An Interview With a Data Analyst

Brandy Drzymkowski
Nov 4 · 4 min read
A scatter plot analysis of creative comparisons. Pictured: Claudia Gerez Miranda, Brandy Drzymkowski

Claudia Gerez Miranda is a marketing and data analyst working at The Shipyard, a digital marketing agency that “solves extraordinary problems using science and creativity.” I have the pleasure of collaborating with her on the marketing strategy for Spendabit, the world’s first bitcoin product search engine, where consumers can spend their bitcoin on products sold by crypto-enabled merchants. I jumped at the chance to ask Claudia more formally about what she does and what drives her. Here’s what she said:

What does your role look like in terms of day-to-day activities?

I was originally supposed to work on organic marketing: grow traffic, SEO, and content media. Now, I work on performance media marketing analysis. I grab all the reports from any campaign we are working on. I know the source of all the reports and I grab all the data, and we work with that.

We are now using a dashboard because our data team is going to break out from the agency. That means originally we would only work with the clients our marketing agency manages. We would wait for data after creatives, but now we can be used by other agencies and expand. To have other agents as clients, we have to break from the current one. I’ve been working on the dashboard with my team. I contribute by cleaning the data, checking if the reports are right, and coming up with ideas to automate

The first dashboard service is the Audience Composer. This helps target who is interested in your product. We run experiments like open target campaigns and check who is engaging with that campaign. We analyze our data and check only for people that engage with the product.

It’s funny, clients have an idea in mind of who their audience is, but we clarify the niche and target it more specifically. We see who actually engages with that brand. The client comes with one idea for who the audience is, and you find it’s not just that, you should test a lot of things and then you’ll come out with your real persona. With this audience composer, we analyze the audiences and determine which is the best to target.

The Create Labs section of the dashboard allows you to find your most effective ads. It shows ads that have the highest click-through rate. Which ones get the most engagement. We track the purchase rate, all the conversions. I used to do this manually, now it’s automated to create a scatter plot for each ad test. Now you come to the dashboard and you can see the ads at the bottom for what data you are looking at. The X-variable is the site-visit rate, the Y-variable is the engagement rate. We run hundreds of ads with a lot of different variables: copy, background, colors, landing pages, etc. We used to make this report all the time and we decided to put it on this dashboard.

You have a hand in a lot of different projects, so how many projects do you find you’re dealing with at once?

Oof! Many. As many tasks as you have here on the dashboard. I contribute to 3–5 different tasks at a time. Some are very short, some are long, some I can do alone, some require collaboration. So it’s a lot of work to keep them organized. The company used to give us the freedom to organize how we preferred, but now we use software to share and collaborate. I have found it isn’t the best for me personally, so I find myself duplicating into my own system.

Is that one of the most difficult aspects of the role, and if not, what would you say is the most difficult part?

No, not once you find the system that works most for you. As long as you are always on the move and able to say you did something in daily standup the next day. Our team is getting bigger and I understand everyone needs to be able to see what you are doing and follow it, in case I need something from them or they need something from me.

The hardest part is when you are assigned a task and you have no idea how to achieve it. You have to figure it out, or be honest and say “sure I can work on it, but I don’t know exactly how to do what you want.” That’s when you look it up, use your network, ask questions, and figure it out. Or you can propose a plan you know you can achieve and prove how it will get the same results as the original idea.

What hard skills do you need to use to succeed in this role?

You’ll use Excel, so you should know pivot tables and line charts. Get familiar with Excel because you will use it a lot. It’s good if you can program a bit because you can start helping more. Specifically, Python or R have been useful at my company.

I got a book called The Art of Data Science. But there are lots of resources online too, like Datacamp and videos online where you can learn some things. What’s best is to grab a small project to learn what you need to do.

To sum up:

There’s always more to learn and do. I love what I do because it’s always interesting!

Special thanks to Claudia for taking the time to speak with me, and for her honest depiction of what it is to be a data analyst.

Brandy Drzymkowski

Written by

I use creative thinking to solve people’s problems.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade