A Good Web Analyst Is Hard To Find

Posted by Akin Arikan on March 29, 2008

0 comments | 3522 reads

There is ample advice nowadays for those who want to light the fire under their company's web analytics practice.

There are more web analytics blogs than for any other type of business intelligence. Just see the blog roll of one of the brilliant bloggers for example, Judah Philips.
There are numerous great books on web analytics that cover almost any aspect of the art. A few of the most recent ones are the following for example:
There are a number of experienced consultancies ready to step in and attach some wings to your web analytics program. Consider the following for example: Avenue A Razorfish, ClickInsight, Semphonic, Stratigent, Web Analytics Demystified, Zaaz
There are educational programs offered by various parties, e.g. the web analytics certification course by the UBC, recorded lessons by MarketMotive, and not to the least, the resource center of the Web Analytics Association.

Why then are good web analysts still hard to find ???

It is because a good web analyst needs to know more than:

the technical aspects about measuring web visitor behavior
the capabilities of his or her web analytics solution
how to respond to metrics requests by business users

Namely, at most organizations web analysts are faced with marketers / business colleagues who ask nothing more of them than endless amounts of reports on "How many visitors did we have to this page or that page or this link or that link ..."

Yet, good web analytics is not about analytics. It is about taking action on analytics. But, no action was ever taken on mundane reports such as the above that just count eye balls.

In other words, too many times the marketers are not fulfilling their part because they are not setting specific goals such as: "Hey, web analyst, your job is to help me improve business value generated from our online customers in regards to product XYZ by x% within the next 3 months. How can I do that?"

When the business user is not doing their part, the good web analyst's job is to start a lobbying + education storm to try to remind the business user of what is expected of them. That is hard and I am not sure whether education/books/blogs are available to web analysts to help them with this proactive responsibility of theirs.

Maybe analysts in other disciplines such as CRM face similar issues and have better materials to guide them?

Akin Arikan

Akin Arikan, the author of Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, is a director of product strategy for IBM's web analytics and interactive marketing solutions. Akin has been working with analytics practitioners since 1999.

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