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How web analysts decide success or failure



Today's web users are demanding

As eCommerce continues to overtake high street sales, price comparison websites boom, mobile internet access starts to outstrip desktop access, web users become more focused on price plus service, and companies jostle for search ranking supremacy, website performance has become absolutely critical to online sales success.

At the heart of any thoughtful online marketing strategy is an ongoing investment in web analytics. Large retailers in particular recruit teams of web analysts to ensure that the complex customer journey through their website is as inviting and intuitive as possible.

Today’s web users are demanding. Short attention spans, high expectations, social-media savvy, price conscious and fully aware that there is always another retailer eager to earn their loyalty. In the strongest eCommerce teams, a range of web analytics tools are used to analyze and define the performance of design, digital analytics marketing, online advertising, customer communications, CRM, search engine optimization and the entire on-site user experience.


Web Analytics - It's all about the numbers

It all comes down to conversion: converting visits into sales, visitors into loyal customers. A sound web analytics strategy employs the latest web analytics tools – with Google Analytics, Omniture, Adobe Insight, SiteCatalyst and Webtrends among the most popular – to deliver deep insights into website performance and customer trends, with a view to attracting and retaining customers and increasing sales.

With so much at stake, it’s no surprise that the demand for good web analysts is growing. Typical salaries for a Web Analyst are $60k, rising to $80k for a Senior Web Analyst, $95k for a Web Analytics Manager and a Head of Web Analytics might earn around $125-$150k. Of course, for big campaigns, new website developments and rollouts, new web analytics tools may need implementing, which is where more contract web analysts are employed. These typically command a day rate of $400-$800 depending on the level of experience.

Such competitive salaries indicate just how important web analysis software is to online sales success. The more sophisticated the analytics tools and techniques, the more accurate the data and the better the customer behavior insight.


What will you be doing as a Web Analyst?

Truly comprehensive website strategies measure offsite and onsite web analytics.

Offsite web analytics tools measure and analyze the visibility of the website, its penetration of other websites and social media and the potential audience for the goods or services.

Onsite web analytics examines the visitor’s behavior on the website itself. From landing page performance to routes into and paths through the website from arrival to checkout – including friction points where a visit may be abandoned.

CRM analytics targets customer purchasing behavior, so that marketing teams can accurately analyze customer trends from location or route to website, to types and volume of product purchased. Done right, this means companies can promote particular products to particular customers and improve conversion rates.

We’re a very long way beyond the click counters that marked the earliest efforts to measure website performance. Today’s web analysts exploit a raft of advanced software tools to delve deep into the data and deliver the facts on everything from A/B and multivariate testing to the effectiveness of various calls to action.

Harnham blog & news

With over 10 years experience working solely in the Data & Analytics sector our consultants are able to offer detailed insights into the industry.

Visit our News & Blogs portal or check out our recent posts below.

Web Analytics Trends

Web Analytics Experts On The Year’s Biggest Trends

Size. Scale. Strategy. Metrics. The measurement of the customer experience is inherent throughout our marketing and advertising efforts in today’s world. So, we thought we’d take a step back and ask Data professionals about their thoughts on current and upcoming trends in the realm of Web Analytics.Their answers were as wide and varied as the people who gave them. But to a one, these are all in executive leadership and are exclusively focused on Web Analytics and its effects on consumer behavior. Personalization Gets More Personal  "With IoT, today service providers have a huge amount of data about their consumers. In Web Analytics, this has led to analysis of individual customer behavior, which is enabling companies to offer personalized services to their customers.  Therefore, on-page analysis has become popular because the aim here is to convert the visitor to a purchaser when the opportunity presents itself. With voice search on the rise, this has led to a push towards analyzing voices- so as to understand emotions and identify points of frustration which lead to abandoned carts."  - Avinash Chandra, Founder and CEO at BrandLoom  Privacy Focus  “Many people are concerned about how the likes of Google and Facebook handle the analytics data they collect. Google Analytics has been the default choice for most tech teams for years now, but it's being installed on fewer and fewer sites nowadays. Instead of handing your website's visitors' data to Google, many young companies want to be in control of their visitors' data.”  - Uku Tehrat, CEO at Plausible Insights Reading the Tea Leaves of Web Analytics “Access to deep information has a drawback; it’s made us reliant on the instantaneous raw data from each analytics channel to inform strategy. However, that data isn’t always accurate. To solve the problem, marketers and analysts will need to take a more holistic view of the data.  Instead of, for example, tracking revenue by channel solely in analytics, the analytics professional will be looking at the real revenue of the business and evaluating the changes in the marketing that have led to that result. By looking at the real business KPIs and creating narratives that reflect the whole of the data, an analyst will be able to avoid the short-term thinking that comes from the constant analysis of daily analytics reports.” - Doug R Thomas, Marketing Consultant at Magniventris  The Third Wave of Business Intelligence  Sean Byrnes, the CEO of Outlier, an analytics solution provider, is seeing an interesting shift in Data Analytics. This shift has us entering the third wave of Business Intelligence (BI).  The first wave, data centralization, aggregated business data in a single place, making it easy to know where to look for answers. Next, data visualization tools made extracting answers easy and accessible, allowing anyone in the organization to make use of them.  The third wave is Automated Analysis. This wave will have a big impact on data scientists and how they do their jobs. In this third wave of BI innovation, automated analysis systems will constantly examine all of a business' data and provide "curated" insights related to specific and actionable changes in the business. This is vastly different than today's dashboards, giving data scientists specific, daily direction on which parts of the business to focus on. This also helps data scientists elevate their own brand to one of a data counselor. Helping define how to use data insights to fine-tune the business.  - Sean Byrnes, CEO at Outlier. Video Marketing is Here to Stay “From a marketing perspective, the biggest trend I see moving forward is the continual rise of video consumption.  Consumers are shifting from reading blogposts to watching YouTube videos, and from reading books to watching Netflix. We know that the currency of the online world is engagement. This means that whichever large company, small business, or individual can engage their audience most effectively, wins.  When it comes to web analytics, it is important to identify the metrics that signal strong user engagement and to work to improve upon the mover time. Some of these metrics include watch time, average view duration, re-watches, returning viewers, etc. The better you can get these metrics, the more engaged your audience will be.” - Jeremy Lawlor, Co-Founder & Chief Strategist at Active Business Growth AI-Enabled Data Interpretation  “AI is constantly being mentioned as an enhanced way to interpret and help visualize data, and we are seeing various tools that promise to do that. I also see a lot of potential in using Web Analytics to predict consumer behavior and have better forecasts of performance. In general, we will have better ways to decipher them in order to better serve our needs in understanding the historical data and identifying trends and risks.”  - Gabriel Shaoolian, Founder and Executive Director at DesignRush A Three-Pronged Shift of Integration and Visualization Data connection web + mobile + offline (data integration)  DataViz development (data visualization) Development of the data-driven business model  "This shift towards a more integrated and data-driven approach should be important to business. After all, it’s the business model not just of the future, but now." - Krzysztof Surowiecki, Managing Partner at Hexe Data, a Data Analytics company A Growth Spurt   “Web Analytics should expect a growth spurt in the next decade. Technology has gotten so complicated, we need people – senior level people – with experience to understand and distill data to the business. Even something as simple as Salesforce, needs experts. Jobs aren’t going anywhere.  Businesses are desperate for educated individuals to help them make sense of all the data and filter out that which “fake” (read: bot traffic) in order to really understand the numbers and what that means for their business.”  - Daniel Levine, trends expert and keynote speaker at DanielLevine.  Web Analytics has been backstage long enough. As businesses aim to strike a balance between the data measurement of the customer journey, ensuring customers’ data privacy, and tailoring each experience, there’s plenty of work here to go around. And with the estimated growth spurt in the next decade, now’s the time to jump in. If you’re interested in Web Analytics, we may have a role for you. Check out our current vacancies or get in touch with one of our expert consultants to learn more. For our West Coast Team, call (415) 614 - 4999 or send an email to sanfraninfo@harnham.com.  For our Mid-West and East Coast Teams, call (212) 796 - 6070 or send an email to newyorkinfo@harnham.com. 

Lauren Harris

Lauren Harris

29. August 2019

Death of the DMP, Rise of the CDP

Death of the DMP, Rise of the CDP

The days of generically using Data in Marketing are on the decline as information gathering becomes more laser focused. Once the domain of third-party sites looking to build partnerships and boost campaign efforts, Data Management Platforms (DMPs) are making way for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). Under the weight of data breaches, GDPR, and other security issues, technologies that center around consent are helping build consumers into campaign strategies. This is a reversal from older strategies to build data from historic data profiles at channel level.  Data is Data, So What’s the Difference? In a nutshell, DMPs act as “equalizers” – all companies have access to predefined parameters of data. CDPs are “differentiators” – each customer is unique with information driven from first-party historical and contextual data, determined along the customer’s purchase journey. Tailored customer data has now gone beyond the scope of Data Management Platforms and offers marketing insights nearly unheard of just a few years ago. Now, we can understand our customers not only from their historical, factual, and contextual data within parameters we’ve created, but we can gain an outside perspective as well.  Five Reasons CDPs are on the Rise Single, Unified StorageThey store ALL data (1st, 2nd, and 3rd) such as names, addresses, emails, etc. as well as cookie IDs and tags. This storage capacity makes it easy to aggregate everything into one place and integrate with advertising systems.They capture data at a granular level. This includes considering long-term storage and multiple storage formats without predefined parameters focused only on advertising – what we want to sell you, not what do you want to buy?They aren’t restricted to stages of the customer journey, but can pick up data anywhere along the customer lifecycle. This information can be used for look-alike modeling or can be retargeted for more effective advertising and marketing efforts.They create a holistic overview of customer behaviors opening up new opportunities for personalization. Customer First Brand Targeting Today’s advertising and marketing strategies are being re-evaluated to prioritize the customer experience. Once customer data had to fit into predefined boxes of information, now our data collection efforts are as unique as every person who visits your website, clicks a call-to-action, or visits a brick-and-mortar store. In a Nutshell… This is a crucial time in the industry and any door which will help us resolve issues and keep the customer front and center will strengthen our efforts. However, as we go deeper into what the customer likes and why we must keep our customer’s privacy safe whilst retaining an advantage over our competitors.  DMPs, once the singular domain of marketers, was used to package and repackage data to better understand customers and improve ad targeting. CDPs, on the other hand, focus on every aspect, every angle of marketing to make advertising more customer-centric and laser-focused. Ultimately, as CDPs are all inclusive, they have absorbed Data Management Platforms into their systems, helping move the industry another step forward. If you’re interested in Data & Analytics, consumer behavior, and are actively seeking an opportunity to dig in your heels and get set up for a strong career path, we may have a role for you. Check out our current vacancies or contact one of our expert consultants to learn more.  For our West Coast Team, call (415) 614 - 4999 or send an email to sanfraninfo@harnham.com.   For our Mid-West and East Coast Teams, call (212) 796 - 6070 or send an email to newyorkinfo@harnham.com. 

Joshua Poore

Joshua Poore

11. April 2019

I, Human – Navigating Data with Analytics and AI

Big Data tomes sit on a number of business reference shelves. Machine Learning, Analytics, and Edge Computing books compete for space in our minds, on our computers, in the cloud, and on the shelf. Over the past year, we’ve talked about the Data Scientist shortage, what Web Analytics mean to businesses, how AI will work hand-in-hand with humans and, if you’re looking for a career, how to stand out from the crowd. As the year comes to a close and we look to the new year, we wonder what 2019’s trends will be. What will change exponentially? What and who is lagging and leading? And how to navigate the soon to be third stage of ubiquitous data. Data is everywhere and, in some instances, can be too much to wade through. So, in a world of juxtapositions, the next wave of trends is to make Big Data small which will ultimately utilize AI more efficiently. Biting Off More than We Can Chew Much like the idea of music in your pocket with the introduction of the iPod, the latest trend in Big Data is to make it small, bite-sized, and navigable. So, how do you make Big Data small? The tsunami of data we encounter on a daily basis is staggering and overwhelming. As data teams become unsiloed, so too, does data. As vendors, digital leaders, business executives, and data professionals come together into a centralized team, data is being streamlined into a single view within a hub. Open source sharing, collaborating, and use of enterprise data catalogs within the hub add more value to businesses and can help to drive data management strategy.  But, though education, training, and apprentice-like experiences, even the best data professionals can have trouble navigating the swathes of data they encounter each day. Enter AI. These systems are intended to cut through the data, filter the information based on algorithms it’s given and, when needed, “learn” what it needs to know to process information, and accurately share what it has discovered. From there, humans can take the information and analyze how it can be of benefit to the business and what actionable insights can, and should, be implemented. I, Human One of the more nefarious predictions of the past few years has been the fear that robots and AI would take over jobs. But, just as the dishwasher and laundry machine were developed to ease time at those chores, AI is the answer to how to increase productivity, not take over.  Though AI has the capability to handle a range of tasks, it cannot replace hands-on, human-centric tasks. In retail, for example, AI might be used to make the process of shopping and buying more streamlined while freeing up the salesclerk to offer more focused customer service. A restauranteur could create the perfect ambience setting based on data about noise level, food preferences, busy vs slow times, and in so doing develop a customer base with whom they could discuss where the food comes from, offer classes, and more. AI is intended as a partnership to humans. Assisted productivity to free up time for more creative and complex pursuits. Beyond the industry executive, 2019 is predicted to be the year AI enables IT to move past routine automation tasks and proactively streamlines processes. With the assistance of AI, people will be able to work smarter, not harder, be more effective, and more productive. If you’re interested in Big Data & Analytics, we may have a role for you. We specialize in junior and senior roles. Check out our current vacancies or contact one of our recruitment consultants to learn more.   For our West Coast Team, call (415) 614 4999 or send an email to sanfraninfo@harnham.com.   For our Mid-West and East Coast Teams, call (212) 796 6070 or send an email to newyorkinfo@harnham.com.

Sam Brown

Sam Brown

20. December 2018

2020 Vision for the Future of Work

2020 Vision for the Future of Work

Timing is everything. Market research, consumer trends, and digital transformation. They all share the structure of right time, right place for the product, service or, in this case, digital trend, and directly impact how work gets done. Change on a massive scale once took centuries to complete. Today, change happens in real-time and reshapes businesses in months, not years. Jurassic Changes in the Digital Age To stay in the market and ahead of competitors, it’s important for leaders to embrace digital and all it entails. Even within the digital transformation of work, there will be three periods of growth, in which some businesses have blossomed and others have failed. Disruption is a given. Hyper-digital is now. Universal transformation is just around the corner. Disruption – add the word “tech” to any industry and even the industry name embraces the technology to create value and improve customer service growing response times to minutes, not hours or days. Demand for instant assistance grew. Hyper-digital –What was once a luxury or novelty quickly became a household or business “can’t do without it” device or service. Digital technology adoption accelerated at lightning speed. Universal Transformation - The convenience of all-in-one will be widely adopted and required. As we look to year 2020, we’re firmly in the hyper-digital age. Understanding technologies, we have now such as Big Data and analytics, and how to utilize their information for business is critical for making plans. This information can help prioritize budgets, schedule implementations, and even plan out investments into what and when to maximize returns. However, this will require strategic planning, and a roadmap to guide and time technology application and implementation for businesses. It will be important for leaders to know why. Why they need this particular technology at this specific time, and how it will help them move forward in their business goals. Delegating Data Mobile and digital consumers have reached unprecedented levels. Departments from marketing, sales, IT, and data teams race to keep up with the demand for instant information. Hyper-vigilance in today’s hyper-digital world requires humans to upgrade their abilities, and learn how to delegate data to the technologies available such as AI and analytics systems. As digital technologies get faster, smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, demand will only grow for integrating human and robot interaction. But, while technologies can change on a massive scale in a short amount of time, humans don’t. AI systems that are dependent on real-time analytics offer relevant and personalized experiences. Add to that the rise and proliferation of mobile and connected devices as well as the associated data used by AI systems to deliver actionable insights, it’s no wonder Big Data and business analytics will see such a strong impact over the next two to seven years.  Analytics Are Key Digital technologies are no longer “nice-to-have”, they are “must have.” Knowing and understanding Web Analytics is key to automation in the digital age. It’s not a matter necessarily of getting the information faster; it’s about taking the information and developing actionable insights faster. Businesses that lag behind digitally may find their markets overturned. While those leaders who embrace and focus their digital strategy will succeed in the universal transformation. Having a clear vision and digital strategy is critical to the success of any enterprise wishing to compete. No longer can businesses wait to see what will happen. Their actions can affect revenue growth and cost savings, particularly as their digital leadership relates to their clients and customers. Data is infused within every aspect of business and our daily lives. Forward-looking leaders can’t afford to overlook the emerging trends in AI and analytics in 2019.  If you’re interested in big data and analytics, we may have a role for you. We specialize in junior and senior roles. Check out our  current vacancies or contact one of our recruitment consultants to learn more.  For our West Coast Team, call (415) 614 4999 or send an email to sanfraninfo@harnham.com.   For our Mid-West and East Coast Teams, call (212) 796 6070 or send an email to newyorkinfo@harnham.com.

Lauren Harris

Lauren Harris

12. December 2018

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