The best answer to that question is that “it depends.” The members of the Web Analytics team vary widely by company based on a number of factors, such as the company size, where you are in your rollout, capability maturity for analytics, established corporate processes, the number of sites to implement and maintain, the granularity of the implementation, the technology used, the number of people to which you give access, support requirements, and many more company-specific factors.

For many companies, the number of web analysts can be counted on one finger of one hand.  The lone cowboy is expected to champion the effort, and pretty much do everything under the sun - from orchestrating the tagging to reading the data to being a project manager.  Sure, that can work.  It just means empowering one individual to get the entire job done and giving them the budget, resources, authority, and clearance to make all the decisions - and communicate up the chain.  In reality though, few companies can find the right person who can do it all. Does it take a village to do web analytics?  We’ll not quite, but it does take many different people to select, implement, extend, and maintain a web analytics platform.

Over the next two (or maybe more) posts I’m going to cover my take on what skill sets, roles, and responsibilities are necessary on for doing web analytics - from when you start thinking (and believing) that you need a web analytics tool, to when you implement, to the ongoing day-to-day operations of the web analytics department and maintenance of the tool.

When you are just beginning you web analytics selection, prior to implementation, you want a small, focused web analytics team (watch out for too many cooks!):

• An Executive Sponsor.  This person is usually the HIPPO (highest paid person in the room) - until their boss gets involved ;).  For some companies this could be a C-level executive, VP, or Director.  The Executive Sponsor is in charge of setting the broad-based strategic vision for the analytics roll-out.  They may have hired you!  They help to set the overall scope of the rollout, remove obstacles, and set and control the budget. They are who you go to “escalate.”
• A Web Analytics Expert.  This person is most likely you. You may be an MBA, a techie, a marketer, an IT person, or someone who was promoted into the position.  Lucky you!  You will be in charge in identifying a vendor consideration set, writing an RFP (if you do one), identifying business requirements, collaborating with internal stakeholders, doing the due diligence with the vendor, determining the features and components needed in the web analytics product, figuring out the appropriate financial model, championing for the budget, communicating with internal stakeholders, debating the merits of the technology with your internal team, and generally supervising and stewarding the whole selection process along so that the job gets done (and your executive sponsor looks good).
• A Technology Expert.  This person could be you too, Ms. Web Analyst. Or it could be a systems architect, a data warehousing expert, a dba, an application engineer, or another tech-savvy colleague with a computer science degree (or maybe not - a degree from the school of hard knocks). This person will vet the underlying technology provided by the vendor.  You want this person to ask deep, hard questions about the innards of the technology offering to ensure the technology will match and scale to your internal technical requirements.  Say you want to integrate internal data with your web analytics tool.  This person should know all about your corporate systems, what data your company has, where/how it’s stored, other technology projects, and so on.  They’ll help you ensure technology you are leaning toward fits into the technology ecosystem at your company at a very deep level.

After short-listing vendors, doing the due diligence, pilot/proof of concept(s), you’ll finally make a decision about what tool to buy (or perhaps you’ll determine a free tool meets your requirements now (but will it in the future is the question you should be asking… LOL!).

At the “buy” decision is made, the Web Analytics team will grow to include a more people with different skill sets, roles, and responsibilities.  I’ll cover that in my next blog post.

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