we need to add emotion into our dashboard. I’ve got five keys here to unlocking emotion in your dashboard. All five of these are crucial to really try to build that narrative arc and get your stakeholders to put their guard down. The first thing is by adding strong styling and visuals. Analysis Workspace often can seem like they don’t have a lot of options or flexibility here, and I’ve had people tell me there’s no way to customize these dashboards. It’s not like other tools that I have. And while it might be a little bit more limited to what we’re used to, there’s actually quite a few options out there that you might not be aware of that really help you make your dashboard look clean and make it easy to understand and easy to tell your story. To show a couple of these things, I want to jump into a quick demo here and show you how you can turn a dashboard into something that’s more visually appealing and has a little bit more flexibility and looks like what a stakeholder might want to look at. All right, so to jump into our demo here today, I want to share a couple things around styling and visuals that are really quick and easy that can really make a little bit better. So you can see here that we have a dashboard that has our text that we talked about earlier guiding the user across these each individual chart. But let’s say you want to add an image to this dashboard. Now your image can be a logo, which is what I’m going to show today, but it can also be a screenshot of the page that you’re focused on so that you can understand exactly what the data is that you’re viewing here. It could be a specific experience that the user is going through and a selection of images. There’s lots of ideas here that you can utilize, but just to keep it simple, we’re just going to add a company logo to the top of this dashboard here. So what you want to do is create a text visualization and when you open this up, we’re all familiar, but I want to use this image option. Now sometimes it can be seen that it’s difficult to add images because you need the actual URL, but if you can find the right image online, there’s lots of great options. You find the right option, then it’s really easy to add these in. So for example, I did a quick search for the Adobe logo. Let’s say we want to add that here and since I don’t currently have access to that, we’ll make it really easy and we’ll jump in and do a quick search. We found this website that has the Adobe logo on it. You can go ahead and right-click on it and select copy link address. As long as the link to this has that file format of a JPEG or a PNG, you’ll be able to easily upload it in here. So we can come in here, we can paste the URL, hit save and just like that, we now have our logo in here. We can take this logo, we’ll center it so that it looks nice. We’ll make it a little bit bigger and now we’ve got our logo in here in the dashboard and everything looks a little bit nicer and a little bit more professional and branded. The next thing to go along with that professionalism and with the branding is to adjust your color palette. So you’ll notice I’ve already done it here as we have multiple colors here that all look good together and match Adobe styling. How you do this is you go to project, project info and settings and then right here you have your color palette. You have lots of options in here that are already predetermined but if you want this to match a certain company’s branding, you can click custom palette and then you can enter in the hex codes of the colors that you want to utilize. Now it’s okay, hex codes can look scary, they’re not that scary and there’s a site that I recommend here to actually be able to figure out what colors to use. So for this example, this site will give you a panel of each color. I’ve already put in a red, white and black because we know that Adobe uses those and I’ve locked those. And now I can simply hit my space bar and go through and find different colors that look good with those colors that I want. So once I found those, it gives you the hex code right there and all you have to do is copy that and paste it in right here with delimited by a comma and now you’ve got your color palette in there and your lines and your charts will start to match those colors that you’ve identified. This all helps it become way more professional, way more branded and looks a little bit better than the typical dashboard that you send out. All the things that are really important in helping craft a good data story, something that’s interesting and that people want to look at. The last thing that I want to focus on here is two new features that just came out that Adobe released that I think are really helpful. The first is the ability to hide these titles. So I’ve already done it a couple times here, but now you can just come up here to your settings, hide the title and that’ll clean that up. We can adjust this a little bit so that it lines up just right and now we’ve got the title gone and just the logo at the top or just whatever image you want. Same thing here, if we want this to say marketing channel performance, we probably don’t because we want the focus to be on our question. So come in here, hide the title. Now everything looks a little bit cleaner, a little bit simpler and we can guide our stakeholders directly through the narrative that we’re trying to tell here. The last thing that I want to mention is the addition of a new visualization called section header. This is something that you can easily just drag and drop in. It looks really good and we can say first we’re going to talk about marketing channels. This breaks up your panel that you have here, makes it so that you don’t have everything all crammed in and we can come in and add another one here. We’ve got, we’re going to talk about email users and the flow that they’re going through. So we’ll go through and add this about email user flow and now this dashboard just looks a little bit better. It’s easy to read. We can guide the stakeholder down through it, down through the narrative, what we’re trying to tell and easily make it so that now we have more time, more space. We’re able to drive and be able to make the dashboard into a data story. Now the next thing to unlock emotion in your dashboards and in your data stories is around human centric framing. Just like how I recommended using journey visualizations earlier, making your questions that you put in there and those visualizations strictly about the user can be a big key. It’s so easy to get stuck behind all the numbers, forget about the user and just to focus on the data but if you can put yourself and your story into the shoes of the user like we mentioned, now you’re able to go beyond reporting and actually start communicating with your stakeholders. The next thing is to focus on impact. Ask so what? Too often we leave a finding with just the appetizers and we forget to dive into the actual main entree just like before with our email traffic dropping. Are we going one step further or are we stopping right there? Are we going to actually focus on the impact? What are you going to do with this information now that you have it? What are you going to do with the data and what do you recommend? What do you forecast happening if they don’t make a change? A crucial part to every good story is that piece of the narrative arc of resolution. It wouldn’t be such a good story in Finding Nemo if Nemo didn’t end up back with his dad at the end. That’s what makes it such an emotional and impactful film. Now the last two things here lead into my last slide about the importance of presentation but I first want to mention these two things individually. The first being your questions. These questions you add on the dashboard and the questions that you ask while you present. These are what get the audience thinking. You’ve got them on the dashboard so that they understand what they’re looking at and what they’re trying to identify and then you as the data storyteller you have the ability to ask questions to them when they look at these things and that can help drive further impact. Once again look to AI if you need help generating those questions that can truly help impact the stakeholders as they’re viewing and seeing your data story. Lastly I want to talk about tone and voice. Share your story as if you care. We all know that we care about our clients, we care about our data, we care about what we’re seeing but sometimes when we present these reports, when we show our dashboards, when we try to tell data stories, we don’t show that we truly care. That is crucial. If the stakeholders can see that you are passionate about what you’re talking about and the story you’re telling they will be able to feel that passion and they will have their guards back down and you’ll be able to share and actually generate impact that happens at the end and your data story now has an actual purpose. Nothing is going to bring more motion to your story than you yourself as a storyteller and how you present and that’s going to lead us into this last slide here about presentation. Presentation truly is the best way to tell a story. Do everything you can if you have a story rather than a dashboard and you have something you want to say with it and something you want to do with it. Do everything you can to avoid just having to send a link out to the dashboard you created. Sure you put in the questions, you made it look nice, you did everything you could on your end but the presentation is what’s going to push it across the line and really truly enact change. A good story is going to have the true impact when it has a good storyteller attached to it. This is going to allow you to hit those emotional beats, create that emotion and that as we know is going to lead to action. It also allows you to go past the limitations of a dashboard. You can now share analogies, user experience, you can have a screen grab that shows what the user is actually experiencing, puts you actually in the shoes and in the eyes of the user. All this and you can summarize your findings and you can do so much more than just showing a dashboard. You can get out of the dashboard and actually talk about the experience, talk about the issues and really take it to the next level. And all of this is going to lead to the ability to create incredible context that’s crucial to telling the perfect data story. So to close I want you to remember these three things.

Number one, design your dashboard around the story you want to tell. Use those questions, use those visuals to help push it across the line. Then don’t forget that the bottom of the screen is going to lead to impact and action down the line. Lastly, the dashboard is your tool, you are the storyteller. It comes down to you in that role. How are you going to present? How are you going to share and how are you going to create that emotion? You get to decide as the storyteller if your data story is great or if it’s not. If you have a story you want to tell, if you want to create change, you want to create impact, then put the effort in, apply these things that I’ve shared today and tell that story and watch as the change will happen. Your stakeholders will start to listen and they’ll really start to enact the change that you want on the site and on your clients’ websites. We’ll now jump into any questions if anybody has any.

Well that’s great stuff Trent, super sharp and hugely valuable. Thank you for joining us. Thank you Adam, it’s been a pleasure to be here. Oh great, well let’s jump into the Q&A. Those of you at home or at work, ask away in the chat and we’ll get to as many as we have time for. The first question we have today, I have seen that there are differences in output data when looking at a flowchart versus duplicating the conditions when looking at a regular table. Why is this happening? That’s a great question. It really kind of depends on how you have your segments set up, what you’re exactly looking at. There are going to be times when the data doesn’t line up perfectly. When you think about what the flowchart is doing versus what the table that you’ve set up is doing, and sometimes they’re looking at the data just a tiny bit, tiny bit differently and that can lead to some discrepancies in the data when you compare the two. Not necessarily saying one over the other is correct, but when you’re kind of comparing the two you got to give it, you got to give the data a little bit of grace and not make it you know so structured that it has to be exact. If you’re seeing major differences then I would recommend really ensuring that your segments and everything is set up the exact same way. I think sometimes we build segments and put them in a table and forget that when we’re looking at a flowchart it’s going to either be visit scoped, it could be person scoped and based on that it’s going to be taking this user through that flow as a part of their session and there’s some settings within the segment builder that you want to make sure align to that that are going to cause some differences sometimes. So just if you have those major differences make sure you really compare your segment to how the flows build out so that it’s really actually portraying the same thing and you should see just minor discrepancies between the two and as long as they’re minor and then it should be accurate enough for you to move forward with it. It’s kind of like measured twice cut once right? Exactly. Yes exactly. Well our next question how is the non-promotional tracking variable supposed to be actually utilized when I want to tell a story? That’s a good question. Honestly there’s not much you can do if you’re not able to really capture that full journey then you’re not going to be able to really see much. It really is going to limit you on on what kind of story you can tell because remember we want the story to be focused on the user that human centric focus. We wanted to cover the whole entire journey and when we’re missing pieces and when we have you know different privacy settings that are causing issues across that journey to really stitch it all the way you’re really going to have a much more difficult time being able to reach that end goal you know what is that KPI that we’re trying to achieve what are we trying to determine and when you’re not able to find that then it’s going to be more difficult to tell a story. Now that’s a great answer. So our next one I have been trying to get use out of the flow visualization but is not user friendly and very hard to read and export. Any tips for this visualization? I completely agree with you it can be kind of a pain to use sometimes but I have found that if you try to you think about what I had talked about presentation is key and so sometimes if you have a flow visualization you’re kind of able to get what you need out of it pull what you need out of it and put it into a slide deck create a page that has you know bars that show the funnel or show that journey but just have the data points that you need you don’t necessarily need to use the dashboard that you create for your data story if you’re giving a presentation you can pull bits and pieces out of that it can be a great deliverable to have at the end of your presentation but then during your presentation you can have that focus exactly on what you are trying to get your stakeholders to see and that’s going to make it a lot easier then they don’t have to deal with the hard to read you know or something not working right then and there just makes it easier for them to see that that visual and get out of it and feel that emotion that you’re looking for and that’s the really what I’ve found to be the best way when it comes to exporting that data out is just kind of getting it to a point where you can see what you need to see and then taking it out of the tool and into something else there’s also you know if you want to go the CJA route CJA offers journey canvas which is an awesome tool that provides way much a lot easier visualization and customization when you’re creating that journey it’s easier to read it’s easier to use it’s an awesome tool I highly recommend you look into it but it’s one of the features of CJA within Adobe Analytics you know there are settings within it make sure you’re limiting it to exactly what you need don’t have you know five columns when you only need a few that’s just going to make it longer it’s going to take longer to process could be more difficult to see and get more convoluted really quick so trying to keep it segmented and limited down as much as you can and then pull out what you need and use that in your story in your presentation awesome our next question do you recommend to use flow to look at user journey over the table built over the table built similarly it really depends on the user I’m a visual guy so I like to see you know step by step I like to see the lines that go from each one see which ones are bigger I love that stuff and so that that just makes it easier to understand for me I know sometimes people prefer that very you know setup structured data table view and and you can still gather the data that you need out of there sometimes that data table view is better depending on what segments you want to add what kind of metrics you’re trying to use the flow builder can be very limiting especially when it comes to some of those custom metrics and so sometimes you have to use a data table and that’s okay like I said before though if you’re trying to tell a story and really convey and present this you know action that you want your stakeholders to take take the data out of it you can use a data table you can use a flow chart you know I shared some tips around this you know dashboard ways that you can make a dashboard look more like a data story and be more presentable that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to use that dashboard like I said before it can be a deliverable at the end it can just have the data and you can pass it on so that they can look at it later but when you’re trying to present that’s when you’re really going to follow that narrative arc you’re going to convey that emotion and when you’re doing that that’s not going to require a structured data table or a flow visualization it can be just whatever you pull from it like I said grab the data points you need build out a simple visualization within you know PowerPoint that’s what I do often is I’ll take you know a table and rebuild it in PowerPoint so that it’s simple easy to read and conveys what I’m trying to showcase and you’ll see major corporations do this if you ever watch an Apple keynote when they release a new device they show a chart that’s really simple and straightforward of this is how much better it is now sometimes those charts can be misleading so I encourage you to keep them as accurate as possible and not be misleading in any way but it’s a great example of how you can really simplify and showcase that story without having to use what’s exactly in Adobe Analytics. Okay this next question really hones in on the whole atmosphere we have around cookie consent and just privacy in general especially with the laws that are always changing. How much discrepancy as a percentage can be attributed to cookie consent preferences? That’s a great question especially when looking at you know I have clients that I work with that have a lot of European traffic and when you start to dive into GDPR things get really complex and it can be difficult to track those users and so when it comes down I don’t think there’s a specific percentage per se that you could say is you know an average discrepancy it’s really going to depend on a lot of things it can depend on your cookie banner is it you know optimized have you ran a B tests on it to make sure that it’s performing the best possible way if not do that to help increase those opt-in rates so that you’re getting more users in and now you’re getting more accurate and valuable data but I encourage you to look into if you have your consent banner tracked you can start to do the math of figuring out what your average opt-in rate is and then take that and use that discrepancy percentage that you’ve found and use that in your data you can export the data run calculations in Excel on it or use other tools to do that but that way you kind of create your own percentage of discrepancy because it’s gonna vary it’s not going to be the same for every company people do different things with their consent banners they’re placed in different spots on the site all different things that are going to work differently for different people and so figuring out what works best for you finding ways to optimize it but then also be able to figure out that calculation of what that opt-in rate is for you and then apply that to your data as you see it okay our next question when preparing a monthly executive report where the data and trends are stable what recommendations would you give to make the presentation more impactful and engaging possibly adding an emotional or human element it’s a great question so a couple things number one we got to come back to the idea that not every dashboard needs to be a data story sometimes especially with recurring dashboards that are getting sent out you know and especially if things are stable there’s not much to see or to say there and so maybe just a dashboard that gets sent out and looked at every month is great and you don’t necessarily need a data story when you need a data story is when you have something that you want to convey if you’re just trying to tell your stakeholders that everything’s great and we’re doing good and we don’t need to make any changes you probably don’t need a data story but when you’ve identified something that needs to be changed even if your trends are you know stable you can find recommendations of you know how can i increase this you know we’ve been stable for months on end six months we haven’t increased at all or we’ve only increased half a percent well we should be increasing more than that let’s say it’s revenue we want revenue to be going up so then you can start to put together what are some recommendations i could make to help us try to find ways to increase that revenue and then as you find those recommendations you can gather those data points you can put them together and now you can create this story and even if it’s just a monthly executive report put something in there if you’re not presenting this if it’s something that’s just sent out it it can be your information and then you know write out a section write a one pager that you know showcases the data points that you’re trying to encourage them to see as maybe problematic or ways areas that need change or improvement and then you can work them through that you can you can go through this whole process what i’ve shared without a dashboard you can do it with you know it can be written out with text you can follow that narrative arc you can bring that emotion in and it’s all by finding data points that your executives find interesting if it’s revenue and you tell them that like hey you’re increasing by half a percent over the last six months you could be increasing two to three percent that’s gonna they’re gonna perk their ears to that they’re gonna want to listen and so that’s gonna make it really a lot easier to start to build that emotion within that report so look for ways that you want to cause improvement or change and then build around those find the data points find a story that you can tell within that and that’ll start to add that that emotion and when you say human element really presentation’s the best way if you can tell the story if you can get in front of them in a presentation and actually share with them that’s going to be huge that’s going to take it to the next step and allow it to have even more impact than just text but if text is all you have there are ways to dive into that and improve it and get it to a way where it can still cause change okay so the next question actually goes back to the consent management question we had earlier how can we check if his user is hitting the consent banner on our page it’s a great question um you know if it’s not tracked on your site if you’re not getting data points around your banner i encourage you to do so um you being able to use that so that you can also see in adobe analytics your opt-in rates and and also see how users are interacting with your consent banner that’s going to help you be able to get the data that you need a lot of times too you can look into your actual consent management tool if that’s one trust or something else and you should be able to see numbers and data in there around how many people are actually getting it ideally everybody should be getting it there are some states that don’t require it to pop up but there’s enough now that i would recommend that everybody sees it and you know whether you can track them if they ignore it or not that’s going to be state-based or country-based but making sure that it should just go to everybody that’s the easiest way around it make sure it’s tracked so you can get data around it and understand how users are interacting with it and then you can go from there okay we have one more we have time for one more question and it is how to get data-driven personalization in adobe target so deliver the best experience match with the ecid with marcato lead data that’s a great question um i we don’t have too much time left so i’m going to encourage you to you know go to some of the resources that adobe has around adobe target and around some of that personalization there are some great ways to get that data into adobe analytics i will say once again another plug for cja it’s a little bit easier if you have that tool to match that all together but but that’s where i would recommend going is to go in there and get that documentation from targeting from target specifically and they’ll be able to kind of lead you and get that stitched together but cja is going to also be the easiest route in order to do that okay well that was awesome trent it was a really great conversation thank you for your insights thank you it’s been fun to be here