web analytics

As a prospective Data Analyst intern, how do I answer the most challenging data analysis I have done so far?

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My answer on Quora for: As a prospective Data Analyst intern, how do I answer the most challenging data analysis I have done so far?

https://www.quora.com/As-a-prospective-Data-Analyst-intern-how-do-I-answer-the-most-challenging-data-analysis-I-have-done-so-far/answer/Paras-Doshi?srid=uWIN

When I hire for Data Analyst (Jr. or Intern) positions, I look for three things:

1) Analytical mindset:

I would do this by sharing a hypothetical case study and seeing how you go about solving this. I would look for things like: a) Approach: How do you break down the problem? b) Effectiveness: How effectively can go about solving the case. I am NOT looking for the “Right” answer but just want to see how you go about solving the case.

(Search for “Management consulting case studies” — I usually pick a simple case)

2) Communication skills:

This is pretty standard across many roles but it’s important for data analysts to be able to communicate their recommendations/findings to stakeholders.

3) Basic hard/tech skills + Willingness to learn new tech skills:

I would ask you basic tech questions around SQL, Excel OR other “tech skills” that you might have mentioned in your resume. I am not looking for expert-level knowledge but just want to make sure you know things that you have listed on your resume or things that you studied. Also, I would ask you questions that would help me figure out whether you are open to learning new tech skills.

So now that I have shared the framework with you, let me try and answer your question: How do I answer the most challenging data analysis project that I have done?

a. If you had a good approach for your project then It would mean that you know how to break down data analysis problems and solve them. So solving a basic case study shouldn’t be difficult for you and I could check box #1!

b. If you can communicate the “complexity” of the project effectively then I think I would check the box #2: communication skills!

c. Since you solved a challenging project, I assume that you picked up some tech skills (Bonus points if you picked up new tech skills while solving this problem). Just let me know what tech you used to solve the problem so that I can ask questions around that — if you are able to answer them then I would check box #3!

It’s NOT about the challenging project but your learning/takeaways from that project that will be help you the most!

Now, assuming that the interview team think you are a good “culture fit” plus you came out on top compared to other candidates then you will get an offer to join the team as a Data Analyst!

Hope that helps and may the force be with you!

Completed Marketing Analytics Course from Coursera:

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I just successfully completed the Marketing Analytics course from coursera. The certificate was issued by coursera and university of virginia — it was great to brush up some of my existing skills and then build upon it by learning some new techniques/frameworks.

The course covered:

  1. Marketing Resource Allocation
  2. Metrics for Measuring Brand Assets
  3. Customer Lifetime Value
  4. Regression Basics
  5. Marketing Experiments

If you haven’t checked out courses on coursera yet then I would recommend to check those out! There’s a ton out there for data professionals!

Coursera Marketing Analytics Certificate

 

Data -> Insights -> ?

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I was at the HP Big data conference last week and I heard something during the keynote that’s worth sharing with you.

As Data & Analytics professionals, we spend a lot of our time on finding insights, trends & patterns out of the data but the keynote speaker (Ken Rudin, Facebook) encouraged everyone to take that a step further = Think about Driving impact based on the insights. It’s simple yet a powerful idea! Over past few months, I have started working closely with decision makers and helping drive impact vs just “handing-off” insights.

I hope that helps! Just wanted to share that with you. What do you think?

-Paras

How to add custom User-ID to your Universal Analytics (Google) implementation?

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There are three different implementations that you could have with Google Analytics:

  1. Classic Google Analytics
  2. Universal analytics
  3. Universal analytics with Google Tag manager.

If you fall under “2. Universal analytics” then this post is for you since I’ll walk you through steps that you need to take see UserID’s on your google analytics report.

First why do you want UserID on your GA reports? 

1) Data blending is powerful. If you can combine your transactional datasets with web traffic data then you can extract some powerful insights! To be able to join your transactions data with web traffic data, you need some field that is common across those datasets. UserID might be one of the most useful fields that you could use for data blending.

2) Also having UserID in your reports let’s you perform some user behavior analysis at individual level and that could be pretty powerful too!

Now, How?

There are three steps:

  1. Identify the User ID
  2. Create a Custom Dimension on Google Analytics
  3. Modify your tracking code to send data for the custom dimension

Step 1. Identify the User ID

The first step is to identify the ID that you are going to send to Google analytics. Remember that you can’t send PII (personally identifiable information) so you can’t send something like an email id but you can send other ID’s that may be used in your database.

Step 2: Create a custom dimension on Google Analytics

Go to google analytics admin section > Select your account & property > Go to Custom dimensions

Custom dimensions google analytics

Now, create a new custom dimension. Give it a name, scope it and make sure it’s marked active.

Custom dimension universal analytics User ID

Step 3: Modify your tracking code to send data for the custom dimension

Notice that once you create the dimension, it will also show the example code (on the right side in the picture above). Send this to your web developer!

Just a note on this: The custom dimensions for which you are passing value using the tracking code are referenced as dimensionxx and you don’t use the Name like “Custom User ID” — if it’s the first custom dimension that you will refer to it as dimension1 in the code.

Next steps: Let me know if you have any further questions and if you are interested in seeing the steps for classic GA and Universal analytics w/ Google Tag manager then here’s a blog for you: http://dan-russell.com/2014/03/how-to-set-a-userid-as-a-custom-variable-using-the-google-analytics-cookie/

I hope this was helpful!

What percentage of users are authenticated? (Google Universal Analytics)

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You’re using Google’s Universal Analytics — That’s great! They key to make sure that you get the most out of it is to make sure that you incentivize your users to log-in aka authenticate. First step in doing that is to figure out percentage of users that are authenticated…Here’s how you can see that report:

1. Login to Google Analytics

2. Select your view > Go to “Reporting” section

3. Navigate to Audience > Behavior > User-ID coverage

Google Analytics User ID Universal

4. On this report, you can see authenticated vs unauthenticated sessions:

Percentage of authenticated users google analytics Universal

Conclusion:

In this post, we talked about how to run a report that shows you percentage of authenticated users. (In google’s Universal analytics)