This post was published on the Screaming Frog blog on 13th October 2020.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. This pithy quote sums up most people’s attitude to data. It’s either untrustworthy, unreliable, or just plain boring.
But in the right hands data can be turned into stories. Stories that captivate. Stories that excite. Stories that get links from top tier publications.
This post will explore how to find great data online, how to use that data to spark an idea, and perhaps most importantly, how not to be wrong when analysing the data.
We’ll also take a brief look at data visualisation techniques, but that really deserves a whole post of its own. Probably from someone with more graphic design experience.
Data Sources
There’s a lot of data online. It’s estimated that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook store at least 1.2 million terabytes between them. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The amount of data on the entire internet is thought to be in the order of zettabytes. That’s a one with 21 zeroes.
To even begin to comprehend how much information this is, imagine streaming a Netflix movie this size. With a broadband speed of 100 Gbps, this would take you 2,535 years. That’s a lot of popcorn.
So, finding the right data is tricky. Thankfully an excellent marketer has put a guide together for you.