How I’m building a job board for Data Analysts, Update #07 - for July 2023
Hi all,
on Dec 19th I launched DataAnalyst.com - this is the seventh update.
Want to make sure I document the journey, and keep myself honest, so each month I will be making a post about the statistics, progress, some thoughts and what are the next steps I want to be focusing on.
Early stages vision is to become the #1 job board for data analysts - hand-picking interesting data analyst job opportunities across industries.
Where I would like to see this going - my long term vision, is building a community of aspiring and professional data enthusiasts. A place for those who love data to collaborate, share, learn and develop their careers.
So, let’s dive right in.
Statistics
1. General Observations
Stats
DataAnalyst.com has been online for just over 7 months and we’ve brought over 1,500 hand curated data analyst jobs onto the site - all of them including a salary range.
There’s almost 1,600 people subscribed to the newsletter, and I can’t thank you enough for your support and for joining us on the journey.
Following the site traffic and visitors peak in April/May, there’s been a noticeable drop on those metrics.
In the early days, I would be posting between 10 - 15 jobs daily, looking to brute-force the marketplace conundrum and bring initial traffic in. At the same time I knew this was not sustainable in the long run, particularly on the monetization front - if companies see jobs added by me for free, why would they engage themselves?
So for now, I’m attributing this dump in traffic to the decrease in number of job postings added daily to the site and potentially also the wide-spread summer slump - people taking time off, organizations are slowing down hiring (which I’ve also noticed when hand picking available roles) and overall, activity drops.
The decrease also goes hand in hand with decrease of social media posts on Twitter/Linked, leading to less social media traffic. I have however added new profile pages on Facebook and Instagram, similarly automating job postings there, so will see how those channels perform.
While looking at the numbers go down isn’t a pretty sight, I do believe that in combination with the organic traffic, it makes sense to have the (hopefully) short term dip, as it’ll pave way for monetizing. Obviously this means there will be less jobs to apply to for now, but until I see steady inflow of company-posted jobs, I will not be looking to decrease the frequency / quality / quanity of listings any more.
I’ve also spent some time last month using tools such as SEMRush / Ahrefs / Moz to run some high level audits and understand how the site performs on the SEO front. This led to a lot of time spent on making significant on-page changes to improve keyword optimisation, rewriting meta descriptions and adding alt descriptions to all the images on the site. This is probably something that could (and should) have been done a lot earlier, but oh well.
BusinessAnalyst.com
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve also recently launched BusinessAnalyst.com - where I’m looking to replicate step by step what I’ve done over the last 6 months with DataAnalyst. The overall idea is to create a network of sites, benefiting from the same infrastructure, serving and helping different career paths, and making a collaboration with organisations much more appealing (after-all, most companies who hire for data analysts also look for business analysts and vice versa). Arguably, this might not make much sense seeing that DA still hasn’t brought any revenue in, but on the other hand, I can reuse the whole tech stack and structures already in place, halve my cost per project, while doubling the surface area to catch me some luck.
Seeing July has been the first full month of having the site up, I will be also documenting the journey and posting a progress update on appropriate subreddits.
2. Expanding the data analyst salary guide
We are continuing on our mission to building out DataAnalyst.com - not just as a job board, but also as an educational hub - from interviews with experienced professional, best practices, to advice about getting into the industry.
As mentioned in my previous updates, there’s been couple of guides recently released.
How to become a data analyst guide which covers topics such as:
- understanding the role and responsibilities of a data analyst
- becoming a data analyst, and what it obtains - from education, experience, to technical and soft skills
- the well known not-so-secret hack - building your own portfolio
- career development and salary guide (yes, our own!)
The data analyst salary guide
- provides the overview of salaries in various industries - and also shows a more detailed view on each industry page, with a deep dive into how much entry level, senior and lead data analysts can earn depending on their experience.
Over the course of last month I’ve been restructuring some of the ways I collect and store data about available job roles, and I was able to expand the data analyst salary guide beyond just industry - now also detailing data analyst salaries across different states in the United States.
Now, as it usually is with this kind of exercise, lumping the data all together you come up with an insane range. On the other hand, if you split the data in 52 different ways, you’ll get a whole different set of issues where N is not large enough to draw any conclusions - and for some states, there’s simply no data at all.
As the site grows, and the number of jobs on the site increases, I do however believe that I’ll be able to bring an addition source of information about salaries, complimenting those already available on other sites.
For the US, we’ve also released the July edition of Market Insights, you can see the full report
What’s currently on my mind (random musings)
Re: Newsletter - when starting, I wanted the newsletter to be sent on a weekly basis, containing the latest jobs. The more I thought about it, the more I became against the idea - after-all, people could visit the site and see, why spam their emails? At the same time, the point of the site is to help people find a role - once they would, they wouldn’t really need weekly emails with latest jobs.
I was recently able to implement better tracking of job views - how many people have views which job post. It may be that I could use this data to send a weekly “hottest data analyst jobs on the platform for the last week” - however, to do so, I believe I need to include segmentation into my email list i.e people looking for a job will receive these, whilst others would be able to opt out. This will require some restructuring of the current newsletter onboarding flow, but that’s probably better to be done sooner, rather than later.
Re: Improving site experience - I go through every single comment I receive on Reddit, and there’s been a few in the last month or two, highlighting some inconsistencies in terms of UX/UI experience across mobile/table/desktop versions. I’ve spent some time over the last few weeks to address some of those bugs, discovered a whole bunch more, and have been fixing them one by one. I do want the site to be easy to use, with consistent styling and experience - so, if you come across bugs, please just let me know :)
Things in the pipeline
- New data analyst jobs, added daily
- Actually launching the weekly newsletter with the pick of best jobs directly to your inbox (yes, I know…, but…above…)
- Monthly US data analyst market insights
- Improving the overall site experience (this one is a never ending activity)
- Continuing to bring you Data Analysts across their experience levels, to share tips, tricks and their thoughts
3 ways you could help
- Looking for a new challenge? Check out the website - I’m adding new jobs daily
- Looking to hire a data analyst to your team? Do you know anyone looking to hire? Shoot me a message at alex@dataanalyst.com and I’ll upgrade your first listing for free!
- As I mentioned, we have an ongoing “Day of a Data Analyst” series. For those of you who are open to do an email based interview about your data analyst career journey, please just send me a message and we’ll organise something - would love to get you featured and share your experience with our readers!
If you have any questions, concerns, come across glitches - please just reach out, happy to chat.
Thank you all again, and see you in a month.
Alex