eMetrics: What Makes a Good Web Analyst?

What does it take to be a good web analyst?

This was the question raised several times throughout the 2009 eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Jose, CA this past week.

The responses across the board were fairly consistent. The most valuable qualities for a successful web analyst cited time and time again were:

• Inherent sense of curiousity. A good analyst always asks questions, wanting to know more.    

• Business acumen. A good analyst is able to provide context for the data and analysis; therefore, they know the business and the current business climate. They are able to connect the dots because they understand the business purpose and can identify and focus on the business problems and disciplines apart from analytics. They have both a great sense of the data and the business.

• Honest, unbiased and credible. A good analyst is not be biased by politics, bonuses, and compensation packages. They are not afraid to provide a real analysis based on the data, no matter how unpalatable that analysis may be.

• Creative. They can effectively communicate the results of analysis and can use data to tell a story. They have a mastery over visualization and can take a complex story and boil it down to story that is simple to the untrained eye, but complex enough to provide answers.

• Marketing savvy.  A good analyst can sell the analysis at the right level, is passionate and cares. They market the analysis internally through email, presentations, posting the analysis, providing visualizations and training others on understanding Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Avinash Kaushik - author, blogger, and analytics evangelist - explained that knowledge of tools is not a criteria – in fact it is the opposite. We can’t teach analysts how to think, but can teach them what buttons to push.

What matters more is that an analyst have a flexible mental model, curiousity, and a good breadth of and diverse experience in life. He went on to say that we tend to look for analysts in the wrong places. We often look for data nerds but we need analysts who can accept the imperfection of web data (because there is a lot of it!) and still see the lessons we can learn from that data. 

Avinash believes analysts don’t need to be technically savvy. After all, he explains, his is not looking for a technical implementor. What he prizes even more is the analyst's mental model and analysis.

I used my flip camera to record the eMetrics conversation between Avinash Kaushik and Microsoft's Ian Thomas at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit where they discuss rules for analytics revolutionaries. The sound quality is poor, but audible. Enjoy!

eMetrics: Rules for Analytics Revolutionaries from LauraLee Dooley on Vimeo.