How data became a cornerstone of our work
Our journey from a basement in Espoo to one of the leading Finnish digital agencies with 30+ people has been a fun and rewarding one. If you’ve been keeping your eyes on us from the beginning, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve changed a lot during these 9 years.
We have gradually shifted the focus of our work from small website projects to bigger and more extensive digital challenges. The main drivers for change have been the urge to keep learning as a company and as individuals and to have a bigger impact on both the users’ lives and our clients’ success. We are also celebrating the first anniversary of our dedicated web analytics team this week. But how and why did analytics become one of our core services?
We have always used data in our projects to a certain extent and everyone has been more or less familiar with, for example, the Google Analytics platform. In fact, 95 % of the company are Google Analytics (GAIQ) certified. But the expansion in our service offering is real: we now have a real analytics team working full-time with data and offering insights to clients in order to make their services more successful.
The service was born from the desire to justify decisions with real data and the need to make our design and development processes even stronger. We’ve realized that increasing our data know-how has responded to the basic issues our clients struggle with; data helps prove the effectiveness of decisions and justify the euros invested in marketing.
Hiring a leader to build our new team
The first person hired to develop analytics at Evermade was Vilma. Before joining us, Vilma gained skills and knowledge at Quru, one of Finland’s most established digital analytics companies. Moving to an office mostly known for design and development was a big change for her. “Incorporating analytics into our service offering was like a leap to the unknown from us”, says Mikael, one of Evermade’s founders. “But very soon, the decision turned out to be an excellent one.”
Since Vilma joined Evermade, our analytics team has grown at a fast pace. Juha joined the team in January and Markus in March. Markus is particularly familiar with marketing automation and knows the HubSpot platform very well. Juha, on the other hand, has a developer background and a lot of technical experience, which is a huge advantage in web analytics. Currently, our analytics clients include companies such as Slush, the Helsinki Deaconess Institute, the Finnish Reserve Association and Kekkilä.
Synergy between teams
Serving the client often becomes rigid if services come from different agencies. Hiring more than one agency for a web project often means challenges in communication and costs surpassing the budget. When seamlessly merged together, design, development and data make a company more agile, collaboration smoother between parties and the project more cost-effective. When data is tightly integrated with other competences, potential problems can also be solved right away: if a certain decision isn’t working, analysts can find a solution without delays.
“We are what you could call an approachable analytics team: we try to make data as understandable for our clients as possible. For some reason, utilizing data in design work is still kind of obscure in this field”, says Vilma. “We don’t just collect data for the joy of collecting it, but have the ability to harness it to really serve our client. When it comes to data, there is clearly a skill gap in the field of digital agencies. Half-done analytics is useless. Very often, data is simply gathered, but never used to continuously support business decisions to really benefit the client.”
“As a company, we have developed tremendously. We’re so much more than what we were two years ago”, says Mikael. “I’m glad we took the step to hire data professionals, because it has broadened our expertise and helped our clients become more successful.”
P.S. We will be recruiting more web analysts and strengthening our expertise in the field of digital analytics shortly. Stay tuned and follow us on LinkedIn to be among the first to find out about our open positions.
