How to Build a Winning Analytics Team

[SakibIslam&8]

Data analytics should be a priority for every advertiser, but building an effective and successful analytics team can be challenging. In this article, we share insights from Google’s marketing and analytics leaders, breaking down key principles that companies can use to harness the power of a tech-savvy analytics team.

Digital transformation—the process of using digital technologies to modernize organizational performance , sri lanka phone number material agility, and sustainability—is widely viewed by marketing leaders as the key to future-proofing businesses. To make the most of digital innovations, companies must be able to determine where to focus their efforts and understand which strategies work best. That’s why having a strong data analytics team that can communicate real-time data insights to the C-suite is crucial to driving meaningful digital transformation.

Companies that build a successful analytics team are more likely to increase revenue, profits, and market share. Yet, according to the Digital Maturity Benchmark , only 9% of organizations are effectively using data and technology to design better consumer experiences. Why?

Through its experience building world-leading analytics teams and working with hundreds of companies, Google has identified 3 core principles that can help companies overcome challenges and build successful analytics teams and strategies.

Core principles that can help businesses build successful analytics strategies: Prioritize talent over tools. Foster a culture of curiosity. Engage in C-suite collaboration.

1. Prioritize talent over tools


When investing in your organization’s analytics, prioritize people over tools. Investing in people leads to a flexible analytics capability that can adapt to a changing business environment without locking the company into an unwieldy system of software and tools.

While many Fortune 500 companies have invested heavily in analytics tools, most still struggle to make meaningful data-driven business decisions. This is largely because this investment strategy makes the mistake of thinking that tools, rather than people, are the solution to creating better analytics. Tools alone can only go so far without the right people behind them.

These misguided efforts led to the development of a 10/90 rule for web analytics success: invest 10% of your analytics budget in tools and the remaining 90% in people. For example, if you pay a web analytics vendor $25,000 for an annual contract, you should be prepared to invest another $225,000 in staff to get meaningful value from that data.

Software systems and professional services from vendors are certainly important components of a successful analytics team. But it is the analysts, not the tools, who transform raw data into actionable insights.

By following the 10/90 rule, CXOs can leverage the winning combination of computing power and human judgment to inform marketing activities and business decisions, and understand consumer behaviors.


2. Foster a culture of curiosity

Analytics teams thrive in dynamic environments that reward curiosity, foster innovation, and set high expectations. Building and reinforcing this type of culture can help put organizations on the right path to realizing impactful returns on analytics investments.

An active analytics culture thrives when CXOs reward curiosity over perfection. Encourage analysts to challenge convention and ask questions as a method of improving quality and reducing risk. This thinking goes hand-in-hand with a test-and-learn mentality, where pushing the boundaries through proactive experimentation helps identify what works and optimize accordingly. It