An Interview with Scott Calise, Web Analyst for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

I had the opportunity to interview Scott Calise, who works as a web analyst for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Scott generously answered four very interesting questions.

What’s the most valuable thing you learned from the pharmaceutical industry that you have been able to apply in your current job?

The job I held in the pharmaceutical industry was my first job out of grad school and was highly analytical. I spent most of every day looking at the dollars and man-hours being charged and scheduled to work on the 20+ clinical trials I was responsible for, then looking for trends and ways to maximize the gross profit each project could deliver. The biggest takeaway from this job that is applicable to now being a web analyst are those analytical skills and learning how to communicate those suggestions to the project managers who would be able to make the changes.

The MarthaStewart.com website is many things at once: a content website offering articles, an e-commerce website offering items for sale, and a community facilitating an exchange of ideas. What part of your job do you find the most challenging?

Marthastewart.com is actually no longer an e-commerce site; we made the switch approximately four years ago to a strictly content site. All e-commerce happens off our site now. We’ve recently relaunched our community offering many more tools for our users to use and contribute to the Martha Stewart community such as rating, commenting, saving, and customizing their own place online. These new features have posed a challenge for me since we have not had those capabilities before and not had to evaluate/analyze their use and success. So the ever-changing functionality and available features on our site are very challenging to keep up with to ensure we are tracking and evaluating them accurately for most actionable recommendations. Aside from these technical challenges and keeping up with the changing landscape of analytics (that is, measuring engagement), I’d have to say the most challenging is getting processes in place within our organization to use the data I collect in everyday decision making. When I started a little over a year ago in this role, analytics was a definite afterthought to every project/product we launched. I’d often find out about a new feature on the site when someone would email and say, “How is xyz doing?” I’d either have a vague knowledge of xyz and likely no tracking had been applied to it for me to measure and answer the question. So, with the help of my boss, we’ve moved the needle in this area so that I am now involved with every project, and most importantly, we are defining what we want or expect xyz to do for our site, so I can answer the “How’s it doing?” question against some preset goals. This process is still relatively new but becoming more part of our culture, but still a challenge to ensure it remains a part of it.

Does anybody ask for popular search terms on the website when looking for ideas for TV shows?

TV does often look to understand what content they featured on the show performed well online, but usually when coming up with new ideas, they do not use online data specifically. My interaction with that side of the organization is limited, but I provide performance data to them and can assume if they hear a particular idea/segment performed poorly, they’ll remember for next time.

Have you noticed any significant difference in behavior comparing American to European visitors?

Currently our audience for TV, print and online is primarily within the United States, and therefore, there is no planned strategy to reach or attract European users any differently than our US users at the moment. That being said, I haven’t analyzed or segmented our users to look for differences between US and non-US users.

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