Web Analytics Rock Stars

Your analytics tool is not only installed and working—it’s optimized and delivering data the way you expected. All the reports are in place and you trust the numbers. One of your key report recipients even told you the interface was easy to understand. Yet you still feel like something’s not quite right. Sound familiar?

You’re not alone.

Here’s what often happens once analytics is “up and running”: First, everyone is excited that it’s working at all (those implementation experts we hired really helped out!). Then, folks are happy that their campaigns are running somewhere close to expectations; and that as new sites are added, the tags are in place and key data isn’t lost. Then another month rolls by and the reports are pretty much the same. Sounds good, right? Everybody goes about their business. And then in the third month—same thing. By the fourth month, people start losing interest. And by the sixth month, only the dedicated analysts are looking at the data.

In fact, by the sixth month, the dedicated analyst may be looking for something interesting to talk about. It may take them a long time to find it. And when they do find something interesting, its most likely going to be something that changed.

Here’s what’s wrong: repetitive data is boring. It’s boring because it isn’t useful.

What’s useful is news. News is about what changed. When something changes, it means something better is happening than before, or something worse is happening than before. And in either case, there’s usually something you should do about it. And isn’t that the whole point of analytics? To find news you can use?

How can you find that stuff quickly? Often it may be buried. Think about report number 87, day 16, line 21. That’s where the news is hidden that in Korea (let’s say), a local news program featured your product and there was a major spike in traffic to that product’s page. Did it make top 20? No. And therefore, you might never know about it.

Along comes a product called Dynamic Alert. It’s made by my company, Technology Leaders. Dynamic Alert is pretty simple. It watches all of your existing analytics reports—every data point for every day—and “alerts” you via email when any of those data points have exceeded its historical norm. Then you can look at a chart of the data point in Alert’s own interface, or go right to the analytics tool and look at the report itself.

Alert is not a “thresholding” tool. We’ve seen those: you decide which reports you want to be told about, and how high or how low they can go before you care. Thresholding tools are okay if you have the time to set them for each and every report you really care about (and as long as its only a few). But Alert specializes in digging deep all by itself and mining nuggets out of the data and showing them to you. And you pretty much don’t have to do anything to make that happen.

Okay, that was a sales pitch. But the industry really needs a way to cut through the information avalanche and give users a way to focus on what’s important—what’s actionable. What changed.

If a product like Dynamic Alert can help out, that’s a good thing. And if you end up using a great alerting tool, you may find yourself well ahead of your competitors who are still trying to find report number 87. 
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Andrew Edwards is a founder and former boardmember of the Web Analytics Association. He is a founder and a Managing Partner at Technology Leaders, a New York City-based web analytics consulting company.

Posted in: Online Analytics by Andrew Edwards
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Hiring managers are the gatekeepers to the job you want.  They may write the job description, review your resume, pick the people who interview you, determine who to call back, and make the final yes or no decision.  The attributes hiring managers look for in a candidate are as diverse as the personalities of hiring managers themselves.  However, I think there are several common characteristics that a candidate can demonstrate to show a hiring manager that they are the right person to employ, such as:

• Desire to do the job.  A hiring manager wants to know that you desire to take on the challenge of the opportunity.  After all, while web analytics is an excellent field, it can be difficult, challenging work.  Building a data-driven culture is hard.  Tool configuration can be complex.  Tell them “I want to do this job.” Mean it, and be prepared to answer why…

• Passion for web analytics.  How do you denote passion about web analytics?  It comes out in how you express your aspirations for an analytics-focused career path, the zeal you convey in answers to interview questions, and even your extracurricular industry activities (do you belong to the Web Analytics Association?  Have you gone to a Web Analytics Wednesday?  What blogs do you read?).  Be passionate within context, not gushing.  Hiring managers I know like passion. 

• Relevant Experience.  Obviously, the track record you have building, implementing, participating in, and/or owning an analytics function will appeal to a hiring manager.  But if you don’t have any, and want an entry-level position, there’s no excuse for not getting some when free tools exist.  Deploy Google Analytics or Microsoft Ad Center Analytics on a site you build or a friend’s site (doing so shows passion and gives you experience).

• Subject matter expertise.  What’s the difference between a visitor and a visit?  What’s the relationship of entry pages to visits?  Are conversions measured on visits or visitors?  What’s the difference between the marketing concepts of frequency and recency, and what analytics measures could be used to denote them?  These are straightforward analytics questions that I’ve watched people applying for web analytics jobs not be able to answer correctly.

• Readiness to take ownership.  Demonstrate from past experience at other jobs that you know how to take ownership and drive forward a job function.

• Accountability.  Show to the hiring manager that “you do what you say” and have a history of getting the job done.  What projects have you stepped up to the plate on and delivered?   What organizational obstacles or technical impediments have you surmounted?  

• Ability to think critically.  Google, I hear, asks some wild questions in the interview process.  The famous “how many golf balls fit on a school bus?”  Is the answer relevant to the job?  No.  Rather it is a test of how many parameters and concepts you can apply to work towards and justify your answer as a proxy for your critical thinking ability.  Be prepared!

Of course, it goes without saying that all analytics jobs require some degree of specific talents and necessary experience unique to the opportunity, which isn’t as general as I’ve presented above.  They will vary by job, company, and hiring manager.  But if you can denote you are a candidate with all of the above attributes, you stand a leg up against the competition.  Good luck in your job search!

Posted in: Online Analytics by Judah Phillips
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Starting a New Business in the Business/Web Analytics Space
Mark Guenthner
President, Clicks, Etc. LLC
http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=5255253&trk=tab_pro

Starting a new business is something I have always wanted to do.  Last summer, as a pre-cursor to creating an official company, I began free lancing in the business/web analytics space.  After quite a few years of managing analytical groups, I felt I had reached the confidence level in my skills and business acumen to go off on my own.  In addition, based on my work experience, I knew there is growing demand for such services at companies of all sizes.  My initial target market, though, was and continues to be small-to-mid size companies who do not necessarily have large enough budgets to support an analytical team.

I recently created Clicks, Etc. LLC (www.clicksetc.com is under construction), a business/web analytics consulting firm, in the Seattle area.  Thus far, my clients have consisted of ecommerce companies in the Seattle market, but my service offerings are applicable to any business model.  Up to this point, my work has been generated using my own professional network.  Eventually, once my company is further along in its development, I will be expanding my advertising to other channels and supporting a larger geographic area.  My work, so far, has consisted of site behavioral testing and analysis, promotional analysis, contact strategy, program evaluation, customer segmentation, competitive intelligence, lifetime value analysis, dashboarding and data mining.  I also have spent time working on how to best integrate analytical tools, including web analytic solutions, competitive intelligence offerings, e-mail service providers, etc.  I have found that many of these tools, even in isolation, are not being fully utilized, which means many companies are not getting as great of a return on investment on these tools as they could.

Over the past year, I have learned a couple of important things.  First, ensure you effectively manage your bandwidth, especially if doing work for multiple clients at one time.  At the beginning, I spread myself out too thin across clients and had to make adjustments, in regard to the level of engagement.  Second, being free of a well-defined job description, I now realize I am much more of an entrepreneur than I ever knew.  I spend a lot more time now generating and thinking through new ideas, relating to how to optimize business performance.  Last, taking risks can be exciting.  Taking risks is not always comfortable, but it can be a really great motivator.

Posted in: Online Analytics by Mark Guenthener
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For most companies that rely on web analytics to make critical business decisions, the days of hits and page views are nearly over. Sure, page views will continue to be an important bellwether about the health of your site as a whole. But increasingly, deeper analytics are expected. And with each increasing layer of complexity, staffing the analytics team becomes both more critical and more difficult.

It was one thing to point your log files at an instance of packaged software and review the (often limited) results that analytics could parse from a server log. It is quite another to set detailed reporting requirements, many of them custom and particular to your business, and then perform the necessary page-tagging that will facilitate accurate, meaningful reporting. Often you’ll need to go beyond simple web pages. What about pop-ups and Flash modules? Have you thought about tracking Ajax-based activities? Perhaps it’s no surprise: tracking Web 2.0 functions can be especially challenging. 

A major difficulty facing analytics users today—even very large ones—is the search for the right skills to facilitate complex, evolving web analytics deployments. Often, the internal skills are both dispersed within the organization and incomplete. For instance, many companies have something like an “analytics administrator” responsible for providing reports to different audiences. But this person often lacks the technical skill to define complex tags or troubleshoot their deployment. The same company may have a developer team that knows how to get tags onto the pages, but not what they should be designed to do, nor how to create them. And while many companies have analysts that can define business requirements and understand the output from analytics tools, those analysts neither develop reports themselves nor have the deep technical understanding of networks and integration tasks necessary to facilitate the critical reports they need.

It is unlikely that any one person will combine all the best skills of an administrator, a developer, an analyst, a strategist, and an analytics technology specialist. That said, the requirement does imply a class of professionals that blend of some of these skills to some degree.

Call them Web Analytics Professionals. Currently these folks are found only in a few organizations, and at a handful of consulting companies. They are in great demand. Can large organizations hope to locate, hire, motivate and keep such professionals on the cutting edge of technology and best practices? As with any highly specialized, rapidly evolving profession, it may prove difficult—but perhaps not impossible.

Here are some of the traits commonly found in Web Analytics Professionals:

Curiosity: Analytics is about finding answers. Often self-starters, analytics professionals need to understand objectives and formulate questions that, when answered, perform a serious business function. With requirements constantly evolving, the tendency to ask the right questions needs to be innate.

Technical Mastery: After all the requirements are set, someone has to “make it happen”. While often tool-specific (Omniture, WebTrends etc.), the professional’s technical mastery needs to extend to tag development, network analysis and integration with third party systems. They may not need to know all about your third party systems, but without significant coding and integration skills, the professional will end up saying “I don’t know” too often during the course of an analytics project. Typically, technical mastery requires continuing study (see “self-starter” above).

Liaison: Communication with marketing, business lines and IT are all required. The Web Analytics Professional will need to come across as a friendly partner to each of the three. A person who is chiefly a marketer may appear superficial to the IT folks. A business-line specialist may be too narrowly focused on specific reports to understand how to leverage analytics as a platform. A professional buried too deeply into IT may be perceived as a back-room coder who doesn’t “get” marketers or their imperatives. You’ll want someone who has enough perspective to understand that all three disciplines have a critical interest in analytics—and sufficient communication skills to make all three feel duly served.

Granted, the search for people who blend the above is likely to be a long one, and keeping them may be tougher still. But give the industry time. The first step is to define the class, then find examples of suitable candidates. If that sounds like it will take a while, it may. Today, there are companies who specialize in analytics consulting and some of them may be an answer to current needs. These companies are blending the skills needed for analytics success and are typically called upon to augment staff in ways that help companies go beyond traditional reporting.

Certain organizations (like the Web Analytics Association) and certain industry events (most notably the eMetrics events held nationally) nurture the growth of this professional class. There are course offerings, workshops and discussion groups where critical knowledge can be assembled. Wide membership in and support for these forums will be critical to maturing the industry.

Finally, a note on the supply-side: this is a great time to be in web analytics—it’s a growth industry, and appears to be holding its own even when other sectors may be cutting back. For web analytics practitioners (or anyone who thinks they might want to be one), here is some advice: build yourself into a Web Analytics Professional, and they will come.

—

Andrew Edwards is a founder and former board member of the Web Analytics Association. He is a founder and Managing Partner at Technology Leaders, a New York City-based web analytics consulting company.

Tags: analytics consulting, staffing web analytics teams, Web Analytics Association, web analytics deployments, Web Analytics Professionals, web analytics tools
Posted in: Online Analytics by Andrew Edwards
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Job opportunities in Internet marketing and analytics are more numerous today than ever before.  Not all Internet jobs, however, are created equal, regardless of title and salary.  You should use a number of different factors to evaluate job opportunities:

• Continuous improvement. The Internet is constantly evolving, and your job needs to provide an opportunity to keep up with emerging technologies whether technically or in business context.  The right job today should give you the chance to expand your skill set in a way that prepares you to deliver on tomorrow’s business challenges.
   
• Work life harmony.  People often talk about work-life balance, and that’s fine.  But that statement implies that to balance life, you need to take away from work, and to balance work, you need to take away from life.  The best jobs provide a harmony – a cadence that lets you do superb work and live a full, satisfying life.
   
• The ability to influence.  The best jobs allow you to step out of the cube and into the spotlight where you can influence others by expressing your expert opinions, applying context to data, and helping make decisions that improve business performance.
   
• A growth path.  No one that I know wants to take a job where they can’t grow into a larger, strategic role, and gain more responsibility.  When assessing your current job or looking for a new role, you need to find out what happened to the person who previously had the job. Or if it’s an entirely new role, you should find out how your manager envisions the team and company developing in a way that lets you fulfill your career aspirations.
   
• The people you will work with.  You may be around your peers at work more than your friends in real life.  You want to work with people you don’t just tolerate, but enjoy working with.  That doesn’t mean they have to share the same politics, style, philosophies, or schedule with you, but you want to be able feel comfortable expressing your opinions and working on a collaborative team together.
   
• Your boss.  Next to your immediate family, spouse, and friends, your boss is a pivotal, important figure in your life.  In a positive work situation, you should be able to trust your boss and communicate openly and honestly with them.  You don’t want to fear contact, or completely dislike the person.  Listen to what your gut tells you about your future boss in an interview, because you are probably right.
• The package.  Needless to say, we all work because we find fulfillment in the work activity and because we want the money.  The package offered from your suitor should include a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package that makes you feel good about getting out of bed in the morning and heading to the office.
   

While these seven factors are only a few of the dimensions you should evaluate when considering a new job or evaluating your current job, they provide a framework for assessing current and future employment in a way that empowers your autonomy and happiness.  Good luck in your search!

Tags: Continuous improvement, growth path, influence, IQ Workforce, marketing analytics jobs, marketing analytics opportunities, salary package, Web Analytics Jobs, Web Analytics Opportunities, Work life harmony
Posted in: Online Analytics by Judah Phillips
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