This insights post is a summary of the blog post published by Standing Partnership. View the full post at: Bad Data Visualizations: Three Mistakes Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them.
When you need to communicate information about data, creating a compelling data visualization can be more effective than publishing a data table or providing a spreadsheet to clients or management. Company executives expect marketing teams to deliver insights to provide actionable ways to inform business decisions and demonstrate meeting success metrics. However, drawing actionable conclusions from a spreadsheet of data can be cumbersome and time consuming.
Data visualization can help represent complex information in a digestible form, without overwhelming the audience. Using the right data visualization can be worth more than pages of text or spreadsheets of data when communicating the outcome of a marketing effort. When reporting critical data, strong visualization could be your best tool for illustrating the impact of your programs and the return on investment.
But not all data visualization are created equal. There are some common data reporting mistakes to avoid including:
- Making the reader work for insights: Don’t assume that if you throw all the data into a table or graph the results are obvious. Good communication requires context.
- Including too many data points in one graph: Humans struggle with complexity so graphs should try to be limited to communicating one data point unless they are illustrating correlation.
- Using the wrong scale: Always start at zero. Graphs that do not start at zero can be misleading.
To get more details about each of these data visualization mistakes, read the full post at Bad Data Visualizations: Three Mistakes Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them.
