A client sent me sixty-two slides in January and called it an insights deck. Fifty-eight of them were charts. Bounce rate by device. Cart abandonment by hour. A heat map so dense it looked like a weather system moving over the Cascades. The last slide was titled Key Insights and held three bullets, and every bullet was a number with an adjective standing in front of it.
High abandonment at checkout. Strong mobile traffic. Declining repeat purchase.
That is a forecast. Nobody in sixty-two slides had told me why it rains.
We spent the last decade getting very good at instrumentation and no better at all at interpretation. Every brand I work with can now measure things their 2012 selves would have paid a consultancy for. Almost none of them can tell me what any of it means about a human being.
A data point describes behavior. An insight is a claim about motive, stated plainly enough that it tells you what to build on Monday.
Take that checkout number. The dashboard said abandonment spiked at the shipping step, and the room concluded price sensitivity, because that is what rooms conclude. We called nine customers instead. Nine. It took a week.
Not one of them said the shipping cost was too much. They said they had already done the math in their head on the product page, arrived at checkout with a total in mind, and been told a different total. The problem was not the fee. The problem was the timing of the fee. People do not abandon carts over eight dollars. They abandon carts over being corrected.
That is an insight, and you can tell because it is arguable. Somebody could look at it and say no, I think it is price. A number cannot be argued with, which is exactly why it is not a strategy.
The fix cost nothing. Put the shipping number on the product page. No discount, no free-shipping threshold eating the margin, no rebuild. Just tell people the truth earlier than they expected it.
The second test is whether the insight names a person. Women twenty-five to forty-four is not a person. Someone who has already decided what this costs before they reach your checkout is a person. Segments describe who bought. Insights describe who almost did not, and why.
A number cannot be argued with, which is exactly why it is not a strategy.
The nine phone calls cost less than one month of the dashboard subscription. I keep telling people this and they keep buying the dashboard.
At karaoke Saturday, the host who calls everyone baby had the screen scrolling lyrics for a room that already knew every word to a song none of us would admit to loving. The screen had the data. It could not tell you why the whole bar stood up.