A Day in The Life of a Data Analyst

We live in a data-driven world. All decisions taken in an organization are based on data as it can give you insights into what would work for the company and what would not. Analysing historical data related to a certain field can help predict customer behaviour, changing customer trends and help to present data in a meaningful way. Every organization today needs a data analytics expert. Hence, if you are driven by numbers, hardworking and tech-savvy, then the job of a Data Analyst is for you.

The Glow & Lovely Careers (formerly known as Fair & Lovely Career Foundation) has numerous short online courses based on data analysis, like Introduction to Data Analytics, Marketing Analytics, Big Data Analytics and more. All of these are free online courses and some of them provide online certification as well.

Why have a data analyst in your organization?

It might be an easy task to gather a lot of data from various sources. However, in order to extract value from this data and be able to make informed decisions using it is certainly not that simple. Here is where a data analyst comes into picture. She does a deep dive into the data and tries to find answers to complicated questions. She adds value to the organization by providing the key stakeholders with relevant information and helping them make sense of it.

What is interesting about the job of a data analyst?

Susmitha works as a web analytics, or an e-commerce analytics expert at her company. Her job primarily entails providing actionable insights to the key stakeholders so as to develop their business and increase their ROIs. This is how her typical day at work progresses:

1.Her day begins with collecting large amounts of data pertaining to a certain industry or area from various sources/ channels like Google Analytics, AdWords, web servers and more. She collects this data to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing programs and strategies.

2.The next step at work for her is data segmentation. Data segmentation is a process whereby you divide the big chunk of data on the basis of the information you are looking for. Segments let you isolate and analyze subsets of data so that you can examine the trends in your business. For instance, of a certain number of customers, if you want to segregate a group of them who are from Bangalore who purchased products from one specific category, then data segmentation is what you will have to do.

3.Now that Susmitha has performed the data segmentation part, the next step is to do 'Data Wrangling'. This is a process whereby all the raw data that she has collected is transformed into a format which is appropriate for working with and easily inferring insights from. The various methods used here are Cohort Analysis, RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis, retention %, Fraud analysis and the like. . This requires math skills to estimate numerical data. You can find and do online courseson the same.

4. The next step is to provide actionable insights to the stakeholders. The various factors that are measured in order to give these insights are the ROI( Return on Investment), Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, etc. The insights could be regarding why the ROI of the company has decreased/ increased in a certain time period, possible reasons for the conversion rate to increase/ decrease and the like. She also analyzes channel wise performance, device wise performance, product performance etc to provide insights based on the findings. Data is precise, analysts have to make sure they are vigilant in their analysis to come to correct conclusions

These processes put together is collectively referred to as Marketing Intelligence. It is nothing but the process of gathering information relevant to a company's markets, analysing it for the purpose of accurate decision-making that would ultimately help in understanding the market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics.

These are primarily the activities done by Susmitha, as a web analytics expert, on a daily basis. She is of the opinion that it is extremely essential to be technologically up-to-date. This would help you to increase the speed at which data analysis is done. Also, pursuing professional online courses on Data Analytics from the Glow & Lovely Careers would also be very helpful in understanding the processes better.