At the beginning of your career, the hardest thing is to understand whether you are going in the right direction and how to quickly become an expert in your field. What exactly should you do, what should you focus on?
I've put together a list of key recommendations to help a budding web analyst navigate what's really important for their work.
DiCaprio Throws Money: Meme
1. Build your competencies
A web analyst is a specialist who not only works with analytical tools, indicators, and makes reports in Excel. He is also a researcher who finds out why one user left the site without finishing an article albania phone number resource while another filled out a form and ordered a product. Therefore, it is useful for an analyst to understand marketing, copywriting, and psychology. But that's not all.
Learn to monitor the market situation, including competitor news and price levels. Any company is part of the market, it does not exist in isolation from other participants and is subject to general rules. There are analysts who collect only information from their own website and "steam" in these numbers. They do not try to generalize the data, look at the situation as a whole and draw conclusions that will help the business make decisions. But such specialists remain simple statisticians. If you want to become someone more, start understanding marketing and sales.
Memo to the analyst
Source: alex-burba.ru
2. Read books, industry channels and industry experts
It is not enough for a web analyst to be able to count numbers and draw beautiful dashboards. Employers want not only to see tables with indicators, but also to understand what these indicators mean, what problems they are talking about and how these problems can be solved. Therefore, specialists with product thinking are becoming increasingly in demand, thinking not within the framework of their function and job responsibilities, but within the framework of the task that needs to be solved. Therefore, the books that I recommend reading to a beginner specialist touch upon issues of not only web analytics, but also marketing and business.
Here is my top list of books:
Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics 2.0 in Practice: Subtleties and Best Practices. This book is on every “must read” list for web analysts. It will teach you how to work with key website metrics, identify weaknesses, and use web analytics tools.
Ron Kochavi, Diana Tan, Ya Xu "Confidence A/B Testing". The authors talk about what A/B tests are and how to conduct them. They provide real examples of companies that improved their sites thanks to testing.
Maeks Dimitri, Brown Paul B. "Key Numbers. How to Earn More Using the Data You Already Have." The book tells how to identify key clients, what indicators allow you to draw conclusions about their needs, how to optimize a website and marketing strategy.
Marco Hassler "Web Analytics". This book will help you understand the basics of web analytics, including SEO and web development. And this is despite the fact that it was written back in 2010.
Carl Anderson "Analytical Culture. From Data Collection to Business Results". Here, examples are given on how to implement data-driven approaches to management in business, which are based on the collected data. The book will allow you to take a broader look at the role of analysts in the work of the organization and understand how data helps improve business.
Marketing
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Industry channels and social media groups will help you develop product thinking. They publish news, analytics, expert opinions, and cases that are useful to read.
Telegram:
Blog of Yakov Osipenkov ,
ProMetrics ,
R4marketing .
Facebook* (a social network owned by Meta, which is banned in Russia):
End-to-end analytics ,
Club of anonymous analysts ,
Dashboards for business ,
Google Analytics & Tag Manager talks .
3. Don't worry if you don't have a college degree.
The chance to enter the profession of an analyst is not only for those who have received higher education in this field. According to the study , people of other professions, even without higher education, can become web analysts.
The traditional way to enter the profession is online courses. This is usually quite expensive, but online schools teach quickly, and you don’t need to search for bits of knowledge on the Internet. Some schools also help graduates find work after training.
By the way, Calltouch also has its own Academy . On the online platform, you can get free knowledge on marketing, digital tools, and analytics — several units are dedicated to it. Short video lessons last only 1.5 hours, there are interactive tests to check your knowledge — a good option for those who want to quickly master the necessary skill in analytics or a related field.
Another way is self-study using open sources of information. This option is also free, but it will take a lot of time and effort.
4. Don't be afraid to experiment and don't forget to test hypotheses
An analyst looks for bottlenecks, draws conclusions, and finds ways to improve the indicators. But without testing in practice, any assumptions will remain speculation. Experiments and tests help find the right solutions. So it is worth learning A/B testing - the basics can be found in the books and channels I mentioned above.
At the initial stage, you can make a table to collect hypotheses. In the first column, you will write down all your ideas, and then transfer those that seem promising to the second. Over time, you will be able to immediately determine which hypothesis is potentially more successful.
5. Ask a lot of questions
Asking the right questions is one of the key, but seemingly underrated, skills of a web analyst. The more questions an analyst asks programmers, marketers, and salespeople, the deeper they delve into the problem and the better the solution they come up with.
Communication skills in general are a very useful skill to have in your skillset. After all, a web analyst has to collect requirements, find out details, explain the essence of tasks, and defend your opinion. It’s good that these skills can be developed.
