Stretching what you notice

Noticing is a deep rabbit hole and becomes analytical quickly. The way you can improve it is becoming curious about the marketing we’re exposed to every single day. Start questioning why you’re seeing something and what decisions were being made to get there. Learning the numbers is helpful - but understanding the why behind the numbers is even better.

If you didn’t take my hint earlier in the book, create a “burner” email address where you can be more liberal with your email newsletter subscriptions. Subscribe to your competitors, areas of interest, or anything you think will be done well. Email marketing is extremely useful to learn, and often what’s said in the privacy of an inbox is different to what you’ll see in the big wide world.

Most online media let you change your ad preferences by clicking in the top right corner. Have a poke around and see what they know about you (if anything) and don’t be afraid to reject ads or engage with ads you like.

If you really want to stretch yourself - get your website fully set up with Google Analytics and start learning it. UTM tracking is a way to “tag” any marketing activity that goes back to your website and will give you new layers or understanding around channels and what leads to a sale.

If that’s not enough and you’re a future aspiring data analyst - Google lets you add a sample ecommerce store into their Analytics tool. With it you can pore over volumes of data that you would otherwise not have access to.

Get into the habit of cross-checking - seeing a trend from the data and understanding from a customer face-to-face why something happened. It’s extra work but the learning you will get is invaluable.