How to organize a web analytics team
03 Apr 2015 » Marketing Team
A few months ago, I was working with a customer on premise and the manager asked me a tricky question: how to organise the analytics team. That company was undergoing significant changes in the analytics front, as a few key members of this team were leaving. As with most questions in life, there is not a clear and definitive answer to this particular one. However, I can share what I have been seeing in my customers.
When companies are small, they inevitably go for cheap or free web analytics solutions. In fact, this is a no-brainer, given the cost of the licenses of proprietary solutions. In these companies, there is only one person in charge of the task of analysing visitor’s behaviour and, usually, this is only one of the many tasks he has to do. As the importance of web analytics grows, this person ends up working full time on web analytics. Sometimes, a second person joins this mini-team, but within a broader team that manages all internal analytics and reporting.
The next breakpoint happens when the company as a whole realises the benefits of having a very good understanding of the customer behaviour. In this situation, more and more people want to have access to the statistics gathered by the analytics tool. Not just only the web analysts, but others in the marketing department (or even other departments) want to have first hand data. These other roles do not need full access nor are going to spend their full working day on the web analytics tool, but they want to be able to self serve. As a consequence, more people demand more features and capabilities.
Inevitably, this approach leads to larger analytics teams, with a manager and a team of two or three people that are working full time on all aspects of the analytics: reporting, ad-hoc analysis, implementation, supporting other users… But not only that, another consequence is that free solutions become a problem rather than a solution and more powerful tools are needed, like Adobe Analytics. As an example, I remember one company switching to Adobe Analytics just because their previous solution did not scale well.
The last big change comes when the websites and apps are in continuous development, constantly adding new features, with releases every few weeks. It becomes impossible to keep up with the changes in the development and, at the same time, satisfy the reporting needs. At this point, there is a need to split the web analytics team in two: one dedicated exclusively on the implementation and another on the reporting. These two teams have different line managers, although they are closely connected.
Even in this situation, there is still room for improvement, especially in big corporations. You can see further separations in both teams for apps/web, different websites, desktop/mobile web…
In parallel to all of this process, there is another tip I would like to share. The web analytics job market is fairly small, but very dynamic. There are very few good web analysts and recruiters are always luring web analysts to fill vacancies in other companies. It is therefore very important to have a healthy balance between junior and senior analysts. Both are needed and junior team members need to receive a good training to be able to fill in the gap when more senior members or even the manager, eventually leave the company.
As I said, this is only my experience, but after having worked with dozens of companies, where this pattern tends to repeat, I am inclined to believe that this is the best approach as of today.