What do web analytics experts do?

[Makaveli2007]

Ive seen there were such jobs. Ive been told on the web there wasnt much actual/traditional statistics such as regression analysis or clustering needed.

But Im wondering, if thats really true, as..well a web business isn't that different from an offline business. Don't big companies with huge websites and thus huge databases need that? Or does it really not have anything to do with regression analysis, data mining & co?

So..is the only link to traditional statistics the ability to 'think statistically' or is there more to it?

[alexdino1]

I am a web analyst for a very large financial services company and we do perform these more advance types of analysis, although most of the work tends to be behavioral analysis or simple visitor statistics. Most of my customers are interested in more straight-forward types of information such as "tell me how many visitors from client x viewed page b during the month of December." There are a million such questions like this that the business has that need to be answered. Another common type of web analysis that I would not call advanced is the path analysis variety. A sample question would be "From landing page A (or home page), what are the common paths and also the conversion rates on these paths". This is usually from the design team who wants to know how successful their landing page designs are and how well their call-to-actions are performing.

Once these basic questions are addressed then the requestor moves on to more advanced questions, such as "Which areas on the web do we need to work on to increase self-service" or in other words "which web content areas tend to drive more calls". This type of question calls for a more sophisticated type of analysis and the web happens to be the channel where more customer interactions take place. I don't think most companys are thinking this way yet as there is still too much basic understanding of the customer to be discovered.

[Makaveli2007]

in other words, theres plenty of work for web analytics experts, even if it seems to be more about statistical and analytical thinking and a grasp of the basics of statistics instead of highly theoretical statistics, I guess?

Do you think a web analytics expert could transfer to offline marketing such as analytical CRM? What you said about customer behavior sounded sort of similar to that? (I plan on staying online ;) im just curious)

[BradleyT]

At my last job I was a web programmer, PPC manager, SEO expert and Analytics expert (jack of all trades - master of none?).

One of the things I'd do would be to find pages with above average exit rates and try to figure out why. I'd take a look at how people were getting to the page (search terms, external link text, internal link text) and then look at the page itself and see if it had the information users might expect.

I'd also do evaluations of online marketing campaigns that companies were using. We had one large university as a client and they had been spending $250/month for 2 years for a banner at a site that wasn't even sending traffic. I then showed their marketing department how they could use the client software we gave them to track campaigns.

Another thing I would set up would be reports for goal pages. For example lets say a form to request more information was a goal. I'd give them a report showing them labels for all visitors that filled in the form. Then they'd know if google was working better than yahoo, if visitors from a campaign on site X were signing up, which PPC campaigns were performing better than others, etc.

We used ClickTracks Pro for our analytics engine. So depending on the client we either gave them the client browser so they could do their own reports or we would do reports for them. Obviously there was a lot more analysis than what I listed above and once the data was evaluated it could require changes from different departments to get a solution implemented. It might require a PPC ad change, it might require a link text change on an advertisers site, it might require a design change to place a link in a more prominent position, content changes on a page to meet users expectations or improve SEO results, etc..