“So let’s think about what a day in the life of a large web operation looks like. What happens when the web analytics person tries to make recommendations on how to change the color and location of the call to action on a landing page? Usability and d…

Quite agree with your idea of becoming a generalist. The knowledge on IT, SEO…are important, but the skills on statistics and modeling are of the same importance, if not more-that’s what I feel, for I’m a guy knowing something of everything, but not the statistics and modeling skills,this really become my bottleneck to progress in WA.

In other hand, I’d more like to compare a WA (web analyst) to a BA (Business Analyst), who have an overall vision of business, and WA could be part of his job.

Excellent points. While this mostly focuses on our territorial nature from a collaboration standpoint, it’s a great point to note that some of what should signal the need for specialists is these benchmarks. Obviously when things are in the extremes, we know to call in the heavy hitters. When things are in the gradient between green and yellow, we may be able to diagnose and treat the issue without much need for the experts.

What you’re saying is actually extremely practical for us to take away and use: let’s set up tolerances in our KPIs that determine when and how resources are re-allocated to treat the site.

While it would always be my preference that the web analytics feedback is as clear as, “Here is the problem, here are three potential solutions to test, here is the expected outcome and timeline,” you’re unfortunately dead on that the feedback is more normally consistent with a pointing dog, barking louder at a problem but not really defining its nature, impact, or solution.

I’m especially interested in your feedback on this post (pardon the silliness, but it’s the barking dog analogy):
http://tinyurl.com/yllvdja

And this one on Search Engine Land:
http://tinyurl.com/ykfqbcf

To maintain the medical analogy what is a good blood pressure? What is the blood pressure of a world class athlete? What, in your example is salty, fatty, greasy food (I would suggest flash) and what are green leafy vegetables?

To take the politic and the emotion out of the conversation good analysts need to start by defining the performance tolerances and benchmarks they are driving towards.

Thanks very much for the feedback. I think we’re getting there, but not pushing ourselves hard enough. While there are some analysts who truly get it all, they’re in the minority and the general sentiment of businesses is that we’re all a bunch of propellerheads.

My goal is to get us to the same status of the financial analyst, as outlined on the “Web Analytics?” page here. Interested to hear your feedback on that, too!

Thanks for visiting, and please follow on twitter – I’m @evanlapointe.

Rudi – also great points. We need to make friends, not just complain about our current enemies!

“we need to get into the mentality where we train our weaknesses, researching usability, design principles, HTML, PHP, javascript, etc. etc. We also need to study business fundamentals, marketing principles, branding, corporate communication, SEO, and more”

Only though systematically identifying and then curing our individual pockets of ignorance can we really become the type of analytics experts we all want to be.

Jeff

Coming from the developer/programer side I understand the frustration when you get requests like the famous, “It’s just a button”, but your right, there can be a lot of friction between the developers and marketers. What needs to happen is to work with the developers and help them understand the value of analytics. This is not an easy task, but one that is easily overlooked.

-Rudi