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A comment on The scourge of web analytics.

Re:The scourge of web analytics by jackgolding on Monday May 29, 2017 @09:15PM (#14442443)
I've worked in web analytics for the last 4 years. It's a bit annoying that OP doesn't differentiate "analytics tools" and "marketing tools", nearly every site I've worked on doubles the site load speed due to some arcane synchronous-only loading iFrame. Server side seems like a good idea until you realise how many bots there are on the internet (which the business doesn't care about), how hard it is to implement (one of the best and worst things about client side tracking is on a lot of sides it can be implemented and modified outside the deployment cycle) and how much information you get through these pixel calls.

There is a massive lack of technical talent in this field that companies are screaming out for. I'm very happy with it as a career. If you are interested in some advice on getting into it send me an email. Also happy to answer any questions.

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Re:The scourge of web analytics by ramblerman on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @01:41AM (#14443147)
Not to be rude, as I am genuinely interested in this area. But is there much more to it than adding a GA tracker and setting up the dashboard?
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Re:The scourge of web analytics by jackgolding on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @10:01AM (#14445397)
Depends on the role, the bad roles generally are just that (report monkey and a bit of project management around implementation.) The tooling is either Adobe analytics or Google analytics at most companies. There are 3 specialisations as I see it: data, outbound marketing and inbound marketing.

Data is to do with the limitations of GA and Adobe. Businesses want to use hit or session level data for segmentation, retargeting, personalisation and all the fancy machine learning stuff. This isn't easy to achieve with out of the box analytics tools so it requires a bit more data processing.

Inbound marketing is to do with conversion rate optimisation, SEO and UX. Questions like "is our left hand navigation better or worse than it was before?" aren't super easy to answer in a commercial context.

Outbound marketing is to do with return on marketing investment for paid advertising. Attribution modelling is a huge space which is VERY hard to figure out for a business.

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Re:The scourge of web analytics by StavrosK on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @03:30AM (#14443492)
What's the difference between the two in how they affect load times? As far as I know, there's no clear delineation.
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Re:The scourge of web analytics by jackgolding on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @09:44AM (#14445284)
Between analytics tools and marketing? You are right by name nothing, however in general if you look in the network tab some on content sites (especially crappy slow ones) you will see ads and other pixels being loaded onto the site as time goes on. Leave certain sites for an hour and they will make hundreds of extra requests.
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Re:The scourge of web analytics by StavrosK on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @09:47AM (#14445302)
Oh, by marketing you mean ads and things like that? I thought you meant optimization tools like A/B testing and similar services.
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Re:The scourge of web analytics by jackgolding on Thursday June 01, 2017 @03:19AM (#14458541)
A/B testing tools slow down sites a lot but yeah I was referring to remarketing pixels or publisher side pixels
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