#also found out that the codes was html and not java like i initially thought. this makes it easier to deal with thank god

[aria0fgold]

I've been grabbing random Shimeji that I stumble into which has customized animations to examine how the creators added to the code and I can't believe I'm lowkey relearning programming cuz of this.

[giannisbct-blog]

I “LIKE” programming

Well just like this blog, when it came to the like system, I wasn’t entirely sure where to start. I had started working on this before we had decided to go with AR built in Unity so I figured I would get the mechanics working and then be able to transfer them into Unity. Initially when we were thinking of building a physical model or projection mapping, I was going to have the like button on a webpage so that anyone could access it, an inherently thats where I started. I had the thought of using a python script to build the whole back end mechanic of the system and that data would be passed from the user via the webpage, and after quickly running this by Liam (who has done something similar before) he agreed that it would be the easiest way and we could have multiple users at once which is what we wanted. I built the most basic version of the “front end” part so that someone could input their name and then like it so the likes would be attributed to them, just like it is on social media.

Liam recommended using the flask module for Python to host the server (and webpage for testing). Once I had installed that I managed to get a connection between the two and even by complete fluke was getting it to receive data from multiple devices and be able to register that it was from different devices. I personally was stoked about this because it was 90% of the like system working but then Liam pointed out, as we don’t know why it worked, if it stopped working we also wouldn’t be able to pick out why. I figured it was in my best interests to learn the best practice for this rather than get the minimum working version as it would be great reference material for the future. In these early stages, Liam helped me a lot by explaining why one way was better than another and generally guiding me through which was super helpful as I was almost coming from no coding background. The main think I am super grateful for is him introducing me to JSON, which I’ll be honest was an absolute pain at first but I now realise it was definitely the best way to go as it was far more reliable and actually made sense. So essentially what was happening is that the HTML page was passing the name that was submitted by the user, to the python script every time the like button was clicked. The script would then add a new value to its own defined variable “like” and count them like that. The bonus of doing it like this is that if someone played once and then after a while came back too have another go, their “score” would compound and keep increasing. On that note though the downside is that if two users input the same name they will have a super score rather than two separate scores. While this would be a downside for an actual game where the score would need to be counted from just one game at a time and not an overall total, for our project it sort of just adds to it. The idea is that the more people “like” the disaster that happens, the more it proves our point that social media is building a screen which separates people from reality and that they can simply click a button to show their support, and the more they do that, the more they are helping? Or at least thats the theory.

In the past when it has come to doing small code projects I have looked up how to do something, found code that suited my need, copied it and then tweaked it to properly fit my programme. However, this doesn’t mean I necessarily understood it which is something I wanted to do differently this time. As this was basically my main role in the team, I wanted to make sure I would be able to explain to other people how it worked rather than have a piece that worked but just because it did. Which I guess relates to this whole degree itself, nothing is really taught to us (especially in studio) and its all self directed so we need to learn the skills ourselves and in this day in age when you don’t need a computer science degree to become a developer but simply be able to copy code from different places to suit your programme, I believe it is quite important to know what you are doing because I the future it will make me far more efficient. And its the learning by doing thing that works really well for me that I like. For example when it came to having to deal with GET requests from both the server and user side, I had done something similar before with the instagram location finder programme that I had had a play with earlier in the semester, and because I had used it before I sort of knew how it worked but then I had the code itself I could look through again and figure out why it worked and what parts I could omit for this different programme. I have to say, I think this semester I have learned more about programming from simply trial and error, Liam and online tutorials than I did in all of last year where I did both programming papers. It was also great to learn this in a group setting where the other team members also are not super coding savvy as trying to explain what I was doing or why I couldn’t do something that we wanted to do due to the nature of the system that I was writing in non technical terms helped clarify what I was doing for myself. I would certainly like to keep doing more programming projects in the future to further develop my skills and learn new things.

Transferring the user side to Unity was a whole different box of frogs though. First of all Unity is all scripted in C# which I have never used before (but luckily is similar to java which I had dabbled in with processing last year) but the whole mechanic of connecting to a server is made a lot more difficult as all requests need to be sent through a Coroutine. Which I’ll be honest, I had never heard of until I stumbled across a million Stack Overflow forums that explained that that is what you have to use. I think I have got my head around them mostly but there are still some things about them that elude me, for example everywhere (including the Unity manual) it says that they end when they hit a “return”, but I have coroutines that have functions or call new functions still enclosed in the coroutine but after the return type and it still calls them (see below).

They also supposedly run for their specified length (of time) regardless where they are called, i.e will run for 6 seconds if told to after being called from the Update( ) function. However, I have found that in some of my code this works, in other parts it just sort of ignores that rule and sometimes it waits for a wee while longer than the instructed time. So its not totally something that I fully understand but I know it enough to be able to use it in the right places and the majority of the function of the Unity scene is run by coroutines so I am clearly doing something right. I like to think of it as a poorly trained animal, I know the commands and the animal knows what they mean but sometimes chooses to do its own thing.

Another major challenge I had was dealing with JSON, for starters sending the exact same data as I was from the webpage but through unity, it was as if it was parson the data into JSON and then parsing the JSON into more JSON even though the commands where almost the same, so on the python side I had to update it so that it decoded the incoming JSON properly so it was then actually processed logically. This brought in a whole world of problems in itself as then the data that was being sent back to the user was all jumbled and messed up which was less than ideal as it felt I had actually gone backwards rather than made progress. But as I have learned from this project, every new error you get means that you are making progress as you have made it past the previous error. After all of that though, I did get it working.

Once I had done all of that, I realised that it was a perfectly functioning Like system that recorded multiple user’s scores and could compound them and it was perfect, but only once. There was no way to restart it without stopping the whole application and going again. So there was the next challenge which proved a lot more difficult that initially suspected mainly due to how referencing different Game Objects is from a script and even harder, referencing the scripts of those Game Objects which is what caused me many hours of strife. To make matters more difficult as well, Unity doesn’t appreciate all the things you could normally do in a C# script so you have to find ways around its very stubborn walls which in my case lead to many, many scripts. Doesn’t sound like such a terrible thing but to make sure each was working correctly I was logging things to the debug console from almost every script so then when I wanted to look for a specific message I was sending to try and get something working, it became a whole lot harder because there were 20+ scripts that were all printing to the console. But once again, I am a champion and figured it out.

As I write this I realise that it doesn’t sound that difficult and didn’t take that long but the code for the like system has been haunting me at night and has been an ongoing saga for weeks . I certainly have learned heaps and am happy with my process that I undertook. However, if I was to do it again knowing what I know now, I would skip out the HTML part and just go straight for the C# scrips because I think that transition was the hardest part of this whole process. In HTML (with javascript) it is easy to do everything all in on document but with C#, you can’t send data and also receive it in the same script, you need to separate them into multiple scripts which is where confusion starts manifesting as you try and think across multiple scripts and have to remember what each one is referencing and how it will then affect the other one. The issue with backend systems as well is you don’t overtly see your mistake as you would with front end because either something happens or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t you then have to comb through your code to find the broken section and find out what is messing you up. Overall I think this is what I found the most frustrating as I have only really done mainly front end development rather than back end, but this project was certainly a great insight into it. Now as for this whole project once we got on a roll, I obviously stopped blogging as I got so engrossed in the work which I do understand is not the best practice but as we were pushed for time (having left it so late to start doing something) I focused solely on getting the work done and from an outsider’s perspective the final product doesn’t really show how much work went into the programming of it, so I have uploaded all my scripts to GitHub so you can have a look at them, and also see how things work if you are interested: https://github.com/JabronusMaximus/ARcde-Scripts

[berbaquero]

Reeddit, six years old

6 years ago today, I gathered the courage to put Reeddit out there. To share it with other people. It was my first serious attempt at building a complete, frontend-only web-app.

Reeddit is basically an alternative way to browse reddit.com’s content. While I love to read and browse reddit.com, I never really liked their UI- specially on their mobile site, which was really cumbersome and ugly, at least back then.

Also, I wanted to become a proper web frontend developer! I had worked with Java for almost 4 years by then and sure, I had to work with HTML and CSS over the years, but it always felt like I was only scratching the surface, and JavaScript had always completely eluded me.

So this was, in my mind, the perfect way to address those things: I would design and build the reddit UI that I’d love to use, and by doing so, I would learn as much as I could about what frontend development really was, learn the proper foundation— JS included.

In the span of ~5 months, working a couple of hours every week after work and a bit more each weekend, I built a responsive, single-page web-app for just reading reddit. And by doing so, I had learnt so, so much about building things for the browser; how to tame the DOM (thanks to jQuery/Zepto!) and the Cascade, the Box Model, how to use Flexbox (so shiny and new back then!). And I had more or less built the alternative reddit client that I wanted.

But that was supposed to be it! I built it for me. So I could use it myself. I didn't consider publishing it on the web— not initially.

But after showing what I had done so far to a friend from work, he told me "you should put it out there! It's nice!", to which I said that wasn't in my plans because I didn't think it was good enough for people to use it and much less like it. And then he said "if you already find it useful or good for yourself, there will be others who will agree and use it as well".

And that made me realize: if there was a single person who finds Reeddit, uses it, likes it, and continues using it, that'd be a huge satisfaction for me. Enough of a reward.

So for a couple of days I worked on making Reeddit a bit more "presentable", and made sure it worked fine in all the browsers I had installed, which were desktop and mobile Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox.

And finally, on November 20th, 2012, I shared it with the world; first with my Twitter and Facebook network (announcement tweet), and then on reddit itself (thread on r/webdev).

I considered also showing it to Hacker News, but decided not to because I thought it was definitely not HN-worthy and that it would be shat upon if I did share it there. So I didn't. Silly me.

The reception on twitter and reddit was pretty much what I expected and hoped; people gave me good feedback, suggestions, and compliments. It was great. It felt good to share what I had worked on and to see it being well-received. I figured the cycle was complete. That the project was over as it had served its original purpose.

But it was far from over.

Less than 2 months later, during the first week of January 2013, someone :) shared Reeddit on Hacker News, and I only found out about it because after waking up that morning, I saw I was getting a lot notifications from people making tweets about Reeddit! All because of the weird machine that is Hacker News top posts.

So, I learned that there's a bunch of twitter bots that automatically tweet when a HN post receives certain amount of votes; here's reeddit getting 50 votes and here's reeddit getting 100 votes. And I guess people that follows these bots started reacting to those tweets and checking and tweeting about Reeddit. Then HN's post reached the top 2 spot on the frontpage.

And then it quickly reached the top of HackerNews' frontpage. Gulp.

The buzz generated by HN and Twitter was picked up by some big websites:

Designmodo tweeted about Reeddit.

Venture Beat published an article and tweeted about Reeddit.

Mashable published a video article about Reddit — although the actual video doesn't seem to work anymore. Boo.

And best of all, Alexis Ohanian himself tweeted about Reeddit.

It was crazy.

Those were a very awesome couple of days. It made the whole thing so incredibly rewarding. Much more than it already was.

But it was not over.

Even after the online buzz faded out, I learned of another benefit from it; I started getting approached by a few companies that were interested on me joining them as a frontend developer. One of them was a big one, and I couldn't believe it. And even though none of those worked out –as I would have had to move to a city I didn't really want to– the fact there was interest in my profile as frontend developer gave me the confidence to persue that path completely, and apply for Frontend Dev jobs in Amsterdam, which is what I really wanted.

Very fittingly, while using Reeddit myself one day and browsing the Amsterdam subreddit, I stumbled upon a post from someone sharing a job opening in the city, to which I replied with interest. Long (sub)story short, it was the experience and knowledge that I got from building Reeddit, and the confidence that its reception got gave me, what ultimately resulted and me getting a great job and moving to Amsterdam.

Afterwards, I continuously used Reeddit as my code playground, trying new things while fixing its bugs or adding new features, experimenting with new frameworks or libraries, or just applying the new things I'd learned at work. I believe I learned Sass/SCSS by migrating Reeddit's styles to it.

Reeddit has also received some open-source contributions during these years, which has always made so happy, humble, and very thankful, and has inspired me to give back— even though I don't do it as much as I should.

But it's been a while since I've done any work on Reeddit. I still love the product, but I feel like I've moved on from the codebase.

For almost 2 years now, I haven't really improved Reeddit. It got an improvement some weeks ago via a Pull Request on GitHub (yay open source!) but that's been pretty much it since years.

And it's actually a great feeling to see something you haven't had to support for a long time is still working fine. Of course, that's partially also thanks to Reddit itself not breaking its public API and to a very stable GitHub Pages service. But it's ultimately a testament to how wonderful The Web as a platform really is. How things that haven't been touched for years are still perfectly usable and accessible. I love it and don't take it for granted.

And I will try to make sure that my now-6-year-old Reeddit web-app stays usable and accessible in the future; but it's time to officially feature-freeze Reeddit.

It's time to move on.

To Reeddit 2.

--

Footnotes:

The first improvement to Reeddit after releasing it was done just around 30 minutes after sharing it on reddit and getting the suggestion to show previews for image posts, in the comments view.

For some time at the beginning of the published codebase, all the JS code was wrapped in a single jQuery/Zepto $.ready() function.

Firefox had no support for Flexbox back then, so I had to do some sort of browser detection and use Floats instead. Yikes.

Reeddit's UI was inspired by HNMobile, now known as HackerWeb, by @cheeaun. When I used HNMobile for the first time on my iPhone 4S, I remember being blown away by the fact a web-app could look and feel so smooth and native.

Yes, I'm building a new version of Reeddit!

[alanajacksontx]

An SEO’s survival guide to Single Page Applications (SPAs)

SEOs beware: if you haven’t heard of Single Page Applications (SPA for short), or if you have been resistant to learning about these JavaScript methods for creating websites, the time for hiding your head in the sand is over.

Check out this tweet from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller:

The web has moved from plain HTML – as an SEO you can embrace that. Learn from JS devs & share SEO knowledge with them. JS’s not going away.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) August 8, 2017

John Mueller is correct. It’s not going away.

A quick search on Google Trends for “Single Page Application” reveals the sharp rise in popularity and awareness of SPAs over time:

Some developers are positively enamored with using JavaScript frameworks and libraries to create websites, and SPA popularity has been steadily growing.

Take Angular (also known as AngularJS and Angular.js), for example.

Here’s a Google Trends search for the Angular JavaScript framework showing the past 5 years, and Trends even recognizes the application platform – you can see popularity has increased greatly over the last couple of years:

The React JavaScript library shows a similar up and to the right trend:

In my role as a professional SEO, I can’t say that Single Page Applications are the rule and not the exception when it comes to how businesses choose to develop websites these days, but I am running across more and more SPAs, and so are my colleagues.

Yes, it’s true that JavaScript was never intended for web page content delivery.

Yes, it’s true that SPAs to date have not been great for SEO.

Yes, it’s true that many developers who had fun quickly creating websites using SPAs had to later spend more time fixing SEO problems than the time they would have spent if they just coded the site to deliver content via HTML5 in the first place.

But, none of that matters, my SEO friends.

Like it or not, SPAs look like they’re here to stay.

It’s time to stop thinking bad thoughts about SPAs and trying to wish them into the cornfield.

Single-Page Applications: Resistance is futile

I admit it – for a while there I was hoping I could ignore Single Page Applications, and maybe eventually SPAs would end up in the trash heap of obsolete website trends such as the <blink> tag, and web page content that’s free of annoying and intrusive advertising interruptions.

Programming and coding languages live and die by developer adoption. For example, if, by some weird turn of events, developers across the world suddenly decided they hated PHP and fell in love with some super-cool new server-side scripting language, then PHP withers, maybe even dies.

It’s just that simple.

That’s why, for example, Google has been pushing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) super hard – because they need major and widespread developer adoption for AMP to succeed and not wind up as the <blink> tags’ roommate.

Talk to developers who’ve created sites using Angular, React, or other JavaScript frameworks or libraries. See if they light up as they talk about the ease and speed of development and how debugging was not as hard as the rumors have it.

SPAs are popular with developers, and that popularity is not showing any sign of slowing down.

Dipping a toe into the SPA

Looking “under the hood” of SPAs, a distinguishing characteristic is that there’s a lot less back and forth between the server and the browser making requests to the server.

After the initial JavaScript framework download to the browser and first page view, there is no page reloading going on when navigating to a second, third, and fourth (etc.) page, hence the “single page” part of Single Page Application.

After that initial JavaScript framework download and first page view, subsequent pages viewed load very quickly, exactly because of the lack of back and forth requests between the server and browser that “traditional” web sites require.

And this means a very good user experience because no extra page load means no extra wait time. And, as we all know, everyone prefers fast-loading pages.

The main aspect to remember here is that with an SPA there is far less back and forth between the browser and the server.

But JavaScript was never intended for web page content delivery

Before JavaScript started being used commonly in website development, web pages were static and created using HTML.

Using JavaScript enabled website developers to add interactivity to their web pages such as pop-up dialog boxes when a user is filling out a form, expandable content when a user clicks on text or a button, or a drop-down menu when the user hovers their mouse over a navigation element.

These and other user interactive features JavaScript allows can be executed in the browser without requiring a call to the server.

And thus, for many years, website developers used HTML for content delivery, CSS for layout and styling, and JavaScript for adding user interactivity.

It’s a fair generalization that JavaScript has become vital to websites and to a developer’s resume; JavaScript is pretty much ubiquitous. JavaScript is not that difficult to learn compared to full-blown programming languages such as Java and C++. The “J” in AJAX and jQuery is – you guessed it – JavaScript.

I only bring this up because in retrospect, and hindsight is always 20/20, we SEOs all should have seen the rise of Single Page Applications looming on the horizon.

But viewed glass-half-full, the rise of SPAs presents an opportunity for technically-minded SEOs to gain experience and become even more valuable now and in the future.

If SPAs can cause SEO issues, then why do developers create SPA websites?

If you’ve never done any coding, then you might not realize what it’s like to be in a developer’s mindset.

Think about it this way: if you were going to have to sit down and write code to create a certain web page functionality and you could either write 10 lines of code to achieve that, or write 1,000 lines of code, which would you choose? You’d opt for the expedience of 10 lines of code, right?

Developers are not lazy; they simply prefer efficiency and elegance when it comes to writing code. I’ve seen developers frame code and hang it on their office wall. Ever heard the saying “code is poetry?”

If you’re trying to get somewhere the fastest way possible, you take the shortest route, correct?

Single Page Application frameworks and libraries, in crude summary, provide building blocks that allow developers to create a website quickly and efficiently.

Consider the fact that SPAs allow developers to efficiently create modern-looking websites that load pages quickly, which makes for a great user experience, and you can see why you might choose an SPA over coding a website from scratch in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, or hassling with the constraints of a Content Management System.

SPAs present a fast-loading user experience because they don’t need to reload most resources such as HTML, CSS, and scripts with each user interaction like a “traditional” website does. These files only require initial loading and then after that only new data is retrieved and downloaded from the server.

SPAs reduce response times primarily by moving the heavy-lifting of data processing from the server to the browser.

SEO may be a lesser consideration given the SPA developments upsides, an afterthought, or perhaps not a consideration at all during the website development process. Any SEO pro who has been in digital marketing for very long has seen the all-too-common situation where a company develops a website, only later to ask the question “how do we SEO this thing?”

Not everyone realizes that SEO should be baked-in at the beginning and not sprinkled-on at the end, or that their website development choices can have definite downstream negative impacts with respect to SEO.

JavaScript libraries vs. JavaScript frameworks

Untangling the technology behind SPAs eventually leads us to the topic of JavaScript libraries and frameworks.

Ask a developer “what’s the difference between a library and a framework” and you’ll get a lot of interesting answers.

One overriding distinction you hear repeatedly goes something like this:

The code you write calls a library, whereas a framework calls the code you write.

React and Angular are both SPAs, but React is technically a library, whereas Angular is technically a framework. However, you will hear often people refer to SPA technology generally as “JavaScript frameworks”.

Frameworks can be thought of as a structure, like a pre-fab home which comes with the framing, drywall, plumbing, and electrical wiring and all you have to do is add the appliances, windows and coverings, flooring, paint, etc.

A library can be thought of as a place that contains a set of ready to use pre-built tools and functionalities. You’d call a library in your code for a specific function.

You can see that starting a web development project using frameworks and/or libraries can streamline the process, as opposed to writing from scratch all the necessary code to create a website.

Common SEO problems of Single Page Applications

There’s a lot of talk about how well Google can handle JavaScript when it comes to crawling and indexation.

Crawling and indexing is critical to ranking.

Google discovers web pages using software called Googlebot during a very fast process often called “crawling” or “spidering”, during which it downloads an HTML file it finds, extracts the links and visits them simultaneously, and then sends the downloaded resources to the indexer.

But when it comes to a JavaScript-based single page application website, the process gets a bit more complicated.

It’s like the process noted above, but there’s a delay and extra step involved because part of the indexer must do some heavy lifting by parsing and executing the JavaScript, and the new links found then must be passed back to the crawler to look at and then sent back to the indexer; you can see that this is less efficient because of the JavaScript.

SEO is more than just having “great content” and earning high-quality links; it’s also about making your web pages easy to discover by search engines like Google and making it simple for them to know which pages are more important than other pages via internal linking.

A “traditional” HTML-based site is far easier to crawl and index, and by extension, rank. Google can get all the links easily and see what the importance of pages are via internal linking.

A JavaScript-based SPA website makes Google’s life more difficult, and some testing would seem to indicate that there may be downsides when relying on JavaScript for purposes of indexation.

Google is evidently willing to do the extra heavy lifting here, and to my mind that indicates that they’ll improve over time rather than announce to webmasters in the future that they have decided they don’t want to bother with the extra work required to crawl and index JavaScript-based sites.

Another potential SEO problem related to the extra work to discover links is that Google may have issues with evaluating the link equity of those pages.

It’s likely that in time, at least some of the SPA frameworks in popular use will evolve the rendering process to make it easier for Google to crawl and index, perhaps even making it on par with “traditional” HTML-based websites.

But in the meantime, we’re where we are and those who’ve tested how well Google can handle JavaScript-based sites have shown that Google’s ability is inconsistent, and we’re also still in a place where those who have developed SPAs frequently must use workarounds, for example using prerender.io along with Angular to serve fully-rendered pages to the crawler.

Another solution is isomorphic JavaScript, sometimes called “Universal JavaScript”, where a page can be generated on the server and sent to the browser, which can immediately render and display the page. This solves the SEO issues as Google doesn’t have to execute and render the JavaScript in the indexer.

Headless Chrome is another option recently proposed as an easy solution by a Google engineer, who also mentions another solution called Preact, which ships with server-side rendering.

It’s also a good idea to create a properly formatted XML Sitemap and submit that to Google Search Console.

Right now, there doesn’t appear to be any single solution or a paint-by-numbers approach to handing the problems you may encounter if you’re an SEO assisting a client with launching or redeveloping a website using an SPA.

It boils down to effectively communicating the correct end result that’s needed, and dealing with issues as they’re presented based on the library or framework being deployed.

Some important Single Page Application resources

Some super-sharp SEOs and developers have written helpful articles about Single Page Applications, and here are a few resources I have enjoyed that I think you will find helpful:

Tomasz Rudzki wrote an excellent post here; the title says it all: The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript SEO

Watch this video by Google ‎Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller – he provides a terrific general overview of Single Page Applications and how Google treats them

Justin Briggs is quite conversant with both SEO and JavaScript and wrote 2 pieces you should check out: Auditing JavaScript for SEO, and Core Principles of SEO for JavaScript

Richard Baxter wrote this awhile back, but it’s still very much worth your time: The Basics of JavaScript Framework SEO in AngularJS

Will Critchlow shared this excellent post: Early Results from Split Testing JavaScript for SEO

Hold on to your hat when you click on Barry Adams’ JavaScript & SEO: The Definitive Resource List

If you’re a bit short on time, this is an excellent quick read: SEO Considerations for Single Page Applications

I definitely recommend reading this from Angular University: Angular Single Page Applications (SPA): What are the Benefits?

This Microsoft article is not geared to SEOs, but it’s a quick and helpful read: Choose Between Traditional Web Apps and Single Page Apps (SPAs)

This is also a relatively quick read covering a few different SPA types by Johann Wagner

Lastly, I strongly suggest you make time to read this, a very good overview: Single Page Applications: When & Why You Should Use Them

Final thoughts

Single Page Applications are evolving rapidly, as is the web technology landscape in general. It’s worth the effort for professional SEOs to be as conversant as possible with not only Single Page Applications, but also Accelerated Mobile Pages, Progressive Web Apps, Content Management Systems in general, and of course the tech behind how websites are coded from scratch.

My sense of the situation is that SPAs, and Google’s ability to handle JavaScript-based websites, will advance at a quickening pace because the stakeholders involved are aware that SPAs come with a definite SEO downside as it stands right now.

It’s entirely possible that in a year or so the most popular SPAs will ship with SEO solutions built in because awareness of the need for SEO friendly JavaScript-based websites is growing. But there’s no guarantee of that happening soon or at all, so my recommendation for today’s SEOs is to get excited about and embrace this technology trend.

from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/04/09/an-seos-survival-guide-to-single-page-applications-spas/ from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/172758142370

[oscarkruegerus]

An SEO’s survival guide to Single Page Applications (SPAs)

SEOs beware: if you haven’t heard of Single Page Applications (SPA for short), or if you have been resistant to learning about these JavaScript methods for creating websites, the time for hiding your head in the sand is over.

Check out this tweet from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller:

The web has moved from plain HTML – as an SEO you can embrace that. Learn from JS devs & share SEO knowledge with them. JS's not going away.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) August 8, 2017

John Mueller is correct. It’s not going away.

A quick search on Google Trends for “Single Page Application” reveals the sharp rise in popularity and awareness of SPAs over time:

Some developers are positively enamored with using JavaScript frameworks and libraries to create websites, and SPA popularity has been steadily growing.

Take Angular (also known as AngularJS and Angular.js), for example.

Here’s a Google Trends search for the Angular JavaScript framework showing the past 5 years, and Trends even recognizes the application platform – you can see popularity has increased greatly over the last couple of years:

The React JavaScript library shows a similar up and to the right trend:

In my role as a professional SEO, I can’t say that Single Page Applications are the rule and not the exception when it comes to how businesses choose to develop websites these days, but I am running across more and more SPAs, and so are my colleagues.

Yes, it’s true that JavaScript was never intended for web page content delivery.

Yes, it’s true that SPAs to date have not been great for SEO.

Yes, it’s true that many developers who had fun quickly creating websites using SPAs had to later spend more time fixing SEO problems than the time they would have spent if they just coded the site to deliver content via HTML5 in the first place.

But, none of that matters, my SEO friends.

Like it or not, SPAs look like they’re here to stay.

It’s time to stop thinking bad thoughts about SPAs and trying to wish them into the cornfield.

Single-Page Applications: Resistance is futile

I admit it – for a while there I was hoping I could ignore Single Page Applications, and maybe eventually SPAs would end up in the trash heap of obsolete website trends such as the <blink> tag, and web page content that’s free of annoying and intrusive advertising interruptions.

Programming and coding languages live and die by developer adoption. For example, if, by some weird turn of events, developers across the world suddenly decided they hated PHP and fell in love with some super-cool new server-side scripting language, then PHP withers, maybe even dies.

It’s just that simple.

That’s why, for example, Google has been pushing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) super hard – because they need major and widespread developer adoption for AMP to succeed and not wind up as the <blink> tags’ roommate.

Talk to developers who’ve created sites using Angular, React, or other JavaScript frameworks or libraries. See if they light up as they talk about the ease and speed of development and how debugging was not as hard as the rumors have it.

SPAs are popular with developers, and that popularity is not showing any sign of slowing down.

Dipping a toe into the SPA

Looking “under the hood” of SPAs, a distinguishing characteristic is that there’s a lot less back and forth between the server and the browser making requests to the server.

After the initial JavaScript framework download to the browser and first page view, there is no page reloading going on when navigating to a second, third, and fourth (etc.) page, hence the “single page” part of Single Page Application.

After that initial JavaScript framework download and first page view, subsequent pages viewed load very quickly, exactly because of the lack of back and forth requests between the server and browser that “traditional” web sites require.

And this means a very good user experience because no extra page load means no extra wait time. And, as we all know, everyone prefers fast-loading pages.

The main aspect to remember here is that with an SPA there is far less back and forth between the browser and the server.

But JavaScript was never intended for web page content delivery

Before JavaScript started being used commonly in website development, web pages were static and created using HTML.

Using JavaScript enabled website developers to add interactivity to their web pages such as pop-up dialog boxes when a user is filling out a form, expandable content when a user clicks on text or a button, or a drop-down menu when the user hovers their mouse over a navigation element.

These and other user interactive features JavaScript allows can be executed in the browser without requiring a call to the server.

And thus, for many years, website developers used HTML for content delivery, CSS for layout and styling, and JavaScript for adding user interactivity.

It’s a fair generalization that JavaScript has become vital to websites and to a developer’s resume; JavaScript is pretty much ubiquitous. JavaScript is not that difficult to learn compared to full-blown programming languages such as Java and C++. The “J” in AJAX and jQuery is – you guessed it – JavaScript.

I only bring this up because in retrospect, and hindsight is always 20/20, we SEOs all should have seen the rise of Single Page Applications looming on the horizon.

But viewed glass-half-full, the rise of SPAs presents an opportunity for technically-minded SEOs to gain experience and become even more valuable now and in the future.

If SPAs can cause SEO issues, then why do developers create SPA websites?

If you’ve never done any coding, then you might not realize what it’s like to be in a developer’s mindset.

Think about it this way: if you were going to have to sit down and write code to create a certain web page functionality and you could either write 10 lines of code to achieve that, or write 1,000 lines of code, which would you choose? You’d opt for the expedience of 10 lines of code, right?

Developers are not lazy; they simply prefer efficiency and elegance when it comes to writing code. I’ve seen developers frame code and hang it on their office wall. Ever heard the saying “code is poetry?”

If you’re trying to get somewhere the fastest way possible, you take the shortest route, correct?

Single Page Application frameworks and libraries, in crude summary, provide building blocks that allow developers to create a website quickly and efficiently.

Consider the fact that SPAs allow developers to efficiently create modern-looking websites that load pages quickly, which makes for a great user experience, and you can see why you might choose an SPA over coding a website from scratch in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, or hassling with the constraints of a Content Management System.

SPAs present a fast-loading user experience because they don’t need to reload most resources such as HTML, CSS, and scripts with each user interaction like a “traditional” website does. These files only require initial loading and then after that only new data is retrieved and downloaded from the server.

SPAs reduce response times primarily by moving the heavy-lifting of data processing from the server to the browser.

SEO may be a lesser consideration given the SPA developments upsides, an afterthought, or perhaps not a consideration at all during the website development process. Any SEO pro who has been in digital marketing for very long has seen the all-too-common situation where a company develops a website, only later to ask the question “how do we SEO this thing?”

Not everyone realizes that SEO should be baked-in at the beginning and not sprinkled-on at the end, or that their website development choices can have definite downstream negative impacts with respect to SEO.

JavaScript libraries vs. JavaScript frameworks

Untangling the technology behind SPAs eventually leads us to the topic of JavaScript libraries and frameworks.

Ask a developer “what’s the difference between a library and a framework” and you’ll get a lot of interesting answers.

One overriding distinction you hear repeatedly goes something like this:

The code you write calls a library, whereas a framework calls the code you write.

React and Angular are both SPAs, but React is technically a library, whereas Angular is technically a framework. However, you will hear often people refer to SPA technology generally as “JavaScript frameworks”.

Frameworks can be thought of as a structure, like a pre-fab home which comes with the framing, drywall, plumbing, and electrical wiring and all you have to do is add the appliances, windows and coverings, flooring, paint, etc.

A library can be thought of as a place that contains a set of ready to use pre-built tools and functionalities. You’d call a library in your code for a specific function.

You can see that starting a web development project using frameworks and/or libraries can streamline the process, as opposed to writing from scratch all the necessary code to create a website.

Common SEO problems of Single Page Applications

There’s a lot of talk about how well Google can handle JavaScript when it comes to crawling and indexation.

Crawling and indexing is critical to ranking.

Google discovers web pages using software called Googlebot during a very fast process often called “crawling” or “spidering”, during which it downloads an HTML file it finds, extracts the links and visits them simultaneously, and then sends the downloaded resources to the indexer.

But when it comes to a JavaScript-based single page application website, the process gets a bit more complicated.

It’s like the process noted above, but there’s a delay and extra step involved because part of the indexer must do some heavy lifting by parsing and executing the JavaScript, and the new links found then must be passed back to the crawler to look at and then sent back to the indexer; you can see that this is less efficient because of the JavaScript.

SEO is more than just having “great content” and earning high-quality links; it’s also about making your web pages easy to discover by search engines like Google and making it simple for them to know which pages are more important than other pages via internal linking.

A “traditional” HTML-based site is far easier to crawl and index, and by extension, rank. Google can get all the links easily and see what the importance of pages are via internal linking.

A JavaScript-based SPA website makes Google’s life more difficult, and some testing would seem to indicate that there may be downsides when relying on JavaScript for purposes of indexation.

Google is evidently willing to do the extra heavy lifting here, and to my mind that indicates that they’ll improve over time rather than announce to webmasters in the future that they have decided they don’t want to bother with the extra work required to crawl and index JavaScript-based sites.

Another potential SEO problem related to the extra work to discover links is that Google may have issues with evaluating the link equity of those pages.

It’s likely that in time, at least some of the SPA frameworks in popular use will evolve the rendering process to make it easier for Google to crawl and index, perhaps even making it on par with “traditional” HTML-based websites.

But in the meantime, we’re where we are and those who’ve tested how well Google can handle JavaScript-based sites have shown that Google’s ability is inconsistent, and we’re also still in a place where those who have developed SPAs frequently must use workarounds, for example using prerender.io along with Angular to serve fully-rendered pages to the crawler.

Another solution is isomorphic JavaScript, sometimes called “Universal JavaScript”, where a page can be generated on the server and sent to the browser, which can immediately render and display the page. This solves the SEO issues as Google doesn’t have to execute and render the JavaScript in the indexer.

Headless Chrome is another option recently proposed as an easy solution by a Google engineer, who also mentions another solution called Preact, which ships with server-side rendering.

It’s also a good idea to create a properly formatted XML Sitemap and submit that to Google Search Console.

Right now, there doesn’t appear to be any single solution or a paint-by-numbers approach to handing the problems you may encounter if you’re an SEO assisting a client with launching or redeveloping a website using an SPA.

It boils down to effectively communicating the correct end result that’s needed, and dealing with issues as they’re presented based on the library or framework being deployed.

Some important Single Page Application resources

Some super-sharp SEOs and developers have written helpful articles about Single Page Applications, and here are a few resources I have enjoyed that I think you will find helpful:

Tomasz Rudzki wrote an excellent post here; the title says it all: The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript SEO

Watch this video by Google ‎Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller – he provides a terrific general overview of Single Page Applications and how Google treats them

Justin Briggs is quite conversant with both SEO and JavaScript and wrote 2 pieces you should check out: Auditing JavaScript for SEO, and Core Principles of SEO for JavaScript

Richard Baxter wrote this awhile back, but it’s still very much worth your time: The Basics of JavaScript Framework SEO in AngularJS

Will Critchlow shared this excellent post: Early Results from Split Testing JavaScript for SEO

Hold on to your hat when you click on Barry Adams’ JavaScript & SEO: The Definitive Resource List

If you’re a bit short on time, this is an excellent quick read: SEO Considerations for Single Page Applications

I definitely recommend reading this from Angular University: Angular Single Page Applications (SPA): What are the Benefits?

This Microsoft article is not geared to SEOs, but it’s a quick and helpful read: Choose Between Traditional Web Apps and Single Page Apps (SPAs)

This is also a relatively quick read covering a few different SPA types by Johann Wagner

Lastly, I strongly suggest you make time to read this, a very good overview: Single Page Applications: When & Why You Should Use Them

Final thoughts

Single Page Applications are evolving rapidly, as is the web technology landscape in general. It’s worth the effort for professional SEOs to be as conversant as possible with not only Single Page Applications, but also Accelerated Mobile Pages, Progressive Web Apps, Content Management Systems in general, and of course the tech behind how websites are coded from scratch.

My sense of the situation is that SPAs, and Google’s ability to handle JavaScript-based websites, will advance at a quickening pace because the stakeholders involved are aware that SPAs come with a definite SEO downside as it stands right now.

It’s entirely possible that in a year or so the most popular SPAs will ship with SEO solutions built in because awareness of the need for SEO friendly JavaScript-based websites is growing. But there’s no guarantee of that happening soon or at all, so my recommendation for today’s SEOs is to get excited about and embrace this technology trend.

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/04/09/an-seos-survival-guide-to-single-page-applications-spas/

[sheilalmartinia]

An SEO’s survival guide to Single Page Applications (SPAs)

SEOs beware: if you haven’t heard of Single Page Applications (SPA for short), or if you have been resistant to learning about these JavaScript methods for creating websites, the time for hiding your head in the sand is over.

Check out this tweet from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller:

The web has moved from plain HTML – as an SEO you can embrace that. Learn from JS devs & share SEO knowledge with them. JS's not going away.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) August 8, 2017

John Mueller is correct. It’s not going away.

A quick search on Google Trends for “Single Page Application” reveals the sharp rise in popularity and awareness of SPAs over time:

Some developers are positively enamored with using JavaScript frameworks and libraries to create websites, and SPA popularity has been steadily growing.

Take Angular (also known as AngularJS and Angular.js), for example.

Here’s a Google Trends search for the Angular JavaScript framework showing the past 5 years, and Trends even recognizes the application platform – you can see popularity has increased greatly over the last couple of years:

The React JavaScript library shows a similar up and to the right trend:

In my role as a professional SEO, I can’t say that Single Page Applications are the rule and not the exception when it comes to how businesses choose to develop websites these days, but I am running across more and more SPAs, and so are my colleagues.

Yes, it’s true that JavaScript was never intended for web page content delivery.

Yes, it’s true that SPAs to date have not been great for SEO.

Yes, it’s true that many developers who had fun quickly creating websites using SPAs had to later spend more time fixing SEO problems than the time they would have spent if they just coded the site to deliver content via HTML5 in the first place.

But, none of that matters, my SEO friends.

Like it or not, SPAs look like they’re here to stay.

It’s time to stop thinking bad thoughts about SPAs and trying to wish them into the cornfield.

Single-Page Applications: Resistance is futile

I admit it – for a while there I was hoping I could ignore Single Page Applications, and maybe eventually SPAs would end up in the trash heap of obsolete website trends such as the <blink> tag, and web page content that’s free of annoying and intrusive advertising interruptions.

Programming and coding languages live and die by developer adoption. For example, if, by some weird turn of events, developers across the world suddenly decided they hated PHP and fell in love with some super-cool new server-side scripting language, then PHP withers, maybe even dies.

It’s just that simple.

That’s why, for example, Google has been pushing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) super hard – because they need major and widespread developer adoption for AMP to succeed and not wind up as the <blink> tags’ roommate.

Talk to developers who’ve created sites using Angular, React, or other JavaScript frameworks or libraries. See if they light up as they talk about the ease and speed of development and how debugging was not as hard as the rumors have it.

SPAs are popular with developers, and that popularity is not showing any sign of slowing down.

Dipping a toe into the SPA

Looking “under the hood” of SPAs, a distinguishing characteristic is that there’s a lot less back and forth between the server and the browser making requests to the server.

After the initial JavaScript framework download to the browser and first page view, there is no page reloading going on when navigating to a second, third, and fourth (etc.) page, hence the “single page” part of Single Page Application.

After that initial JavaScript framework download and first page view, subsequent pages viewed load very quickly, exactly because of the lack of back and forth requests between the server and browser that “traditional” web sites require.

And this means a very good user experience because no extra page load means no extra wait time. And, as we all know, everyone prefers fast-loading pages.

The main aspect to remember here is that with an SPA there is far less back and forth between the browser and the server.

But JavaScript was never intended for web page content delivery

Before JavaScript started being used commonly in website development, web pages were static and created using HTML.

Using JavaScript enabled website developers to add interactivity to their web pages such as pop-up dialog boxes when a user is filling out a form, expandable content when a user clicks on text or a button, or a drop-down menu when the user hovers their mouse over a navigation element.

These and other user interactive features JavaScript allows can be executed in the browser without requiring a call to the server.

And thus, for many years, website developers used HTML for content delivery, CSS for layout and styling, and JavaScript for adding user interactivity.

It’s a fair generalization that JavaScript has become vital to websites and to a developer’s resume; JavaScript is pretty much ubiquitous. JavaScript is not that difficult to learn compared to full-blown programming languages such as Java and C++. The “J” in AJAX and jQuery is – you guessed it – JavaScript.

I only bring this up because in retrospect, and hindsight is always 20/20, we SEOs all should have seen the rise of Single Page Applications looming on the horizon.

But viewed glass-half-full, the rise of SPAs presents an opportunity for technically-minded SEOs to gain experience and become even more valuable now and in the future.

If SPAs can cause SEO issues, then why do developers create SPA websites?

If you’ve never done any coding, then you might not realize what it’s like to be in a developer’s mindset.

Think about it this way: if you were going to have to sit down and write code to create a certain web page functionality and you could either write 10 lines of code to achieve that, or write 1,000 lines of code, which would you choose? You’d opt for the expedience of 10 lines of code, right?

Developers are not lazy; they simply prefer efficiency and elegance when it comes to writing code. I’ve seen developers frame code and hang it on their office wall. Ever heard the saying “code is poetry?”

If you’re trying to get somewhere the fastest way possible, you take the shortest route, correct?

Single Page Application frameworks and libraries, in crude summary, provide building blocks that allow developers to create a website quickly and efficiently.

Consider the fact that SPAs allow developers to efficiently create modern-looking websites that load pages quickly, which makes for a great user experience, and you can see why you might choose an SPA over coding a website from scratch in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, or hassling with the constraints of a Content Management System.

SPAs present a fast-loading user experience because they don’t need to reload most resources such as HTML, CSS, and scripts with each user interaction like a “traditional” website does. These files only require initial loading and then after that only new data is retrieved and downloaded from the server.

SPAs reduce response times primarily by moving the heavy-lifting of data processing from the server to the browser.

SEO may be a lesser consideration given the SPA developments upsides, an afterthought, or perhaps not a consideration at all during the website development process. Any SEO pro who has been in digital marketing for very long has seen the all-too-common situation where a company develops a website, only later to ask the question “how do we SEO this thing?”

Not everyone realizes that SEO should be baked-in at the beginning and not sprinkled-on at the end, or that their website development choices can have definite downstream negative impacts with respect to SEO.

JavaScript libraries vs. JavaScript frameworks

Untangling the technology behind SPAs eventually leads us to the topic of JavaScript libraries and frameworks.

Ask a developer “what’s the difference between a library and a framework” and you’ll get a lot of interesting answers.

One overriding distinction you hear repeatedly goes something like this:

The code you write calls a library, whereas a framework calls the code you write.

React and Angular are both SPAs, but React is technically a library, whereas Angular is technically a framework. However, you will hear often people refer to SPA technology generally as “JavaScript frameworks”.

Frameworks can be thought of as a structure, like a pre-fab home which comes with the framing, drywall, plumbing, and electrical wiring and all you have to do is add the appliances, windows and coverings, flooring, paint, etc.

A library can be thought of as a place that contains a set of ready to use pre-built tools and functionalities. You’d call a library in your code for a specific function.

You can see that starting a web development project using frameworks and/or libraries can streamline the process, as opposed to writing from scratch all the necessary code to create a website.

Common SEO problems of Single Page Applications

There’s a lot of talk about how well Google can handle JavaScript when it comes to crawling and indexation.

Crawling and indexing is critical to ranking.

Google discovers web pages using software called Googlebot during a very fast process often called “crawling” or “spidering”, during which it downloads an HTML file it finds, extracts the links and visits them simultaneously, and then sends the downloaded resources to the indexer.

But when it comes to a JavaScript-based single page application website, the process gets a bit more complicated.

It’s like the process noted above, but there’s a delay and extra step involved because part of the indexer must do some heavy lifting by parsing and executing the JavaScript, and the new links found then must be passed back to the crawler to look at and then sent back to the indexer; you can see that this is less efficient because of the JavaScript.

SEO is more than just having “great content” and earning high-quality links; it’s also about making your web pages easy to discover by search engines like Google and making it simple for them to know which pages are more important than other pages via internal linking.

A “traditional” HTML-based site is far easier to crawl and index, and by extension, rank. Google can get all the links easily and see what the importance of pages are via internal linking.

A JavaScript-based SPA website makes Google’s life more difficult, and some testing would seem to indicate that there may be downsides when relying on JavaScript for purposes of indexation.

Google is evidently willing to do the extra heavy lifting here, and to my mind that indicates that they’ll improve over time rather than announce to webmasters in the future that they have decided they don’t want to bother with the extra work required to crawl and index JavaScript-based sites.

Another potential SEO problem related to the extra work to discover links is that Google may have issues with evaluating the link equity of those pages.

It’s likely that in time, at least some of the SPA frameworks in popular use will evolve the rendering process to make it easier for Google to crawl and index, perhaps even making it on par with “traditional” HTML-based websites.

But in the meantime, we’re where we are and those who’ve tested how well Google can handle JavaScript-based sites have shown that Google’s ability is inconsistent, and we’re also still in a place where those who have developed SPAs frequently must use workarounds, for example using prerender.io along with Angular to serve fully-rendered pages to the crawler.

Another solution is isomorphic JavaScript, sometimes called “Universal JavaScript”, where a page can be generated on the server and sent to the browser, which can immediately render and display the page. This solves the SEO issues as Google doesn’t have to execute and render the JavaScript in the indexer.

Headless Chrome is another option recently proposed as an easy solution by a Google engineer, who also mentions another solution called Preact, which ships with server-side rendering.

It’s also a good idea to create a properly formatted XML Sitemap and submit that to Google Search Console.

Right now, there doesn’t appear to be any single solution or a paint-by-numbers approach to handing the problems you may encounter if you’re an SEO assisting a client with launching or redeveloping a website using an SPA.

It boils down to effectively communicating the correct end result that’s needed, and dealing with issues as they’re presented based on the library or framework being deployed.

Some important Single Page Application resources

Some super-sharp SEOs and developers have written helpful articles about Single Page Applications, and here are a few resources I have enjoyed that I think you will find helpful:

Tomasz Rudzki wrote an excellent post here; the title says it all: The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript SEO

Watch this video by Google ‎Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller – he provides a terrific general overview of Single Page Applications and how Google treats them

Justin Briggs is quite conversant with both SEO and JavaScript and wrote 2 pieces you should check out: Auditing JavaScript for SEO, and Core Principles of SEO for JavaScript

Richard Baxter wrote this awhile back, but it’s still very much worth your time: The Basics of JavaScript Framework SEO in AngularJS

Will Critchlow shared this excellent post: Early Results from Split Testing JavaScript for SEO

Hold on to your hat when you click on Barry Adams’ JavaScript & SEO: The Definitive Resource List

If you’re a bit short on time, this is an excellent quick read: SEO Considerations for Single Page Applications

I definitely recommend reading this from Angular University: Angular Single Page Applications (SPA): What are the Benefits?

This Microsoft article is not geared to SEOs, but it’s a quick and helpful read: Choose Between Traditional Web Apps and Single Page Apps (SPAs)

This is also a relatively quick read covering a few different SPA types by Johann Wagner

Lastly, I strongly suggest you make time to read this, a very good overview: Single Page Applications: When & Why You Should Use Them

Final thoughts

Single Page Applications are evolving rapidly, as is the web technology landscape in general. It’s worth the effort for professional SEOs to be as conversant as possible with not only Single Page Applications, but also Accelerated Mobile Pages, Progressive Web Apps, Content Management Systems in general, and of course the tech behind how websites are coded from scratch.

My sense of the situation is that SPAs, and Google’s ability to handle JavaScript-based websites, will advance at a quickening pace because the stakeholders involved are aware that SPAs come with a definite SEO downside as it stands right now.

It’s entirely possible that in a year or so the most popular SPAs will ship with SEO solutions built in because awareness of the need for SEO friendly JavaScript-based websites is growing. But there’s no guarantee of that happening soon or at all, so my recommendation for today’s SEOs is to get excited about and embrace this technology trend.

from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/04/09/an-seos-survival-guide-to-single-page-applications-spas/

[seo53703]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[restatebrk24219]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[seo19107]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[seoprovider2110]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[seo90210]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

from FEED 9 MARKETING http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[famlawatty6000]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[vidmarket32514]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[duilawyer72210]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[restateagnt17101]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[seocompany35203]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

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