Advertising Analyst

You're measuring whether advertising is actually working — tracking impressions, click-through rates, conversions, and ROAS across paid channels, then reporting back to the team that planned the campaigns. The math tends to be the easy part: setting up tracking, pulling data, calculating performance against benchmarks. What takes longer to develop is the instinct for when a bad number reflects the campaign and when it reflects the measurement.

You'll work closely with media buyers, creative teams, and marketing managers who all want the data to say different things. Presenting a campaign miss requires political finesse — being direct about underperformance without sounding like you're pointing fingers, while also being clear about what the data can and can't prove. That communication skill is often underemphasized in job descriptions for analytical roles.

What people underestimate is how much of the job is about data plumbing before any insight is possible — setting up tracking correctly, managing UTMs, working through attribution gaps. The analysts who advance fastest are usually the ones who get comfortable in the infrastructure layer rather than relying on others to clean the data before they see it. Curiosity about how the ad ecosystem actually works — bidding, targeting, platform algorithms — makes the job much more engaging.