Job Description

The Senior Analyst manages the data processing, testing, analysis, and determines data-driven strategy for our client advertising and marketing campaigns. This position will also work closely with their respective media, account and project management counterparts in ensuring campaign objectives are appropriately tracked and optimized. The Senior Analyst will design relevant marketing tests within the context of our campaigns that lead to improved learning and performance, analyze campaign activity from a variety of sources and provide compelling case studies by employing their analytic insight and present their findings, highlighting the key trends and learnings to our clients.

Responsibilities

• Develop measurable campaign objectives, and enable their tracking through site or 3rd party measurement tools: selection, implementation, usage
• Define base metrics to inform current and future campaigns
• Collect, normalize, and report on campaigns histories and current activity
• Analyze performance reports for optimization and learning
• Develop and present analysis to clients
• Provide team leadership with media, creative, and account management
• Manage day-to-day relationships with 3rd party vendors
• Other duties as assigned

Requirements

• 3+ years web analysis experience including SEM (PPC, Paid Inclusion)
• Excellent writing and editing capabilities
• Familiarity with online analytics measures, terminology, benchmarks
• Detail-oriented, with high standards for data accuracy and integrity, and quality of thinking and presentation
• Excel skills, including pivot tables and vLOOKUPs for data manipulation
• PowerPoint presentation skills
• Ability to recognize and correct data problems and inconsistencies
• Self-motivated, deadline-driven, ability to support multiple projects at a time
• Understanding of strengths, challenges and complexities of online tracking
• Skills with 3rd-party ad servers: DART, AtlasDMT, Mediaplex
• Skills with 3rd-party site-side tools: Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebsideStory Hitbox, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Google Analytics
• Understanding of statistical analyses, databases and site building basics
• Bonuses: Experience with A/B and multivariate creative testing, experimental design, SAS or SPSS, e-mail campaign analysis, SEO

Agency.com San Francisco
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San Francisco, CA 94111
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V: +1 415 817 3800
F: +1 415 817 3801
careers@agency.com

One thing that's often elusive in doing sites analysis is weeding out the demographics of visitors. There have been natural limitations here as analytics technologies have always had to collect no personally identifiable information, and in connection with this they've also obviously had to keep their privacy policies clear. Vendors like Omniture, Coremetrics, Websidestory and others must adhere to this basic rule, like just about anyone doing business online.

This has meant Web Analysts have been left to things like surveys, offline data sources like call center data, and any associated indirect and/or circumstantial evidence to draw conclusions from. This can get complicated fast, so often marketers opt to keep it simple at least at first. Example:

OK, my top referrer is Myspace, so chances are good most of my visitors are Millennials.

Aside from accuracy considerations, a problem with this though is the results aren't always going to be actionable. The data will come out something that had already been treated as a given...

Well duh, I'm selling ringtones. Tell me something I don't know, like whether we're talking mostly high school or mostly college students...

One fun, free and casual tool that's out now to perhaps help connect the dots is Quantcast. Some of the data it returns on some sites I've worked on looks believable. On low-traffic sites at least though, I'm finding it's way inaccurate, presumably due to limited data: I also checked a well-aged domain held by a popular club here in the city, managed by a few folks I know. Quantcast says it's got roughly 1000 visitors a month, which is of course almost nothing and sounds about right. However they also said an overwhelming majority of visitors to the site are Hispanic, also holding graduate degrees. I do promotional networking at the venue itself on occasion. To my knowledge its average patronage is almost all early-mid 20-somethings (normally a bit young to have finished grad school), moreover pretty Caucasian; perhaps leaning slightly on the WASPy side... So there are some pretty big differences here between who Quantcast says the club's Web audience is, and what I know their meatspace audience to be. It doesn't add up.

I've started connecting a few sites to the tool for quantification, to see how it does with queries regarding others I've background on already. At the very least, on traffic numbers we'll see how it holds up against the reporting sources already in production. They're still aggregating information from their integrated partners, and I'd half-expect them to not come up with demographics at all on some domains even if they weren't still building out their records, but here's crossing fingers and noting a new option for the toolkit in any case.