The three-part data story structure
- sushrutha d
- Oct 4, 2024
- 2 min read
Data isn’t just numbers and figures. Data tells a story that can be integral to your company’s future successes. To create effective campaigns, you have to find the stories in the data. Data storytelling is the practice of explaining data insights to a specific audience using a clear and compelling narrative. Identifying your context, complication, and resolution will help you get there.
The context of the data story may be your past social media campaign’s performance. In this past campaign, you aimed to increase sales by 5% over a three month period through the use of paid social media ads. Unfortunately, you didn’t reach that goal during your last campaign, and you want to review the data of your current campaign to see if it is performing better. Now, you’ve set the context for this data story.
When you take a look at your past return on ad spend (ROAS) and conversion rates to compare them to this campaign’s numbers, you notice an increase in both ROAS and conversion rates. That increase is the complication of your campaign.
Finally, the resolution of your campaign tells the story of why ROAS and conversion rates are soaring. Did the ROAS and conversion rates increase because you changed the copy, switched out the images, ran a promotion in your ads, or something else? Your findings are your resolution.
Example: Juan is a marketer for an outerwear company that isn’t meeting its ROAS goal for rain jackets. Using data storytelling and three-part narrative structure, he presents his findings to teammates.
Context
Juan knows the importance of giving relevant context. He explains the question he posed: Why aren’t rain jackets meeting their ROAS goal? Then he gives some metrics he examined to answer it: CPC, conversion rate, and average order value.
Complication
Juan compares rain jacket metrics to winter coats. The conversion rate and CPC are similar, so he thought the ROAS should be similar, too. Using a bar graph, he explains the complication: rain jackets have a lower average order value.
Resolution
Juan explains that they were tracking the wrong metric. Low average order value for rain jackets means they can’t reach their ROAS target. He advises shifting some budget to coats to raise the overall ROAS. Then he takes audience questions.