Good to see you in our next episode of our series Experts Share Experiences.
This week we performed a deep analysis of various Web Analysts and datamined their knowledge on managing information.
We asked them our 3 standard questions:
What is the most important quality a good web analyst should have?
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
Use the list on the bottom to navigate the answers and enjoy their knowledge – it's worth it: 26 Web Analysts Share What It Takes To Be A Great Analyst.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
A good web analyst should be a great communicator. Since we constantly partner with various internal online teams working towards unique goal conversions on the site, it is essential for a good web analyst to be able to translate insights in a clear and specific manner to those individual teams.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
One of the constant challenges I've faced as a web analyst is changing the mental model of management in how they use web analytics data.
In my experiences, I found myself drowning in data reporting pukes that focus on typical web metrics like visitors, sessions, time on site, page views etc. However, the key to really witnessing the power of web analytics is focusing on outcomes.
Outcomes speaks to why the site exists in the first place and measuring outcomes will provide the knowledge into whether those reasons are performing successfully or not and if they're not, focusing on outcomes will help drive the action needed to resolving those problems on the site.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
By consistently answering these 4 ongoing questions fluently and impact fully:
How many users are coming to the site?
Where are these users coming from?
What are they doing on the site?
What do we WANT them to do on the site? My metric would be "action driving rate".
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Of course, analytical skill is a must, but for me communication skills are much more important. It doesn't matter how great analysis/reports/queries web analyst does, as long as he or she cannot communicate and explain them. Without such skills, analytical efforts are meaningless.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
I had to build web analytics environments for different companies and that is always exciting and takes a lot of time and effort.
As I see it, such environments are a construction of data gathering systems + people (analysts and business) + process. In other words – Google Analytics implementation according to business requirements, teaching non-analyst business people (marketing and sales) how to use and understand gathered data, project process of reading reports and analysis that lead to better data-driven decisions.
What such projects taught me:
work close with business/marketing/sales people,
do not stay in a closed circle of analysts,
act fast, be elastic, do not plan to many details for too long (for example giant reports tracking dozens of metrics don't make sense),
be essential,
those 2-3 numbers (KPIs) or sometimes just answer Yes or No to business question is actually the essence of analyst job,
no need to be 100% accurate, you are not an accountant :); better to have decision today with 80% accuracy than 99% accuracy but next week.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
I wish I could say I use ROI But to be honest, I have never seen calculations about effectiveness of hiring web analyst (comparison of changes that such people create or stimulate in business vs. their cost).
So, when assessing my work and business impact I made, I like to ask myself a question: How many of business decisions are not gut feelings, but data-driven. How many initiatives were initiated by my work with numbers? How did my efforts really influence people, projects and process in the company?
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Inquisitiveness, curiosity. We should keep digging until we find the answers we need… and we should never stop asking "why"?
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Never stop surprising or attracting people's attention. In this job you can easily get into a rut. People should want to listen to you, wait for the results of your work – you must take care about it all the time.
Besides, right now the interesting issues are: a cross-channel measurement (between online and offline), a customer journey and the ways how to monetize mobile traffic.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
My effectiveness should be measured by right business decisions (based on my analysis/conclusions) having added value in a particular case. Keeping up with innovations and their implementation is more than welcome.
For some people an orders measurement, CR, CPO, ROI, a customer life cycle will be important, for others – NPS, engagement, user paths and so on… You are the person who should find the way to measure it and sell it in an accessible form. A mass production of reports is often pointless and will get you nowhere. We should be still thinking not only about what and how to measure, but first of all – why – what it will give us, our colleagues.
We should treat the team as an ecosystem, where we are the link between different areas, you must pursue to get the bigger picture. A good way to do it in practice is to have a weekly status with your team when you can sum up what was made, what was measured in particular areas and show people in what way some decisions affect other moves.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Being action oriented in their analysis and thinking. “What action will it drive?” should be on top of the mind of a web analyst when creating an analysis or a report.
With the vast amount of data available from a Web Analytics platform it is easy to fall into the trap of creating beautiful reports which are really data dumps and do not drive any action.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
As someone tasked with setting up the Marketing Analytics function, I would say setting the right expectation for my stakeholders, my team and myself was critical. Challenges around data quality, current analytics implementation and processes can appear overwhelming and it takes time and commitment across the organization to fix them.
We need to be able to support business needs with what we currently have while we build the analytics foundation for the organization. The key is communication, focus, persistence and lot of education.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
In a B2B company where conversion happens at sales and sales cycle can be long, Analytics plays the critical role of measuring marketing effectiveness and its contribution to Revenue. E.g. measuring number of leads generated from the website, while an important metric, is not sufficient.
We track and report prospect’s journey from our campaigns, which in most cases begins with a digital touch point, through the marketing and sales funnels and are able to link a Marketing Campaign with Revenue. This allows for better understanding of a campaign’s performance and opens up conversation around opportunities for Optimization and improving Marketing ROI
Paweł Bęczkowski
Senior Web Analyst at Starcom MediaVest Group Poland
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
A good web analyst should have the ability to connect the right dots. What I mean is that right now we have lots of data. A good analyst should have the ability to select meaningful data and analyse it in a way that provides useful insight for a client’s business.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
The biggest challenge I’m facing right now is convincing clients that they need to be data driven organizations. In Poland we still have the problem that offline and online departments don’t exchange data and analytics knowledge. Sometimes departments even fight with each other and deny access to “their” data.
Luckily, in the company that I work for, we were able to convince some of our clients to take proper approach to data.
Right now I’ve learned that only language that CEO understands is language of money. No matter what we propose in terms of data management, if we can prove (or be convincing enough) that this allows to save money, we have a green light. But a green light from CEO doesn’t mean that all the people in the organization will understand how important this is. To be successful in that kind of project there must be someone inside the organization who believes in data and will be connection between client and analytics agency. Otherwise, people treat analysts as strangers, as people who don’t understand their organization, culture, product. If we pass through these two obstacles, we can think about changes.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
For me the best thing that shows me that I’ve done good job is clients' satisfaction.
Not long time ago I presented post-campaign analysis to one of my company clients. Not a big client nor a big campaign, but we’ve done some quality job there. Web analytics part was rather small, only ¼ of the whole presentation. But this part was the only moment when the client was asking a lot of questions and took notes. After the meeting, he said that he didn’t expect that web analytics could be so useful and he wants to do a lot more. I know that this is not “hard” KPI, but I think, that for those moments most of web analysts are doing their job.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
The most important quality for a web analyst is to understand the different web analytics tools and how they technically work.
As a consultsant, you need to be the expert and have a broad business understanding but also know how Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Webtrends etc. collects and handles data. From my 9+ years in this industry, you still meet people who don't understand the data collection behind the tools that they are using.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
I think the biggest challenge that I see, and also have seen is the lack of investment in people who are using the tools in larger companies.
Often web analytics is something that you do 1 hour a month to send out some reports. But you never get to analyse and the discovery phase, where data turns to insight. I always recommend my clients to have a workshop with the everyday users of the tool, because that is where you can inspire and showcase what can be done in the web analytics tools.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
We always thrive to do things as fast as possible.
But we never rush with implementations; hence data collection is something essential that many people will rely on. The easiest way for us to track effectiveness is through "time-on-project" estimates. Often we have a good idea of how long a project will take and we make good-case and worst-case scenarios to ensure that we have enough time to deliver a good product.
A simple way of ensuring you are doing right is to send out a quarterly survey to your clients to ensure that they are happy and satisfied with your service and deliveries.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Never stop asking "why" and "how".
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
The biggest challenge I'm currently facing is to build a bigger team of experienced digital analysts. It's not that there are no good specialists on our market at all – the thing is most of them are happy with their current positions – there's just too much cool things to do at the moment on our market.
What's my learning here? To create our own digital analytics youth academy and train the new Leo Messi of digital analytics.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
It depends on the specified task, but given the fact our main goal is to deliver insights and recommendations that would improve our clients' businesses, it also depends on the time horizon you take into account.
Once our recommendations have already been implemented, it's relatively easy to determine the exact factor we improved someone's business by. Hovewer, it's not possible to determine this factor during the analysis itself. That's why while conducting the analysis we take into account the following set of constraints: the amount of time in which we have to prepare the analysis, the focus on aspects having the greatest impact on the business, the ease and cost of both testing the specific recommendation and implementing it.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Versatility.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
The biggest challenge was a total redesign of whole analytics system for one of publishers, which included switching to tracking via Google Tag Manager, tracking over 90 properties that should collect accurate data within themselves, mobile versions, forums, sending and opening of newsletters, and ideally show traffic data in cumulative view for each topical group.
This implementation took us over 4 months to include and test everything, include all necessary data, check whether all KPIs are being measured and if necessary – add custom dimensions.
Best Advice we could give after this journey ? Ask your customer a ton of questions what do they need to track and how do they want to see it. Work with them on selecting the right KPIs, otherwise you might end up doing the actual work 3-4 times before everything's OK.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
The best way to measure what we do is how our customers are satisfied, if they understand what's going on and how it is measured.
Also we need to meet deadlines, but we take into calculations heavy workshops with the customer so they understand the logic behind all we do. If in the end our customer is proficient in using Analytics and knows his implementation by heart – we succeeded
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Curiosity. There are many traits which a good web analyst should possess.
Better yet, it should be a set of traits, which taken together ensure that the analyst's work makes sense.
If I had to choose the most important one, the primary trait – I would bet on the "researcher's curiosity." It is that trait which makes it impossible for someone to quickly brush through a problem. It does allow – together with inquisitiveness – to find the best possible answer to a given problem. An answer which initially might be hidden behind the very first likely explanation.
Then again…
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
… sometimes you have to be able to say " let's NOT do it."
The grandeur of the problem at hand cannot overshadow the profit of solving it. Ultimately; analyses and proposals are done for businesses and it is their needs that are the most important factor. Therefore return over investment should always be the highest priority. Simple economy. You can't get stuck in a problem which is not worth it.
Especially given that…
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
…everything is relative.
There is no simple set of KPIs which will describe a business exactly the way stakeholders would have it. Which indicators are better in a given situation depends on:
the business model – you have to take different approaches when working for a content site, a typical e-commerce site, or an online publisher.
the department for which the analysis is being done
the work product recipient's depth of knowledge and their place within the structure of their company.
Instead of proposing a prepackaged solution it's much better to work with a complex approach and together set up indicators which would satisfy the need for knowledge on all the levels of management. Combining the customer's experience of the business with the analyst's knowledge will yield best results. This is the moment when it pays to invest time in the planning stage.
KPIs should be refreshed from time to time. Some of the indicators should be replaced with others. Those which turned out to be the most important should be introduced to other departments. Generally – the topic should be alive and should be able to provide answers to the most important questions
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
It's hard to pick one quality as good a good analyst needs to have multiple skills. However, if I need to name one key quality, then I would say that an analyst needs to be able to think critically.
This is needed to solve complex questions, how data requests from the business are actually answering the underlying needs, and to continuously see how data can contribute to the wider business.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
My biggest challenge was joining a company where there was no solid Web Analytics tracking framework in place with unreliable data, whilst there was an immediate need from the business for data. It felt like already opening a store with customers running around (the business), whilst the whole store is still under constrution to get the right product in place (reliable data).
My main learnings during this challenge:
It's important to educate stakeholders around Web Analytics (having a tool doesn't mean that you have reliable data) which helps you to manage expectations about which data is and isn't available.
Ensure that you get buy in from management to get the needed IT resource to get a foundation for a framework in place.
Ensure that you have a long term vision on where you want to go. It's quite easy to get lost in the daily operation and questions from stakeholders, whilst you need to work towards your vision.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
Within our team, goals are set around three main pillars for Web Analyst:
Maintain and improve the tracking framework: Project and tracking requirements are defined within this area and afterwards is visible if the goals are met.
Business consultancy: This is mainly around supporting the business with data. This is harder to make SMART on forehand and therefore 360 degree feedback from stakeholders is an important element.
Conversion Rate Optimization: Within this area, I'm looking at the results of A/B test and the way a Web Analyst is contributing to those activities.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
I think there are several qualities all good web analysts have: curiosity, logical thinking and a real passion for web technologies.
The first of these ensures that the analyst will start to pick up on small trends and data that look interesting and want to understand them without necessarily being asked to dig that deep.
The second trait then allows the analyst to investigate such data in a systematic fashion that enables them to identify root cause in an efficient manner.
The final quality helps on multiple levels: providing context in terms of what atypical data looks like; completing concise investigations (knowing and checking most likely causes first); and making recommendations for enhancements/improvements resulting from their investigations.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
The biggest challenge I think we continually face is making sure that as a team we are embracing, understanding and helping our clients with new technologies, tools or methodologies.
Three years ago, Universal Analytics and Tag Management Systems were not on our radar, whilst remarketing and conversion rate optimisation were far more in their infancy. We have to be pro-active in testing tools and methods in order to ensure we’re offering clients the best service possible and helping them to succeed through adoption of this new technology.
We try to achieve this through a couple of team initiatives – the first is dedicating time each week for everyone in our team to explore an area they are interested in.
The second, hopefully based on the first, is our weekly “kaizen” meeting where we share what’s been learnt that week, whether it be tools or simply good examples of a piece of work.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
As an agency a lot of our work historically has been focussed on GA audits and implementation work. Proving ROI on these types of projects is inherently difficult so we generally measure effectiveness in terms of client happiness and retention.
Being able to convert a simple audit into an ongoing technical support contract or, better still, having the client engage us with more strategic planning and analysis or an ongoing CRO project is a real endorsement of our work. We often ask for 360 feedback from our clients in order to better understand what we are doing well and what we could improve.
Fortunately, our clients seem to like us and we’ve been able to build up a nice portfolio of CRO and attribution projects which are fun to work on. These type of projects often enable us to work closely with our PPC and RTB teams and have led to us winning several industry awards which provides external ratification of our work.
In terms of individual performance we hold formal reviews on a quarterly basis and again try to get 360 feedback both from internal and external stakeholders. However, the focus on this feedback is primarily for personal department rather than performance management. In addition to this our leadership team have frequent informal catch ups with their direct reports and escalate as required.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
The ability to ask the right questions related to the business is a feature that should characterize a good analyst. To achieve this you need to know perfectly analytical tool and have the basics of mathematics and statistics. Learning maths and statistics is an excellent way to develop logical and critical thinking. It makes you a better marketer and, of course, a better analyst.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Last year I collided with the implementation of analytics in one of my clients. I was responsible for implementing the analytics side technology (implementation of Google Analytics on a new website). The technology from which a new website was built of, surpassed me. Seriously!
Technological solutions are awfully fast evolving. There is no way with them to keep up.
It made me thinking that you can not specialize in everything. Since then, I leave the implementation of technological tools to people from my team, and I deal only with numbers and drawing conclusions from them
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
For me the best KPI is the client's happiness, but every KPI is a metric and a metric is a number or ratio. So there is no way to quantify human emotion such as happiness, but this is my secret formula
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Websites today are an integral part of doing business and for many businesses their business is their website. For that reason the most important thing I look for in a web analyst is great business acumen. People with great business acumen view the data through the right lens, and they will also use the right context to deliver the information to stakeholders in the most effective way.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Most of the time stakeholders ask for the numbers rather than clarifying the business questions they want to answer. It is often genuinely hard to help them step-back on what they think the answer to their question should be and make them articulate the real questions they need to answer to be successful.
I have learned that setting up a process for reviewing performance makes everyone coordinate with each other better, and stay more focused on the business problems. My typical process is to set up automated reporting for every stakeholder so they are informed on their metrics; depending on the business, I set up weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meetings with all stakeholders to discuss how the business performs, decide what we should change, and share insights. In that way I keep the conversation focused on where we want the business to go, rather than reacting to a stream of metric request inquiries.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
The Return on Analytics with no action is ZERO. We can do as much analysis as we want, but if we haven’t persuaded people to make a change, or we have not developed the organizational mechanics for our Web Analytics program to effect change, then we are just a cost center in the organization.
When I measure the effectiveness of a program or a team I count how many changes we effected and what their result was on the KPIs. When it comes to Web Analytics, quantity can be more important than quality. I prefer to have an organization make one change a week that increases the bottom line by 1% rather than wait for big changes that could increase the bottom line 10% every couple of months. That’s because the more changes we are able to influence, the more agile the organization will become, and ultimately the more actionable our insights are. After a few months of making constant changes, the organization develops muscle memory; then stakeholders ask for your input to inform their decisions, and then you become a very busy and successful part of the organization.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Curiosity.
A good web analyst needs to conduct many researches and ask many questions to validate hypothesis and understand the big picture. Without curiosity it's hard to do both well.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
The biggest challenge is to track the same customer throughout his / her journey in a single platform.
What I've learned:
The "data silos" problem cannot be solved by just technology. Collaboration from all parts of the business is also a key element
Before you can perfectly track customers' footprint from all customer touch points, identify KPIs for each touch point and optimize each of them to gain "small wins"
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
3 KPIs to measure effectiveness of my team's work:
Media cost efficiency (e.g. avg CPC, avg CPA): Begin with this metric as the data is easy to collect. You can show cost savings as quick wins to the business, especially when it is hard to relate your marketing effort to revenue directly.
Return on marketing investment: The metric that business concerns most however not straight forward to compute when you're working for non-ecommerce focused company.
Team efficiency (i.e. budgeted hours / spent hours): Validate if your team is not fully utilized or overworked to stay efficient. You can bring in more business from an underutilized team while you should prioritize projects and resources for an overutilized team.
Trinadha Kandi
Specialist Leader – Digital Marketing & Analytics at Deloitte Digital
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Story telling skills! Seriously, I believe a good web analyst should have an ability to tell a story beyond the numbers. In the current digital / data world, it’s important not to caught up with just data points like impressions, visits and views, but able to drive the message around value drivers such as customer experience and business impact is the key.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
“Data-driven and Test & Learn” mindset. Either it’s overly complicated or simply ignored! Identifying the quick wins and deliver it through agile way helps companies to create a fine balance between data and it’s value.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
As we say and hear, Customer (satisfaction) is always takes a center stage! If we can help our customers (brands) to create a compelling data-driven experiences for the end customers (consumers), that’s what I call as success factor. The effectiveness of work can be measured on the value we bring in or impact we create!
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Inquisitiveness – the itch to dig deeper and know when to stop once they hit the point of diminishing return.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Building trust with other teams. Insight has the ability to make another team look good or make them look bad. Insight it meant to be the unbiased source of truth, however both truth and bias can come into question when results are unfavourable.
The challenge is to build trust with the key stakeholders so that they know when you are analyzing the data you are hoping that results will be beneficial and if they are not you do your due diligence to make sure that the numbers are correct. In the past i have taken multiple tactics to build trust, some have worked and other have back-fired pretty drastically.
Some of the ways that I have employed over the years:
Open, constant communication with key stakeholders
Detailed methodology slides that include any assumptions made
Getting the key stakeholders to define KPI's upfront
Providing numbers with a confidence interval
Allowing key stakeholders to define target ranges based on your calculations (shrunken, targeted and stretch targets)
The one that really hurt me in the past is getting the key stakeholders to define the KPI's upfront because they really only focus on the things they know they will make better. This often does not correlate with what makes the business successful.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
I measure my team on three KPI's:
Ease of understanding insight that is presented, this is delivered through a survey post presentation
Data accuracy – Using a 3rd party tool called ObservePoint we validate business and vendor rules every day.
Completeness of data – survey based each quarter. I ask "Are we communicating the things you are interested in?"
I don't measure "quality" of analysis because making sure our stakeholders understand what we are talking about is more important than producing something that only we understand.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Patience – getting things done takes time and people will always come to you with numerous different requests. It’s best to try to deliver what you can, as that is the key to your value.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Maintenance – unfortunately with so much changing in technology, just staying on top of tagging and making sure that all expected analytics are being measured is a major challenge. Too often, we would only find out at the end or beginning of the month that some site had had major changes but they forgot to include analytics code or tracking.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
Being able to deliver recommendations to various business unit owners was the best way to measure effectiveness. If we could see trends and come up with creative ideas or suggestions, that delivered value from our team.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
The term 'Web Analyst' definitely needs redefining, at iProspect we are already transforming to digital analyst. The difference is we don’t look at website alone, but at all the different digital assets of our clients to connect the different data sets.
Coming back to your question, If I get a situation to hire a person just based on one quality that would be either proactiveness or tech savvy. In the agency world, being proactive for our clients is very crucial or if you’re tech savvy it definitely helps to tackle even offline challenges using the technologies like beacons, sensors, kiosks etc.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Educating your clients on the value of data and how to make use of it which was the biggest challenge around data & analytics. So the way we solved is to find the major factors such as
Understanding client business which is key if we want our clients to understand the value of data,
Choosing right analytics & CRO platforms (Google Analytics is not always the default pick for some of our clients) and installing it,
Visualising all the data together in a centralised and universal dashboard / reporting system
Generating actionable insights,
Finally, reinventing the budget strategy using the data, in other words attribution.
At iProspect, we have these different levels when approaching clients about the value of data and how we solve it.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
At iProspect, project management plays key role to solve the high demand with right number of employees. So we track each and every task of my team using Wrike – a project management tool that we use internally.
As the number of clients always increases, its important for the team members to be flexible to work on different verticals almost every hour. So we defined a process where once we onboard an employee they will have a clear view on what’s their role is and how they can grow their career at iProspect / Dentsu Aegis Network.
Every employee uses Wrike and we have a system called Horizons that shows the performance of each employee by using the KPI’s such as Teamwork, Decision Making Ability, Communication, Skill set growth etc.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Being an effective communicator is immensely important. A great web analyst must be able to talk to technical and non-technical audiences.
Decision makers are not always technically proficient therefore it is important to present your message in a jargon free manner; clients/directors/VPs prefer stories to help interpret the statistics.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Client(s) who are not data driven in slightest and therefore not utilising their analytics platform.
Upon taking the time and effort to understand their business objectives, marketing strategy, internal processes etc. highlighting throughout where analytics can provide further insight, you obtain their trust and are able to hold their hand through the journey of becoming more data driven.
The base of this occurs from a robust implementation strategy. In doing so, they were able to start to understand their online performance and how it fits into their overall business and KPIs.This process helps an analyst understand different factors/considerations within multiple industries and build strong business acumen, as well as working on their interpersonal skills with clients.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
Monitoring KPIs is vastly important and are a good indication of the success of a project/campaign. Put simply, have mine (or my teams) recommendations increased conversions, leads, product views, click-throughs etc.
Receiving feedback from clients/seniors/colleagues is always a great sign too. I’ve often provided training in web analytics to colleagues and have received positive feedback. It’s also nice to see them actually interacting with the tools instead of hiding in fear.
Artur Żak
Senior Web Analyst at Starcom MediaVest Group
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
There isn't just one, but okay. Each of us must know the answer to the questions how, what and why. How the users entered , how they moved , what they watched, what they bought, why they left, and so on.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
In my daily work, every project I take is a challenge. I create something new or perpetuate what I knew already.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
A well executed and timely project is the only KPI. We also need to divide the project into two parts: the implementation and reporting.
Implementation:
If everything works and collects data correctly, then we recognize that the job is done.
Reporting: reporting is a long and tedious job. The main task is to extract interesting data and draw conclusions from them . If you succeed, that means good job. The happiness comes from the fact that the solutions are used by the client .
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
That depends whether we are looking for someone who is going to conduct analyses or be responsible for deployment of tools and data quality assurance. When it comes to the former, the most important trait would be curiosity. Someone who is into analysis must possess this never-ending urge to dig deeper, to understand better, to challenge his outcomes and findings. Only then will he be a good data analyst.
When it comes to the latter, i.e. someone responsible for deployment of tools and data quality assurance, then I would say that the most important quality is patience. Getting the right data is usually a tiresome job that is really hard to get done. You need a lot of patience to reach the goal but hey, if this job isn’t done right how can you do a good analysis without the data that you can trust?
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Hiring the right people is in my opinion the biggest challenge every company faces. In digital analytics market we have got a huge shortage in talents with analytics background. The competition for these talents gets fiercer every day as more and more companies realize the potential of digital analytics.
From my perspective hiring is one of the areas at every company where you simply cannot cut corners. To get hiring right we have come up with multi-step process to weed out candidates who do not match our expectations. If I were to give advice I would highlight two things:
have your requirements written down, use the list to assess every candidate and never ever let anyone slip through if he or she misses at least one of them,
hire for the culture-fit first.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
First of all we are assessed by our customers. We collect feedback from them to gauge the effectiveness of our work. NPS is the macro metric that tells us how do we fare. Additionally we gather lots of opinions on how we are doing.
The second assessment comes from our strategic priorities. We focus on generating the highest value from data that is possible. That is why we focus on measuring the outcomes of our work in monetary value. We use these values to calculate ROI from our projects.
Adrian Ignatescu
Growth Analyst at Azimo / Personal Website: techchangers.com
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
It's not an easy answer, but if I would have to choose the most important one I would say versatility. A web analyst must cover a wide range of responsibilities, from data crunching to insight creation and implementation.
That is why the web analyst has to be versatile and adapt fast to any of the requests above. Moreover, a good analyst has to be up to date with the latest releases, news and tools in the industry.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
The biggest challenge I have as a web analyst is to make things sound simple even if they are complex behind the scene.
Sometimes we forget that not everybody is data savvy so we have to be careful with how we explain things and build up the story of the analysis. The amount of data we collect and own is massive nowadays so we have to focus on the right pieces and explain them in a simple but comprehensive way (I love visualisations and explained screen shots). Also, it is our job to educate and show people how to use the data and the reports we produce.
Maybe as important as the previous is the actionable insights our reports must contain which improve the business and take it to the next level. Put in simple terms: keep things simple, visual, measurable and actionable.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
I believe the answer here is the classic road map and a few essential KPIs for the business or clients (if you are an agency for example).
At company level, every member of the analytics team should ideally have a road map for the next 3 to 6 months. Obviously, some of the tasks in the road map will intersect with other members of the team and the KPIs should be there as well. A clear and achievable roadmap usually helps to manage and reach the goals and objectives of the team, either client side or agency side.
To keep things even more real, quarterly reviews with the management or the client (agency side)should give us a reality check and collect improvement ideas for the analytics team.
I think another important point here is self service for the different stakeholders in the company. This can take things to the next level. If we can empower other departments of the company to visualise the data and have their own KPIs, the collaboration between departments can be very smooth. Analytics to the rescue!
To be more specific, I'm talking here about custom dashboards, visualisation and segments specifically created for non data departments like marketing, finance,etc.
A few example of KPIs or elements of the roadmap:
A few Critical CR% on the website/app: landing to registration, registration to first purchase/transaction
CPA for the users (do you know your different users?)
Roadmap elements: have X visualisation of the product categories by Z date , ran 3 A/B tests by X date, implemented X,Y,Z elements in the data layer,etc
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
PASSION as it has an addition & multiplying effect and it magnifies other qualities.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Biggest Challenge: No team unity in the Service oriented, Diverse, Matrix Org.
Learnings: Every individual needs to comprehend the strength of togetherness vs. selfness.
We experienced the power of togetherness, so we did everything in our might to achieve the feel of unity. I contributed by bringing togetherness wherever possible.
Second Biggest Challenge: Shortage of DIGITAL Analytics acumen across key potential areas.
Learnings: Increase awareness & open the doors across the potential areas/opportunities.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Once a problem has been identified, a hypothesis has been tested, the data has been analysed, the testing result is written up. However, without a great presentation key findings may be left out of product roadmaps and lost in the backlog for months or years.
So a good analyst shall be able to deliver a great presentation, grab their audience's attendtion, so that the key findings can be acted on.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
The biggest challenge I was facing was to unit business and analytics and optimisation.
Business demands faster analytics capability to provide insight for Optimisation to act on.
Proving causation requires analyst to pick the metrics carefully, and those metrics are tracked correctly!
From many many failed tests, I learned that a good analyst will have to keep pace with their efforts at managing data quality, analytics and optimisation integration, and adaptive planning to deliver a quanlity and insightful analysis.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
Use business KPIs to measure our performance.
My team and myself use business KPIs to measure effectiveness of our activities. We will ensure those KPIs cover the overall goal and the why behind each activity.
By identifying the KPIs each team member is focused on, everyone will have a clear idea of what they’re trying to achieve and how they’re going to achieve it, which means less time spent managing and reporting, and more time doing.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Curiosity. Traditionally I would be looking for someone who has a mathematical / numerical background but this discipline equates to nothing if you can't combine it with somebody who questions the data, develops a hypothesis and takes an iterative approach to analytics before delivering insights, recommendations and, above all, action.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
With the shear volume of web data that we capture (over 70GB of granular session level data a month) the challenge in the first instance was where do we start? The approach we have adopted is to work with our stakeholders to understand their requirements.
Through understanding business priorities and key questions this can help to galvanise your analytics strategy. Once the confidence is built with the stakeholders it then makes it easier to get buy-in or adoption of initiatives that the Analysts have identified through the data.
I think this needs to work two ways though I.e. it is imperative that you let the analysts find patterns within the data and take an R&D approach to providing insight.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
We try to take the mentality that if you can't measure it then why bother doing it. However, the team provide a lot of insight to feed into Marketing that will ultimately see a change made off the back of the recommendation but in reality you can't measure absolutely everything.
We try to deploy test and control where possible and the key KPIs that we ordinarily consider include conversion rate, sales per session, gross margin per customer, cost per sale. We also have tough objectives with £note targets for each analyst. This enables us to understand effectiveness through the year.
What is the most important quality a great web analyst should have?
Flexibility.
What was (or is) the biggest challenge you were facing and what you have learned from it?
Recently I had tried to build Analytical team in my company and It was very difficult for me. There is much more supply then demand on the market and finding right person who meet our clients requirements is a huge challenge. I’m still in a progres of it and recruitment could be the biggest challenge of 2016 too.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your and your team’s work?
I measure it by satisfaction of our clients. I’m totally sure that we made a great job when they are suprised what analytics can do with their conversion rate. Sometimes just bringing a new tool for measurement change a lot and suddenly client find out what are real KPIs of their website. Many users still don’t set their website target especially in non e-commerce platform.
Do you think we've got them all?
Is there anyone you’d like to see here? Or do you believe that you should be in the list?
Go the comments section or to the Twitter profile @UserpeekCom and tell us what you think – we’ll gladly make additions!
Be sure to spread the word around and share the list – everyone should benefit! See you next week.
Disclosure: All profile pictures of experts were taken from their official profiles in social media such as Twitter or LinkedIn.
Torsten is CEO and founder of Userpeek. He is an old stager in the online business with 20 years of experience as an online marketer, conversion rate optimizer and UX strategist.
knowledgeable content