My interest in metrics lead me to becoming Google Analytics IQ (GAIQ) certified and using quantified self data in my personal life.

Curiosity plays a significant role when running stat queries. “I wonder why XYZ page saw a rise in page views last week…” and down into the rabbit hole, exploring the various numbers that could lead to an explanation. However, it’s not purely number-crunching —  you need to understand the business and the audience in order to fully report on the explanation.

In a prior job, I provided operational support to the Business Development team. Part of that role entailed attending monthly meetings with in-house data analyst along with the senior staff. The goal of these meetings were to identify trends and provide metric requests. The website was very complex and, unfortunately, KPIs were introduced after launch so it required some workaround to identify useful information. As such the monthly meetings tended to be a chore.

When the data analyst resigned, the responsibilities were passed on to me. It was a challenge to dig into the a new area of the company, but I enjoyed the “behind-the-scenes” look into how the Google Analytics tagging worked on the site, what type of information would be beneficial to the editorial team, how to identify leads for the sales team, and interacting with the C-suite on the overall traffic to the website.  I learned how to run SQL queries on my own (without needing to create a JIRA ticket) and created dashboards to visually display the data (in GA and other tools).