Building out a web analytics team
This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.
Despite the tough trading conditions a trend that I have observed here in the UK and I expect, is that organisations are continuing to build out their web analytics capabilities and grow their teams. A number of clients I work with are looking to bring on new people and the job market for web analysts remains reasonable healthy. In some cases this means that companies are looking to appoint their first person into a new role, but increasingly some organisations are looking to to expand the team to 2, 3 or more people.
An interesting challenge for organisations when building up an analytics team to determine the right mix of skills within the group, is manage the variety of tasks that a web analyst team has to handle. I believe that there are three main competencies that companies need to look for:
• Insight generation
• Data integrity management
• Data management and manipulation
One of the key requirements of any analytics team has to be to produce actionable insight that the organisation can use to make decisions and drive the business forward. To do this someone needs to extract the value from the investments that have been made in data and technology. This is the true role of the web analyst. The skills and competencies needed for insight generation are business orientated rather than technically orientated. In my view a good web analyst is an internal consultant with strong data pattern recognition skills that can communicate their findings to the business in terms it can understand. One of the inherent attributes of a good web analyst must be curiosity, a desire to understand why things are the way that they are and what can be done about it. For me, most analysis is about pattern recognition, the ability to identify trends and associations in the data and also by the same token things that don’t look right.
Most people don’t like making decisions on dodgy data. Getting the data integrity right is vital. Generating good quality data from a web analytics system requires continuous management and maintenance and is another competency required in a web analytics team. This requirement is more technical in nature and requires a different set of competencies and skills than the insight generation requirement. Most web data is collected using page tags these days and most data quality problems stem from data collection issues. Pages aren’t tagged in the first place or the tag is wrong and collects the wrong data or data isn’t collected at all. As organisations analytical requirements become more sophisticated, the data integrity issue becomes more complex. Deep level skills are required to ensure that the right data is being collected in the right way and that the system configuration is right to produce the right databases and reports for insight generation.
If organisations are building out their web analytics team it probably means that the web is becoming a more strategic and mainstream channel for them. At the same time it is coming out of the silo and the business wants to know how the digital channel interacts with other channels. At this point data integration becomes more of an issue and so good data integration and management skills are required in the team. The requirement often becomes to take data from one system and import it into another or to take data from two or sources and created a new data repository.
The question then becomes whether there competencies can be found in the same person or whether different types of people are needed in a team. In my experience it is rare that a single person has all the competencies that I’ve described. Someone who has strong insight generation skills may have a good understanding about data integrity issues but is probably not the person best suited to wiring a specification document for tags to be put on a new piece of functionality for the site. In the same way, someone with good data management skills may not feel comfortable presenting some findings to a group of executives. As digital analytical teams grow, organisations need to determine more carefully the competencies required within those teams and recruit accordingly.