A day in the life of a CRO Analyst at Digital 22

I live my life in a spreadsheet. Exporting data from Google Analytics and HubSpot into a Google Sheets document, ready to include lots of conditional formatting and formulas is my typical day. (As well as beating everyone at pool and FIFA, but I’m not here to brag). 

I’m lucky enough to work with all of the clients at Digital 22, offering them an insight into how their website is performing and how we can take that next step to more success every day. 

My role involves a lot of numbers and puzzles to find solutions and potential issues a client will come to me about regarding everything analytical. 

Picking my seat… 

Every day starts by arriving at the office before 8.45am. This gives me time to grab my notepads out of my locker and get myself a drink to start the day. I usually try to spot a seat that I want to hot desk and get myself set up. 

The screen on the left, laptop on the right and my chair positioned to the height of a normal person.

Time to get started… 

My day usually starts with checking my emails,  Accelo and Hotjar to see if I have anything of urgency that has come through. This could be an alert from some software we use that’s telling me something is wrong with a client’s data or a report that’s due soon which needs some preparation before it’s due. 

Usually, the Strategists hold scrums in the morning with their team and relevant specialists to catch-up with everyone at the same time. Being an analyst and working on all of our clients, I find myself mixing it up depending on what I have on for a particular client at the time. 

This is the perfect time to ask for anything specific that the Strategists want to see or to make them aware of anything that our software has noticed over the past week. 

With my list of tasks ready and my inbox empty, it’s time to get stuck into the real stuff! 

Data, Data, Data…

At the start of every week, I like to collect data from Google Analytics and Hotjar then put them into a spreadsheet to help me track weekly progress. This is perfect for finding any drops or jumps in data so we can quickly come up with a solution to why it’s occurring. 

We’ve managed to quickly put out some potential fires this way by spotting something early. An example would be any changes to a website page negatively affecting the page speed. If the page speed rises too far, this will affect the conversions and user experience on our client's site. 

Other than the weekly data, all of my other tasks each week will differ. I may have to look into how we can improve the conversion rate of landing pages one day then the next, work out why a new client’s analytics has not been tracking correctly (which is a big issue for a data geek like me). 

All of the time, I work towards the same goal: making data-driven decisions. 

What’s for lunch… 

It’s 12.15pm and I arrive at the biggest decision of the day - what do I want to eat? Clitheroe has so many choices for what you can eat at dinner, especially if you can’t handle a week of butties. 

I have to give a shout-out to Castle Chippy. My go-to chippy day is a Friday but sometimes, I just can’t resist. If you’re ever in Clitheroe, tell them Tom Knowles sent you and if you’re a client visiting Digital 22 or a new team member, find me and I’ll show you the ropes.

We continue…

After lunch, I carry on with the tasks from the morning or start something new. 

Apart from the usual data tracking, here at D22 we use a software called Hotjar. I spend my time using this to help our Growth-Driven Design (GDD) clients make changes to their website and it gives me plenty of data directly from the users of the websites we work on. 

For example, heatmaps from specific pages to see where visitors are clicking and scrolling, NPS polls to get that true feedback or even watching how the visitor travels around the website with user recordings. There is no way of making the task of watching people interact on a website any less creepy. 

All of this helps our team make data-driven decisions to improve the usability and the conversion rate which help our clients generate more high-quality leads. 

The day is done…

It’s 5pm midweek or 3pm on Friday (lovely) and it’s the end of the day. Organising my hotdesk and putting everything back into my locker is a priority. A beer and a game of pool or FIFA is always an option, especially when we finish early on a Friday. It means I can squeeze in a game of golf or go and watch an early movie too. 

On a Tuesday, a bunch of us try to play football. We won a recent five-a-side agency tournament by the way, if it wasn’t mentioned before. 

That’s a quick overview of my life at Digital 22. Find me on LinkedIn if you have anything specific! 

Nice one, 

Tom Knowles

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