Welcome to the fun world of analytics!

Sometimes it's tough getting the word out regarding what we do and how exactly it applies to our business. Simply put, we work with numbers. Said differently, we take data that is in its raw format, scrub it to ensure accuracy, import it into our database and create a multitude of reports that can be used by our sales teams. What we (and any analyst) do is no small thing and most reports take significant effort, time and major attention to detail.

The idea behind this blog is to give the analytics team a place to discuss what we have learned or built and hopefully share some insight with anyone who wants to know more. Feel free to post comments, questions, and/or suggestions with your real name or anonomously.

We build reports for 2 websites, automart.com and autoextra.com and right now they don't share customer information which means we have no way of automatically figuring out if any one customer is advertising on both sites. We are in the process of figuring it out so some of the posts will be about that project as well as everything else. We will rarely, if ever, provide actual reports for download here but will reference where they are located on the Intranet (password required). To date, we use Excel for everything. It's an amazing tool for data manipulation and with the upgrades available in Excel 07, we can create some pretty nice reports. We provide all reports in both Excel 07 and 03 (we realize not everyone has upgraded yet) and many are saved as PDF.

We hope you find this valuable (and interesting).

Ciao