Digital Analytics Data Quality- Your First Lesson

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Make sure you are very confident in the accuracy of your data before you present it to stakeholders.

Eager Young Digital Analyst Meet the Data Quality Mousetrap

Almost 9 years ago when I was first starting out in my career in digital analytics I was tasked with an analysis of an internal search tool. It was one of those sites that had a bunch of filtering options for search. The visitor could select sizes, colors, product categories, and many other product attributes. I dove head first into the web analytics tool and started to explore the data. I quickly found what I thought was a smoking gun. According to the data, the insight I discovered was that the only internal search filtering option that visitors used was the color filter.

I presented two recommendations in my PowerPoint analysis:
1) Simplify the filtering and just keep the color filter
OR
2) Highlight the other filtering options like size, product category etc. to get visitors to use other filters

Read the story of how I found my career as a digital analyst on Craigslist.

Digital Analyst Meet the Debugger

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How I found my Career in Digital Analytics on Craigslist 7 Years Ago

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Semphonic Staff at XChange 2010 Monterey California

Digital Analytics is an amazing field. I am so lucky to have found something so interesting so early in my career. Like most web analytics professionals I didn’t plan on being a web analyst. In fact before I started searching for a new job in spring of 2008 I had never heard of web analytics. In my 7 year web analytics career I’ve been fortunate to work for Semphonic and for the last 2 years plus Ernst & Young following the acquisition of Semphonic in March 2013. Thankfully Gary Angel and Joel Hadary hired me in July 2008. I’ve been lucky to have Paul Legutko as my mentor, manager and my professor of digital analytics for the entire 7 years. When people ask me about Paul I describe him as the professor that you wished you had in college: smart, patient, funny, willing to take the time to answer your questions and truly an amazing teacher. (Before web analytics Paul spent time teaching and doing post-doctoral research at the University of Michigan and Stanford University). I can’t believe it has been 7 years. Before too much more time passed I wanted to make sure to recount how I got into digital analytics. I responded to Semphonic’s Craiglist job post and the rest is history. Here is the story.

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