We look for people with 10 years of Omniture experience or with experience in Webtrends, Optimost, iPerceptions, and making coffee. These people are very hard to find; you’ve narrowed the pool of potential candidates way too much. We are a young industry, and that means it is hard to find people with deep experience in one specific tool.

How do you identify all the possible variables that went into delivering an outcome on your website (variables that are key to your ability to extract some value from your predictive analytics efforts)?

This problem happens with pretty much every tool, and it is a below-the-surface issue that actually hinders progress. But you don’t have to deal with this issue. You can fix it using the custom reporting feature available in most web analytics tools on the market. Hurrah!

The best analysts have a deep technical side, in the sense that they possess an understanding of JavaScript tags, URLs, parameters, redirects, and web pages. They are better able to answer this question: “How does the data get collected, and then how it is interpreted by the analytics tool?” To see practical examples of how important it is to know

The people who tend to use category terms are early in the consideration life cycle. I call these people impression virgins because they have not yet decided what they want and are open to suggestions.

It includes a 13-month trend of overall traffic (All Visits), Paid Traffic, and organic traffic (Non-paid Traffic).

All of my A/B and multivariate testing education came from using Google Website Optimizer on the website of a nonprofit that I work closely with.

When visitors move along through these pages, then that’s success for you. Think of going from Add to Cart to Start Checkout to Complete Credit Card Info, and so on. The Exit Rate, on any page, indicates a “bad” exit. But in this case it is called Abandonment Rate, to distinguish what is actually happening in terms of customer experience.

If you want to change your boss and your company, then you’ll have to become a marketer—someone with an understanding of marketing principles, someone who can be a customer advocate, and someone who can evangelize the purpose of data in creating customer centric-decisions.