Behavioral Insights: causal inference + share your feedback 👂
Behavioral Insights.
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And now, last week's roundup of interesting articles and other links:
1. Summer Seminar: Man, Machine, Money
Tomorrow I am going to a seminar in Amsterdam, focused around one question; 'how can behavioral science, data science, and technology best serve our financial lives?' Looking forward to it. I believe there are still some tickets available.
2. Using Causal Inference to Improve the Uber User Experience
An article explaining what causal inference is, why it is important and how Uber is using these techniques to improve their business. Read the article.
3. Synthetic control and alternatives to A/B testing at Uber
Recording of a presentation Nick Jones and Sam Barrows from Uber did at PyData in Amsterdam. A bit related to the link above. Good explanation of why Uber sometimes cannot use traditional A/B testing and what the do to still be able to make causal inferences. Link to presentation (22 mins).
4. Measuring effectiveness: 3 grand challenges
Paper by Google which highlights three of the biggest challenges around measuring the brand and sales impact of marketing:
incrementality: proving cause and effect
measuring the long term, today
unified methods: a ‘theory of everything’.
Read the summary or the complete paper (pdf).
5. List of Conversion Rate Optimization tools
Kudos to Simon Vreeman for making this list of CRO tools. Check it out.
6. To make big gains, avoid tiny losses
James Clear is a writer in the self-development space, but often his articles also hold true for business. Like this one: "In many cases, improvement is not about doing more things right, but about doing fewer things wrong". Read the article.
7. Superhuman is spying on you
Superhuman is an email app (like Gmail) that had a feature that allowed senders of email to see when and where it was opened by the recipient. Until Mike Davidson wrote this blog post on what one feature can tell about company culture:
"The point here is that companies decide early on what sort of companies they will end up being. The company they may want to be is often written in things like “core values” that are displayed in lunch rooms and employee handbooks, but the company they will be is a product of the actual decisions they make — especially the tough decisions". Read Mike's blog post.
8. Impact of one year of GDPR
This article lists the evidence about the impact of GDPR after one year. It is not a pretty picture.
*|INTERESTED:Would you also like insights in Dutch?:Yes please / ja graag|*Job opportunities:
Product Analyst at eBay
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And to wrap up: Marketoonist on "... data-driven marketing can lead to A/B testing the deck chairs on the Titanic. I think we have to learn to be data-driven without being data-blinded."

See you next week!
— Kevin