Web analytics is a vital skill for any digital marketer, content creator, or website owner. It helps you measure, analyze, and optimize your online performance and reach your goals. But how can you help your team develop web analytics skills and become more data-driven? Here are some tips to guide you.
Before you start planning any training or coaching sessions, you need to understand your team's current level of web analytics knowledge and skills, as well as their learning objectives and challenges. You can use surveys, quizzes, interviews, or performance reviews to gather this information. Based on the results, you can identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement, and tailor your approach accordingly.
It's very key in this to find out where their skillsets sit in terms of working with data. Is it: - Data gathering - Descriptive - Predictive - Prescriptive The level will have a mass impact in terms of where to start, but also to consider what your business needs and maybe needs to source elsewhere in the meanwhile.
There are many online resources that can help your team learn web analytics, such as courses, blogs, podcasts, webinars, ebooks, and tools. You can curate a list of the most relevant and useful ones for your team, and share them regularly. You can also create your own resources, such as cheat sheets, guides, templates, or case studies, that illustrate how to apply web analytics concepts and techniques to your specific projects and goals.
Learning web analytics is not only about acquiring theoretical knowledge, but also about practicing and applying it to real-world scenarios. You can help your team practice web analytics skills by assigning them tasks, projects, or challenges that require them to use data to solve problems, make decisions, or optimize results. You can also provide them with constructive feedback, recognition, and support, and encourage them to share their insights and questions with each other.
One of the best ways to help your team develop web analytics skills is to foster a data culture in your organization. This means that you value, promote, and reward the use of data in your daily work, and that you create a positive and collaborative environment where your team can learn from data. You can do this by setting clear and measurable goals, defining and tracking key metrics, communicating and celebrating data-driven successes, and encouraging data literacy and curiosity.
Foster a data culture and ensure everyone is starting from the same baseline of knowledge. Often times teams get overwhelmed with the concept of analytics when really simple data and analysis are best. Know there is no need to do it all at once, we can build on what we know.
Web analytics is a dynamic and evolving field, and you need to keep up with the latest trends, updates, and best practices to stay ahead of the curve. You can help your team stay updated by subscribing to relevant newsletters, podcasts, blogs, or social media accounts, and by attending webinars, workshops, or conferences. You can also organize regular meetings or sessions where you discuss and share the latest news and developments in web analytics, and how they affect your work.
Navigating through the endless amount of news and trends can be overwhelming at times which is why aligning on a specific topic can be helpful for regular knowledge exchange sessions. That way, everyone has a similar foundation for discussion, allowing for much more in-depth chats and questions.
Finally, you can help your team develop web analytics skills by investing in their professional development. This means that you provide them with opportunities and resources to advance their careers and grow their expertise in web analytics. You can do this by offering them mentoring, coaching, or sponsorship programs, by supporting their certification or accreditation goals, by sponsoring their participation in online or offline courses or events, or by connecting them with industry experts or peers.
Even before assessing the team’s need, one key action to take is to actually inspire your team members to learn more about web analytics. They should understand that it’s not something they do for the company or for you because you want to put more work on them, but it’s a vital skill that will help them in their professional life. Once they’re clear about that, they will want to learn more about it themselves. Once they understand that EVERY marketing discipline and marketer is better with analytics, they will naturally ask you for more training.