Business Analyst

Are you able to invasively track your users' web surfing habits through cookies or otherwise? Do you think that doing so breaches any privacy boundaries?

Asked by Twig over 12 years ago

Interesting question. No, I'm not able to invasively track users' web surfing habits, nor do I care down do that level of detail. As a web analyst, you're looking for macro-level trends, or trends of users grouped into segments. We're not bad guys out looking to invade our users' privacy, but rather trying to figure out why they're coming to our site, what they're trying to achieve, and how successful we are in delivering a user experience that fulfills their goals. We collect data in order to serve our users better.

Have you had any interesting "aha" moments regarding social media and its effectiveness as a marketing tool? For example, is there something that people generally think is useful but is actually a complete waste of time (or vice versa)?

Asked by PatC over 12 years ago

Social media marketing results will vary based on the nature of your business. It's not suited to all types of businesses, and it will be up to you to decide what you think may or may not work for your company. To be honest, my experience with social media marketing is limited, and it's not something I deal with a lot in my current role (that falls more to our PR team). But I do have some exposure to it from back when I was consulting. Too many companies think they can simply create a Twitter account, and bam, they're social media marketers. It doesn't work this way. First, your company needs something interesting to talk about. If you're Cisco making routers, this probably won't be an effective marketing channel for you. If you're Vince selling Sham-wow, you may have struck gold. To be effective at social media marketing requires a few elements coming together 1) an implementer - someone who can lay the foundation of the tracking for FB, twitter, etc. that can tie the data back to a conversion attribution model that can help you discern what importance your social media played in driving that sale, 2) a creative person - someone who has the knack to take your product, its positioning and value proposition, and come up with tweets/posts that both are interesting to your audience and also drive home your selling points. This might be the hardest part of the equation. 3) You need a talented product owner/web designer that can create a landing page experience that will capitalize on these users once they've taken that initial next step. In my limited experience with this, Twitter and FB served two very different purposes for one of my clients who was utilizing these channels effectively. I can't say this will apply to all companies, but Twitter was more suited to branding and lead acquisition, while FB (pages) seemed to be a tool we could use to hook the initially interested user in to a final sale. We tried FB advertising and the results were dismal. I've heard stories from friends at other companies who have had great success with FB advertising, but stressed it took them a lot of tweaking to find the right call to action language on the ads that really struck gold. To address the last part of your Q, is this useful or a complete waste of time, you better have a rock-solid product if you want to leverage social media. If you don't, you'll find that both Twitter and FB go from being a marketing tool to a customer support platform.

Can you give an example where something you mined from all of your data/analytics actually catalyzed a change or new initiative at your company?

Asked by quikonthedraw over 12 years ago

I lead initiatives for new analytics tools all the time. I've successfully led platform switches from one major vendor to another, and convinced the company to appropriate more budget to enterprise-level SEO tools by providing data on what an increasingly important new user acquisition stream that channel has become. This resulted in us being able to better react to changes in Google's search ranking algorithm and maintain/increase our organic traffic. 

In my current role, we're very rigorous with hypothesis development, A/B/n testing, analysis, and further iteration. This has helped influence a wide range of things on our site like marketing messaging, sign-up flow improvements, site functionality, etc. And that's just in the 3 months I've been with the company!

OMG! I've wanted to become a BA for ever- cannot segue out of an EA role. I'm also tech support; web developer, and consult on projects such as emergency broadcast notifications and social network portals. Pls-how do I get your job?

Asked by Jen almost 12 years ago

Hi Jen - excuse my ignorance but what's an EA role? One great way to get into web analytics / business analysis is to setup your own website, install Google Analytics, and start playing around. Google offers a ton of training resources: http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html Another great way to start learning is to volunteer for the Analysis Exchange, which is a place where you can volunteer to offer free web analytics consulting to not-for-profit organizations.

What would you consider to be the next step up from Google Analytics? Is there better free software, or is the next step a premium product? What do you recommend?

Asked by St. Jonny over 11 years ago

Google Analytics is a really capable tool, even the free version. The key to extracting the most value from it really lies in your implementation, use of custom events, custom variables, campaign tracking, etc. I haven't used any of the other free tools out there, so it's hard for me to comment on those, but GA is very, very good. I've heard of some people using Piwik, but don't know much about it.

The problem with GA for enterprise-level analytics lies in data ownership. With the free version, Google owns the data and only backs it up for a certain window of time. There is also the issue of GA (free) reporting sampled data. With the Premium (paid) version, you get unsampled data, 50 instead of 5 custom variables, visitor-level segmentation and attribution modeling, unsampled data export, content grouping, and implementation support. 

Other enterprise-level analytics tools like Omniture's SiteCatalyst, Discover, etc. are nice because they're a bit easier to work with in terms of data export, Excel integration, and having API's companies can use to extract the data into internal data warehouses. But in terms of ease-of-use and complexities in implementation, I find Omniture/SiteCatalyst to be less friendly than GA Premium. GA also benefits from having USEFUL dashboarding functionality, whereas SiteCatalyst's dashboard functionality is horrible.

A step above SiteCatalyst is Discover, which is my personal favorite analytics tool. The abillity to drag-and-drop segments and metrics and slice and dice your data in multiple ways on the fly is great for exploratory analytics that can lead to those key insights and a-ha moments. 

However, unless you're a larger business with $$$ to burn and a clear need to switch to a paid analytics / enterprise-level tool, I'd stick to GA. Even highly-trafficked sites like Yelp were running GA (free) for ages. If you're going to spend the $$$, hire a capable implementation consultancy like AnalyticsPros, E-Nor, or Cardinal Path. All those guys really know GA in-and-out, and with the right implementation you'll be wowed at how much value you can get out of a free tool.

I have a bachelor in computer science, and I am currently working as a web developer. How would I transition into a BA role?

Asked by Endz over 11 years ago

Depends what type of analytics you're hoping to do. I like to think of analytics as consisting of 4 quadrants - Business In / Business Out / Tech In / Tech Out. 

• Business In
  • Analytics strategy - what are the business goals we're trying to achieve and the main questions we're trying to answer?
• Business Out
  • Sifting through the data to come up with actionable insights and recommendations.
• Tech In
  • The actual analytics implementation and data collection infrastructure. Knowing the Omniture/GA functions in and out and helping someone handling "business in" collect the right data to answer business questions.
• Tech Out
  • Creating data warehouses, writing SQL queries to generate reports, etc.

 

I dabbled in CS/engineering as an undergrad, know HTML/CSS/JS decently well, but have always leaned more to the business quadrants than the tech quadrants. All four areas require a certain degree of technical competance, but for the business side you really need to be able to prioritize, not get lost in the weeds, and figure out how you can deliver the most value to your organization in a way they can understand. You need to distill complicated analyses down to the key takeaways. An MBA is helpful for this.

The other analyst on my team is a former software dev, and she's much better with the technical areas - helping setup SQL queries, automating reports, data QA, etc. These roles are also in high demand as you'll often see them listed as "Technical Business Analyst" or something like that.  Places like Amazon hire a lot of these folks, who know about Hadoop, Python, etc. and the "business analytics" function is rolled into part of the job description for their product managers and category managers.

If you're serious about a transition, I'd just start volunteering with the Web Analytics Demystified Analytics Exchange and start following leading analytics blogs and LinkedIn groups. Make a hobby website and install Google Analytics and start getting into the reports and familiarizing yourself with the tool. Other great tools to get used to are ClickTale (on-page analytics) and UserReport (voice of customer tool). Also try using Google Tag Manager to manage the different analytics tools you have setup. Tag management is the direction I see the industry heading in.