Thalasar Ventures

The Skills required by a Web Analytics Consultancy

 

Web Analytics consultant is an easy title to claim.  But it can mean many different things, even within what is currently seen as quite a narrow field.  A web analytics consultancy is likely to contain a number of consultants with different skills sets, experiences and knowledge.  The appropriate consultants are assigned to projects depending on what needs to be done.

There are many tasks required of the web analytics consultant involving different types of skills.  The implementation and configuration of the web analytics tool requires technical knowledge and the ability to understand code.  Setting up relevant reports and dashboards needs Excel skills.  The analysis of the web analytics data requires someone with a more analytical approach, not always found in someone with technical skills.  And transforming the data into insights and intelligence and provide the client with recommendations on how to improve their business performance needs a wider knowledge base including commercial sense and an understanding of marketing.

Web Analytics consultancy requires the knowledge of many tools too.  You have your most popular web analytics tools such as Omniture SiteCatalyst, Omniture Discover, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Google Analytics and Yahoo! Analytics.  But there are many other sources of data available as well that a web analytics consultant could use to aid in investigating and understanding visitor behaviour.  These include Ad Tracking tools including AdWords and DoubleClick, Heat mapping and tools for recording visitor sessions.  Added to this is qualitative data from sources such as onsite surveys or usability studies.  Finally, once you have identified issues with a website, solutions needs to be tested to see which version of a button or page is most effective with the website visitors.  This then requires the knowledge of A/B or Multivariate Testing tools with key examples being Google Optimiser and Test & Target.

There is such a wide range of knowledge required, even within this specialised field, that no one person can know it all.  Web analysts argue that it is the approach and mindset that matters, not the tool knowledge.  A good analyst can learn to use any tool but the important thing is knowing what data should be investigated given a certain problem.  An analogy is this is that once someone knows how to use a smartphone, it doesn’t matter which type they are given.  It helps if it is a brand they know inside out but an iPhone user can work a Samsung Galaxy S and vice versa.

It is not so easy with the different roles within web analytics.  If you are good at analysing web analytics data, it doesn’t mean you can easily switch to implementing web analytics code.  Totally different skill sets are required, there is some cross over knowledge but generally a person who is great at one is unlikely to have the right skills to be good at the other.  This difference is intensified with the more high end web analytics tools such as Omniture SiteCatalyst due to the sheer complexity of the tools.

With all this in mind, an organisation should ensure that when working with a web analytics consultancy, that the consultants assigned to them are appropriate for the task at hand.  Do not be as concerned if the consultant does not know every little feature

 

 

L3 Analytics is a London based web analytics consultancy providing in-depth analysis of online data acquired from advanced web analytics tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst, Omniture Discover, Sitestat and Google Analytics. They provide advice and consultancy to individual businesses and agencies by deducing insights and intelligence from the web analytics data which is used to drive improvements in business performance.

 

 

 

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