As I sit here to put pen to paper on this post, I’m overwhelmed by all sorts of emotions. Sadness, excitement, fear, gratitude, and so much more. The past 6.5 years have been some of the best, and some of the most trying of my work life, but one thing is for sure, it is damn hard to leave Google. Sure, there’s the free food, the onsite amenities such as gyms, micro-kitchens, massages, and all those creature comforts that I’ve become so used to. There’s the business class international flights and nice hotels that budgets allow me to have when I travel (which I’ve been fortunate enough to do a lot of on behalf of Google). But it’s the scale of the work and the people I’ve been fortunate to
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A few weeks ago I had the chance to sit down (virtually) with an industry friend, Jeff Sauer, who is an expert in all things Google Analytics & AdWords and who has recently kicked off a podcast series he’s calling ‘Jumpstart with Jeffalytics’. I had the distinct honor of being guest #2 (after the Wizard of Moz, Rand Fishkin) for Jeff’s new podcast and now that it’s live I wanted to share Jeff’s recap of the episode as well as a link to where you can find the podcast. I had a great time chatting with Jeff and recording this session, and am humbled by his kind words of support throughout. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the support and friendship of industry peers such as Jeff and
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Over the past couple of weeks I have presented at a few conferences (SummitUp in Dayton, Ohio and UnSummit in Salt Lake City, Utah) on the topic of People, Process, and Platform. Now, before you roll your eyes because you’ve heard it all before, let me let you know that you won’t be getting my whole speech in this blog post. In fact, you won’t be getting any of the core parts. Instead, I want to remind you of the importance of the people you have looking at, analyzing, interpreting, and telling stories about your data, as I did to the audiences at these conferences. Most of you will have seen #TheDress, #DressGate, #WhiteAndGold, or #BlueAndBlack over the past couple of weeks. For those of you who haven’t, let me
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I was recently chatting with a young women who happens to be a senior at Chapman University in Southern California and is an aspiring analyst. She mentioned she had just been to New York for a school trip where she had learned a lot about financial analytics, and she asked me my thoughts on financial analytics vs web analytics. Were they two different things? Were the skills transferrable? What were the main differences? After chatting with her about this for a good 15 minutes I thought it would useful write it all down in a blog post to share more broadly. What are the main differences between a Business Analyst and a Marketing Analyst? A business analyst is generally someone who sits in a business operations, finance, or marketing operations
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Searching for a new role? Career change? Be sure to go into the interview process armed with the salary range you think you deserve, based on experience and specialties. There is info all over the web for salary ranges for various roles in Digital Analytics, Web Analytics, Social Media, Digital Marketing, etc. – it’s important you do your research! Some skill sets, in particular, help to drive up your potential salary range (as well as the # of offers you may receive). Tops amongst them is knowledge and hands on experience with the Omniture suite of products. What sets this skill apart from others is the difficulty in gaining it. Omniture is a large, enterprise level tool. There is no free version and no free trainings (unlike Google Analytics and
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