Best Practice Guide: How to ask the right questions in ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst.

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How to frame your questions

What questions are out of scope?

Mathematical computations

Grouping

Filtering

Example questions

Further types of questions

Validate ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst results

Verify with follow up questions

How to frame your questions

One of the approaches for asking questions that will help you get to the expected answer faster is to think of the question in parts.

What computation do you want ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst to perform? Try to write it in a way that any new person will understand.
What groupings do you want to see in the final results?

What filters do you want to apply while generating the answer?

A good question clearly defines all of these aspects in an unambiguous manner. Note that since ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst is a conversational experience, you can ask your question incrementally.

What questions are currently out of scope?

ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst is currently not designed to answer "Why?" questions.

"Why" questions are not yet supported in ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst and should be avoided. For example, Why did my sales go down in Q2?

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Mathematical computations

ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst can:

Count things in your dataset (for example, how many campaigns are there?)
Aggregate metrics (for example, what is the average sales?)
Perform complex mathematical computations (for example, How does the ctr for the channel source shopping compare to performance max?)

Grouping

ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst can:

Help you perform the computations for specific groups (for example, what is the total sales by channel? )
Create grouping on date columns on the fly (for example, what are the yearly sales? or what are the monthly sales?)

Filtering

ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst can:

Perform computations and grouping operations on a filtered set of data instead of the full table (for example, what are the total sales for August? or what are the sales for this month? or what are the sales for SEO in July 2024?)

Example questions

Below is a quick overview of the kinds of questions you can ask by a combination of above skills. Note that this is not an exhaustive list.

Simple Computations

Sub-category	Sample questions
Counting	How many purchases were made last week? How many clicks were there on Monday last week? Count the number of campaigns in channel source Performance Max.
Aggregation	What is the average sales for each campaign? What is the maximum sessions by channel this week?
Conditional counting / aggregations	What is the sales for the channel source shopping last week excluding Wednesday? What would be the sales if channel source Direct were included?

Common Date Intents

Sub-category	Sample questions
Group by date	What are my weekly sales? What are the quarterly sales?
Filter by date	What are our yearly sales for the last 2 years? What are the sales this year? Show campaigns that did not have any sales in the last 3 months. Compare the sales of channel SEO for Q1 2025, Q1 2024 & Q1 2023.

Advanced Computations

Sub-category	Sample questions
Ratios and percentage	What is the percentage of revenue from the Direct channel for the year 2024? What is the ratio of clicks to impressions?
Comparison	Compare the revenue by device mobile to desktop during march 2024 and march 2025 Compare sales of PPC and SEO Compare weekend vs weekday revenue for this quarter.
Advanced calculations (change, nested aggregations, conditional logic, etc.)	What is the change in sales each day this month What is the month-over-month percentage change in sales for each channel last year? Can you provide the quarterly revenue breakdown for campaigns that were part of the promotional campaign in Q2?

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Further types of questions in ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst?

ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst will support a few additional types of questions. Note this is not an exhaustive list.

Descriptive questions about selected data source

Sub-category	Sample questions
Descriptions	What can I use this data for? Tell me about this data What is in this dataset? I want to decrease operational costs. How can this data help?
Explanations	How is [insert formula] calculated? What can I do with time filters? Show me the steps to calculate [insert formula]

Make recommendations for leveraging selected data source

Sub-category	Sample questions
Follow-up questions	What can I analyze next? What else can I ask about this trend?
High-level strategies*	Give me ideas for increasing sales in the (Channel/Source) Affiliates How to improve March's sales?

*Note: ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst can't provide direct business strategies, but it can identify areas of the selected data that you might analyze in pursuit of accomplishing business strategies. Then, it can generate data insights based on related questions.

Validate ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst results

You can verify ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst's results by checking the query and by comparing to the previous step in the conversation.

Let's say you ask ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst, What are the monthly sales for channel/source Shopping in Google last year?

The answer is shown:

ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst has performed the following actions :

Mathematical computation: The mathematical computations are highlighted in green in the query syntax. In the example above, we can see that the revenue column is marked in green, which shows that we have computed the total revenue.
Groupings: The groupings are highlighted in blue in the search query. In the above example, we can see that monthly grouping is one of the groupings being used. The column label also shows that the Monthly date column is used for this monthly grouping.

Filters: The filters are represented in grey. The query also shows that the system has applied a filter on source=’google’, date=’last year’, and Channel/source=’shopping’.

We recommend that you always check the search data query, as it provides an easy way to validate all the important choices of the column values picked by ASK BOSCO® and how it is using them to build the answer.

Verify the changes after follow-up questions

ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst considers each new question in the conversation as a follow-up to the previous question. As your answer becomes more and more complex in the conversation or when you start the ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst experience from a dashboard, you don’t have to continuously validate the query for each answer generated by the system, but you can easily verify.

In the case of follow-up questions, we provide a quick summary before the answer which showcases what has changed from the previous step. For example, if we tell ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst to “include Performance Max for last 18 months” for the question asked in the previous step. ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst shows that it added Channel/Source = 'Performance Max' and changed Date = 'last 18 months'.