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Slightly disagree with the above posts. While understanding how your data works together is very important, storytelling is a very different skill. I suggest reading: FastCo, HBR, The New Yorker, Good to Great, Design Thinking by Tom Kelly. I particularly like a passage in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery that talks about the "essential matters." He says adults tend to only understand things numerically, but that the real meaning comes from the deeper questions. Check out Kurt Vonnegut's lecture on the shape of stories. I believe there are two ways to approach changing your job: reduce the amount of time you spend processing data by automating as much as you can AND focus on interpersonal skills such as explaining things to people. The math side of analytics is easy, but success will come from your ability to convey that math to people who don't even know how to read scatter plots
Fellow analyst here. I found myself in the same rut recently which was made even worse when I found how little clients paid attention to my reports. I spent extra time on the visual language of my reports and found that both clients and colleagues started seeing the value in the same type of insights I was previously providing in a less visually appealing deck. Read the book Nobody Wants To Read Your Shit by Steven Pressfield. It helps. A lot.
For stuff to better yourself, sign up for the TMAI newsletter on Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik. Seriously, he's great. And if you haven't used Openstrate.gy yet or signed up for a slack account there, that is also a must.
Take your boring reporting and do some ad hoc analysis off of it. Show a strategic insight you've learned from the data, and make an actionable recommendation. It could be as simple as "our emails have the highest open rates on Tuesdays", but if an email gets opened, then the creative gets seen. Eventually someone will listen
Start with anything that is a trend or outlier.
Pay attention to the media or creative teams to see what's important to them.
Correlations across seemingly unrelated things - ie, when digital video has high engagement, search and social volume spike, etc
I am VERY good at finding patterns and storytelling. Problem is in the position I'm in I seem to not get all the CONTEXT i need from the strat/account teams in order to storytell/analyze/pattern find appropriately. I'll do my analysis, write insights and then when running thru it with the internal teams they'll drop nuggets of info that GREATLY alter the story. And of course it's AFTER i've already done all sorts of analysis. *sigh*
I don't really have websites to point out. I'd look at the data you have access to and start by making comparisons. How was yesterday's measurement different from last week? What was different about yesterday from last week? Was it the people that got the message? Was it the subject line? The button placement? For the folks who clicked into your website, what did they do before/after the thing you wanted them to do. It really takes some self initiative to dig, but the easiest place is with simple comparisons
OP, what others have said above! But, also, based on your question about how to look for things and find insights...you might want to think about whether that's something you're into and are good at because honestly it's kind of the point of being an ANALYST. The presumption is that reporting the data is only a means for you to acquire it so you can then ANALYZE what it means. I used to be a financial analyst and I worked in the financial reporting & analysis dept and was in charge of reporting expenses data + create recos for reducing those based on data and I was also in charge of reporting productivity data for our operations abd create staffing recos from there based on data. If you're not good at spotting trends and curious about unusual data occurrence or pattern formations and connecting dots, maybe that's not actually your field? It's not right/wrong, just something to think about before going too far down a career.
Try joining campaign kick off calls and weekly client check ins. If you pay attention & ask questions during those, you will have all the context you need to write a kick ass report.
@Analyst1 are there any good websites or resources you'd recommend for increasing my knowledge on how to find insights? I'm not always aware of things I could be looking for.
OP which agency are you from or what client are you on. This is like so common but there is so much to Analytics. I love it and can't get enough yet.
Oh... That's f...ked up 😱