Analyze This!
Mountain View, CA
Male, 37
I manage web analytics and business intelligence for a leading software provider/Internet services company. I spend a ton of time in Excel manipulating traffic sourcing and user behavior data from Omniture and Google Analytics, internal log data, partner data and other sources, finding insights and coming up with recommendations for action, producing reports & forecasts, and supporting various product teams within the company.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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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.
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.
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