The book is really enjoyable, written in an easy to digest style with plenty of humorous examples to liven up a pretty drab topic of statistical analysis.
The subject matter within the anecdotes is clearly explained from the very beginning. Charles Wheelan’s personal experiences with maths lessons help to add realism and relatable perspective for the reader.
It is by no means simply a series of stories without substance. There are actual topics in here! Concepts such as central limit theorem, regression and sampling are introduced and detailed out through practical, yet light-hearted, examples.
Translating the concepts from the book into marketing analysis can seem difficult. Some simple methods to help you level up can be found with how averages can be used to describe datasets. The mean and median of a dataset can help to reveal further insight which may not have been obvious at first glance. These things are straightforward to apply and will give your analytical reports a bit more robustness.
For example, imagine that you’re looking at a Google Ads campaign. You might have lots of ad groups inside of it, and naturally they’ll register different CPC costs. A quick statistical analysis of it will reveal the mean, median and standard deviation of it, allowing you to see how it’s distributed and provide a bit more explanation on what you see is happening with it. This could help to identify where certain ad groups are over or under performing, which will invariably dictate how much budget they should be allocated.
All in all, this is a great book for anyone who does not have a strong background in mathematics. It will introduce concrete concepts gently, with good humour as part of the explanation delivery. Applying what you read to your marketing activity may require more thinking on your part, but there are certainly very solid foundations for you to build upon.
Have you read Naked Statistics yet? If you have, we would love to hear what you think about it too.