Presentation given by Mark Edmondson and Peter Meyer at Superweek 2017 in Hungary. Includes three examples of using APIs in a tag management solution to give better data to make decisions and use predictions.

1. TURNING ANALYSIS INTO ACTION
WITH APIs

2. • Digital business focus
• 15+ years of experience
• Web Analytics House 2013,
2014, 2015, 2016, 2017
• Value-driven business
• More than 40 people in
Denmark, Sweden &
Norway
About IIH Nordic

3. About Us
Mark Edmondson
• In digital since 2006
• Data Insight Developer
• Google Developer
Expert for Google
Analytics
• RStudio Advocate
• cloudyR contributor
• @HoloMarkeD
Peter Meyer
• In digital since 1997
• Analytics Technician
• TMS and Analytics
implementer
• @pmeyerdk

4. Agenda
• What are actionable analysis APIs?
• Example 1 - Weather API - IBM
• Example 2 - Custom prediction API - Prefetching
• Example 3 - Text sentiment API – Google/Algorithmia
Machine Learning
• Future opportunities

5. What are
Analysis APIs?

6. Collect
Data
Analyse
Data
Change
something
An Analytics Workflow

7. Collect
Data
Analyse
Data
Change
something
Reporting APIs
Tracking APIs
Analysis APIs
An Analytics Workflow

8. Collect
Data
Analyse
Data
Change
something
Reporting APIs
Tracking APIs
Analysis APIs
An Analytics Workflow

10. Analysis API
An API that transforms
data into useful
information

11. Examples of actionable analysis APIs
• Visualisations for decision support (dashboards)
• Multivariant testing
• Bid managers
• Enrichment of data - weather
• Content prediction - prefetching
• Text analysis – machine learning API
We will talk today about these ones:
…but others include:

12. Weather API
(data enrichment)

13. Deployment
• Only one webservice used
• Geo- and weather data in one go
• A bunch of information returned

14. Deployment

15. Analysis
• Take daily lag to negate
spurious trend
correlation
• tscount() R package for
poisson distribution
• 16% ±4% extra visitors
on rainy days

16. URL
Prefetching
(react to predictions)

17. Deployment
http://code.markedmondson.me/predictClickOpenCPU/supercharge.html

20. https://www.noisetosignal.io/2016/11/using-google-analytics-to-predict-clicks-and-speed-up-your-website/
Simpler method using offline analysis and deploying through a GTM lookup table

21. Text Sentiment
API
(surfacing important
features)

22. Real-time sentiment tracking of
customer service forums/comment
sections
Categorise topics your customers
care about

23. http://bit.ly/Superweek2017-Demo

24. Deployment - Algorithmia
• Stanford NLP Sentiment Analysis
• https://algorithmia.com/

25. Deployment - Algorithmia
I really love ice cream very much!

26. Deployment - Google
• Google Cloud Natural Language API (beta)
• https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/

27. Deployment - Google
I really love ice cream very much!
http://glaforge.appspot.com/article/sentiment-analysis-on-tweets

28. Recent example at gov.uk
https://gdsdata.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/20/using-machine-learning-to-classify-user-comments-on-gov-uk/

29. Future
OpportunitiesThe Horizon

30. Machine Learning APIs

31. Preparation for the singularity
• Get your data tidy and out of silos
• Start prototyping models
• Skill up in a ML tech stack

32. Skill up in a machine learning tech stack
• Google
BigQuery
• Google
Compute
Engine
• Tensorflow
• Dataproc
(Spark)
• Redshift/Athena
• Amazon EMR
• EC2
• S3
• Amazon Machine
Learning
• SQL Data
Warehouse
• Azure
• Microsoft R
• Microsoft
Cognitive
Programming languages: R, Python, bash, JavaScript, Scala, Java, Julia(?), SQL

33. ML: Google Flavoured
Build your own self-
driving car!
....or for simpler use
cases use the pre-
trained models
available using easy
to use APIs

34. A Microsoft Cognitive API Example
https://matt-stannard.blogspot.dk/2016/12/measuring-footfall-with-google.html

35. • Look to reduce time to actions via APIs
• GTM can do more than tracking
• Skill up in a machine learning tech stack
Summary

36. Thank you!
Mark Edmondson
mark@iihnordic.com
@HoloMarkeD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markpeteredmondson
Peter Meyer
peter.meyer@iihnordic.com
@pmeyerdk
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmeyerdk