A lot of information exists in our industry about telling stories, building presentations or deploying analytics. There is less information (that I’ve found) that teaches someone to think like an analyst or how to derive insights from data. I believe it’s less available because it’s not exactly simple to teach. In many cases, people either have an analytical mind and can see things in data naturally – or they don’t. Most people gravitate towards things they’re a little naturally gifted in. That said, I still find the challenge of teaching how to derive insights from data a worthwhile endeavor and that’s the focus of this blog series – Analyze Like a Pro.
I started my digital marketing career in 2003. Yahoo was king. AOL was relevant. Netscape still existed. Google was not yet a publicly traded company and there was still a competitive market for search engines. Amazon was not yet profitable. eBay was all the rage and ecommerce was just starting to blossom. This is the state of the industry when I started my career.
I started in small business consulting for web design, entrepreneurship and digital marketing. I have owned and sold a couple of small businesses including a website where I sold children’s bedroom décor and bedding. I have had multiple failed businesses where I had online stores for Swiss watches, truck tents, and polo shirts on eBay. I learned how to optimize websites for search, pay for advertising through Overture’s revolutionary ‘pay per click’ model for advertising in search.
About 5 years into my career I made a decision to pivot from small business consulting to web analytics and data analysis. Instead of financially challenged business owners looking to squeeze just a few more sales each month on a small e-commerce website or push a few more orders through their eBay store…I was working with brands like Samsung, Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Hewlett Packard. I saw how dramatically money was spent in advertising simply to ‘get eyes’ on a website and marketing budgets that were previously incomprehensible to me. My world was changing, and it was the beginning of the global shift of media dollars from traditional advertising (TV, Print, Radio) to digital formats.
I was assigned a new account and we were to analyze ‘website performance’ for a major retailer. I recall vividly being on a conference call at 6pm with one of my clients. We planned a comprehensive review of their entire website. We analyzed their home page effectiveness, landing pages, product pages, internal search, advertising reach and conversion, and many other dimensions of their website. We had spent weeks on this analysis, had a presentation with 50 or so slides in it and it was beautiful. We presented our material and walked them through the data and insights we had found. We spent nearly two hours on that call, answered questions and ultimately gave them something they had never received before.
I thoroughly enjoyed the work and enjoyed it even more that the insights I was able to glean from their data provided them with answers to questions that had gone unanswered for years in their business. They could now make effective business decisions based on facts – instead of intuition – and it was a result of effective analysis and insights generation.
It’s been quite a journey since I started in this field and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve succeeded a few times here and there, I fail a lot, and I try to keep learning. I’ve had the pleasure and experience to work with Tech, Retail, Hospitality, Healthcare and Financial industries. Throughout this journey, there have been opportunities I’ve had to lead others, formally and informally as they’ve started or transitioned their career into this field. In training others, I’ve found a structure to train new analysts or retrain seasoned analysts into a framework that consistently yields insights from data analysis. I want to share the key components of this framework throughout this next series of blog posts. I can assure you with 100% certainty that if you apply the steps in this framework, you WILL find insights in your data.
Analyze Like A Pro Framework
- Evaluate
- Identify
- Validate
- Mine
- Synthesize
- Action
>>NEXT POST: Step 1 Evaluate
I hope you learn something new or it reinforces some work you’re doing. Either way – I’d like to know how it’s impacting you, if you have questions or need some guidance – so drop me a line on LinkedIn or email me at Bryant.hoopes@33sticks.com.