What is a Digital Marketing Analyst?
Data stories work to answer particular questions around marketing channel performance, and often uncover several insights and recommendations for improvements. These insights are all backed by data, and incredibly valuable to their employers to help determine budgets and effective marketing programs.
To gather data, digital marketing analysts use tools like Google Analytics, Heap or Amplitude. These platforms allow for highly customizable dashboard creation, and allow analysts to actively monitor and analyze stats like cost per click, website traffic sources, or referrer performance.
Another extremely important role of a marketing analyst is identifying key performance indicators (commonly referred to as KPIs, or sometimes OKRs) to measure the success of changes being made to different marketing content or strategy. Digital marketing analysts track things such as effectiveness of a social media blast, change in strategy to paid marketing keywords, or performance of organic traffic.
A very common theme of this role is the importance of A/B testing, which is where the statistics job requirement often comes into play. Marketing analysts are in charge of keeping track of the metrics used to measure marketing changes in a (semi) controlled environment, and reporting on change impacts to their leadership.
Digital marketing analytics is a great entry-level field into a technical role (which are often remote!), and often leads to becoming a marketing manager. If you’re technically savvy or inclined towards numbers, read on!
What does a Digital Marketing Analyst do?
Marketing analysts spend a bulk of their day monitoring data, looking for any trends in marketing channels, and presenting insights and recommendations to team members.
A marketing analyst's day is broken primarily into three parts:
1- trendline monitoring
2- dashboard creation
2- exploring for improvements
Trendline monitoring is watching marketing channels to make sure there are no abnormalities with budget to customer ratio. This is often done by monitoring some basic metrics like traffic source and order conversion rates. Often a marketing analyst will keep tabs on things like how many users are coming from a particular source per week, or if a source has a high engagement/bounce rate. If any of these metrics drastically change, it’s the analyst’s job to alert the team.
Dashboard creation is where the web analytics platform skills come in. It's a marketing analyst's job to create reports that are viewed by other team members to help them make decisions about their marketing channel. At a larger company, each channel will often have their own dashboard and strategy.
Exploring for improvements is the meat of the marketing analyst's role. This often involves diving deep into a particular question and trying to find trends, such as “what’s the most popular channel used to access our site?” or “why does our social media marketing have such a high bounce rate?” From there, the marketing analyst is encouraged to craft up hypotheses that each of the marketing channel teams will work to solve.
Do I need a degree to be a Digital Marketing Analyst?
While this role seems more technical, marketing analysts can come from all backgrounds.
Job descriptions will often mention a requirement of something STEM related, but often psychology majors do well here because they’re able to understand the “why” behind user interactions. This is also a popular bootcamp role, which we don't love, but would be remiss not to mention.
- Data entry and receptionist professionals
- STEM majors- anything math, science, or technology related
- Liberal arts degrees with a writing twist (for reporting and data storytelling)
Our Favorite Marketing Analyst Certifications
Data Analysis Specialization
This specialization focuses on data programming in R, and spans 3 courses. It covers probability basics, inferential statistics, and light visualizations. Duke is an incredible certification for Linkedin.
Google Analytics
Google Sponsors a data analytics certificate program through Coursera. This is one of the more coveted certificates in the industry for Google Analytics, and as a paid media analyst we highly recommend getting familiar.
Data Visualization
UC Davis teaches a class in Tableau to manipulate and visualize data. It's included with a Coursera subscription ($49/month) and has a rating of 4.5 stars with almost 6 thousand reviews.
Career Path of a Digital Marketing Analyst
*Or Associate
Entry Level Digital Marketing Analyst Salary
We've aggregated thousands of salaries across glassdoor and linkedin, and marketing analysts can make anywhere between 75k - 98k, depending on their location and skillsets.
Top Skills of a Digital Marketing Analyst
We've compiled thousands of job descriptions for marketing analysts to record the most common requirements to save you time. While preparing for interviews, keep in mind specific times you've demonstrated these skills.
- Craft and tell compelling data stories from different marketing channels
- Basic understanding of SEO, SEM, social media campaigns, offline marketing, and branding
- Develop hypotheses for testing prioritization
- Gathering and utilizing data to create marketing channel optimizations
- Design compelling data visualizations to showcase findings
- Experience with AB Testing and Optimizations
- Familiarity with omnichannel marketing campaign KPIs and performance benchmarks
- Assist with team's prioritization with data-driven methods
Top Tools of a Digital Marketing Analyst
We've also compiled the most common tools listed in job description. If you're serious about becoming a marketing analyst, get familiar with these and be ready to talk about them.
Gathering Quantitative Data
- Google Analytics
- Adobe Analytics
- Amplitude
- Heap
- Mixpanel
Gathering Qualitative Data
- Hotjar
- Userbrain
- Fullstory
- Usertesting.com
Aggregating Data
- Excel/Google Sheets
- Tableau
- Lookr
- PowerBI
- Mode
Task Management
- Jira
- Confluence
- ASANA
- Notion
- Trello
Key Traits & Competencies of a Successful Marketing Analyst
As a Digital Marketing Analyst, you'll work most with:
Do marketing analysts need to know code?
Analytics is often associated with coding, including SQL or Python to access huge swaths of data stored in warehouses. However, this is incredibly company dependent, and often marketing analysts are not required to code.
Most popular web analytics tools -- Google & Adobe Analytics, Amplitude, Heap and others do not require programming to access data and have an intuitive user interfaces. If a company is requiring "coding" or "programming," it may be worthwhile to ask about the reason in an interview. If they have lots of data only accessible by warehouse, this may be more of a data scientist role!
One of the main distinctions between analytics and data science is the ability to code-- and data scientists are paid better for it. Don't be fooled into doing data science for lower pay!
Role Differentiators
Difference between Product Analysts and Marketing Analysts
Marketing Analysts focus on the best ways to attract users and potential customers to the site. They specialize in breaking down different customer acquisition channels like SEO (search engine marketing, meaning organic google or bing), paid search (google or bing sponsored ads), or paid media and tracking traffic levels and performance. Learn about the different types of marketing traffic here.
Once a user is on the site, often from the optimization efforts of the marketing analyst, the user is passed along to the . Product analysts focus strictly on a website or application, and how customers interact with it. The primarily role of a product analyst is increasing site metrics like order conversion or product views.
To recap: a marketing analyst is responsible for analyzing and improving the ways at which a customer accesses the product, while a product analyst is in charge of making sure that customer completes the product's desired actions once acquired.
Difference between Marketing Analysts and Data Analysts
To recap: a marketing analyst is a specialization within data analytics.
How to Get Marketing Analytics Experience
Learning on the job is one of the fastest ways to get familiar with new topics, and showing is much better than telling. Use a website creator to write about something you're passionate about, and use Youtube videos or our recommended classes to learn how to implement free Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Then monitor your data! Think about what paths you'd expect users to take while engaging with your content and write about why.
Congrats! You've written your first data story. This is great content for a mini "portfolio" to talk about on interviews. Expert mode: find a local business to trade work for-- maybe you throw up GA & GTM, they give you a meal, and you can give them a few insights to improve their user experience. Win, Win, Win.
Some popular marketing analytics questions:
- How are users finding the site for the first time?
- Are users buying on their first visit, or do they have multiple touchpoints?
- What's the most common path to conversion for users?
Conclusion
Marketing analytics is the practice of using data to inform decisions about marketing strategies and content performance. A digital marketing analyst finds, gathers, and organizes data about marketing channels to help teammates and colleagues make decisions about the all faucets of the marketing business.
Here at Bridged we are huge fans of stacking micro-certifications to achieve desired career results. We're building a product to make your career planning fun and affordable, and we'd love to talk to YOU! Was this article helpful? Did you land an interview for a marketing analytics role?
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