What Classes to Take to Become a Digital Analyst

Digital Analysts need to know both digital marketing strategies and data analytics. This means needing a background in running digital marketing campaigns and advertising on various social media and other online platforms. Along with these marketing and advertising skills, a Digital Analyst needs to know how to track data, analyze it, and use data visualization programs to create dashboards, charts, and presentations that can be shared with colleagues. You can take classes to learn the skills necessary to become a Digital Analyst either live in person or online from any location. 

What is a Digital Analyst?

A Digital Analyst collects and analyzes digital marketing data to aid a business in optimizing their digital performance and sales. Digital Analysts, also sometimes called Digital Marketing Analysts, are tasked with gathering and analyzing all manner of data from an organization’s various channels across websites, social media, applications, emails, and advertisements as it relates to who uses what digital asset and how, along with information about market saturation, trends, performance, and sales. Digital Analysts must analyze and make sense of this data to write reports, create dashboards, and generate presentations that communicate vital insights about an organization’s current digital performance and effectiveness, make predictions about future outcomes, and build strategies for more effective and competitive performance.

Many companies employ full-time and part-time Digital Analysts and it is also a career that one can do as a freelancer. Whether working singularly or with other Digital Analysts, this job has a unique role in analyzing a company’s data and preparing easy-to-understand reports for stakeholders and those from other departments and will need to communicate and work well with others in marketing, sales, and finance departments. Often, Digital Analysts will need to prepare reports daily, weekly, and/or monthly to communicate key insights into the customer’s digital experience and the effectiveness of the business’s current and future digital marketing strategies. As such, Digital Analysts need to have excellent communication and presentation skills, along with their ability to analyze detailed datasets and make predictions based on this information. 

What Skills Will I Need to Learn to Become a Digital Analyst?

To become a Digital Analyst, you will need to know digital marketing and advertising skills and strategies as well as have the necessary skills to collect, analyze, and visualize data. Most Digital Analysts have a bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, statistics, economics, or a related field as well as 1-2 years of experience working as a Digital Analyst. Even without a degree, you can learn the skills to become a Digital Analyst through shorter training and certificate programs and a wide variety of bootcamps and classes offered both live in person and remotely online. 

The skills that a Digital Analyst needs for digital marketing include knowledge of how to run a successful marketing campaign through email and on different social media platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn), the basics of SEO, and how to do paid advertising on different platforms. Additionally, a Digital Analyst is a kind of specialized Data Analyst and needs to know how to integrate data analytics into digital marketing to optimize performance and engagement for a company or brand. This will involve not only being familiar with free services like Google Analytics but also learning industry-standard software like Tableau and Power BI for data visualization. Digital Analysts do not need to know most aspects of coding and website programming but will need a basic knowledge of the programming language SQL to manage and query large datasets. 

In addition to specific tools and software programs, Digital Analysts need excellent communication and analytical skills. Much of the work of a Digital Analyst will be to collect and then interpret data using industry-specific software, meaning that one needs to have the ability to perform analysis on complex datasets and pull out specific and important insights to share with others. Communication skills are necessary for a Digital Analyst as often you will be responsible for generating easy-to-understand charts, dashboards, and presentations to share your findings with others and contribute to making important decisions about a company’s business and marketing strategies. These are skills that can be learned through practice and over time. Look for classes and bootcamps that provide real training and project-based instruction to practice these skills under the guidance of experts. 

What Courses Should I Enroll in to Become a Digital Analyst?

Digital Marketing Certificate 

If you’re looking for a comprehensive course or program of study to teach you most of the skills you will need to know to become a Digital Analyst, you should consider taking a Digital Marketing Certificate program. A Digital Analyst will need to know digital marketing and advertising strategies and this is what will be covered in a Digital Marketing Certificate program. These programs often teach the different strategies one needs to run successful marketing campaigns on different social media platforms, blogs, and over email as well as the basics of SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and other forms of advertising and awareness-generating strategies that will be specific to a certain digital platform.

Many Digital Marketing Certificate programs and bootcamps will also be a good entry point into learning the necessary skills for data analytics. Digital Marketers often need experience with Google Analytics, for instance, which is a free service provided by Google that collects data on how customers engage with a website or application and provides you with reports to help optimize your website’s performance and customer experience. A Digital Marketing class will often cover the basics of Google Analytics as well as other ways to track and monitor marketing data. 

You can find free programs of study online that aim to impart all of the necessary knowledge about digital marketing in a matter of hours or days using videos and interactive quizzes. However, the benefit of a longer paid program of study will be one-on-one mentoring and expert instruction, the use of real-world examples and projects based on successful and proven digital marketing campaigns, and the ability to create or bolster your work portfolio to show potential employers your skills. These longer programs of study will still be less expensive than a traditional four-year college or university degree and are often more flexible to allow you to take them part-time or around your own schedule. The length of these comprehensive programs will vary from 8-18 weeks in length, depending on whether it is a full- or part-time program and what is included in the course curriculum. 

In addition to a Digital Marketing Certificate, a Data Analytics Certificate should help to cover the necessary aspects of working with data and doing data visualization. A Digital Analyst might not need everything covered in a complete Data Analytics course (like specific programming languages, for instance) and instead of taking a full, comprehensive course, can supplement a Digital Market Certificate with shorter, more targeted bootcamps to learn the basics of analytics and data visualization. 

SEO Bootcamp

SEO stands for search engine optimization, a necessary business practice to utilize for those engaging in any kind of digital marketing. Learning about how search engines work and how to optimize a website to rank higher in searches, raise awareness of a website, or remain competitive as a business is essential to any person, brand, or business with a digital presence. In a class on SEO, you should expect to learn the basics of how search engine ranking works and techniques for optimizing a website, content, and keyword use to rank higher in searches. Many SEO classes will also introduce you to free and paid tools you can use to facilitate link, website, content, and keyword optimization or to monitor and audit your business’s current performance. 

SEO is often taught in comprehensive digital marketing courses but it is also something you can learn in a short, multi-day class or bootcamp. Look for a class taught by an expert who is up-to-date on current SEO techniques, as some older strategies have fallen out of favor and are considered obsolete. 

SQL Bootcamp

SQL stands for Structured Query Language and it is a programming language used to store, retrieve, and manipulate data in large datasets. Digital Analysts usually do not need to know how to code or program a website, but SQL is a programming language that many will need to be familiar with as it relates to organizing, storing, and representing data. You can learn SQL in longer bootcamps and certificate programs that cover data analytics, though these will also teach you Python, R, and additional skills that Data Analysts often use. For someone looking to become a Digital Analyst, you should find a standalone class or bootcamp that will teach basic familiarity with SQL. 

SQL is necessary to know as it is how many companies across different industries store their data and learning SQL is essential for those Digital Analysts who want to be involved in the decision-making process within a company. A class on SQL should teach basics like how to create a table, query the table, filter and sort for specific data, and use JOIN statements to combine multiple tables as well as cover some of the more advanced ways to use SQL for data analysis. A good class on SQL will not only cover essential material but provide you with many examples and test cases to work through that will mirror real-world uses of SQL that you might encounter. 

Tableau Bootcamp

Tableau is a paid data visualization software program that a Digital Analyst will often need to use to create detailed charts, maps, graphs, and other visual representations of data. Tableau is considered an industry-standard and a necessary type of software for those in any data analytics field. As such, employers will often expect you to come into the job already familiar with it. Taking a short class or bootcamp to learn this software and its functionality is a good option for anyone seeking to become a Digital Analyst. 

You can find both introductory and advanced bootcamps to learn Tableau. Usually, these classes will be offered over a short period of 12-18 hours or 2-3 days. When considering what class to take, look for one that both introduces the software and promises to teach advanced skills to cover all your bases in one class. A Tableau class should provide you with basic familiarity to understand, connect, manipulate, and analyze data using Tableau as well as how to generate customizable and interactive data visualizations. 

Learn the Skills to Become a Digital Analyst at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop offers a variety of certificate programs and shorter, skills-based bootcamps to get you started on the pathway to becoming a Digital Analyst. To learn comprehensive digital marketing skills over a short period of time, consider pursuing Noble’s Digital Marketing Certificate program which can be taken in person in New York City or live online. During this program, you will learn the basic tenets of digital marketing across different platforms, including all major social media platforms, blogs, and email, as well as what you need to know about search engine optimization (SEO), how to track and analyze key performance data utilizing data analytics, and how to implement paid advertising. During this program, you will receive expert one-on-one mentoring as you work on real projects to improve your digital marketing skills. 

Additionally, Noble Desktop offers a complete Data Analytics Certificate program, which can be taken part-time or full-time, either live in New York City or remotely online from any location. This comprehensive, project-based certificate program teaches how to analyze and visualize data and includes units covering Excel, SQL, Python, and Tableau. The Data Analytics Certificate is a great option for someone who either needs training on how to interpret data as a Digital Analyst or someone looking to transition into more data analysis work. Similar to the Digital Marketing Certificate, you will receive expert instruction and mentoring during this course. 

If you are looking to learn specific skill sets quickly, consider taking a bootcamp. Bootcamps are a great option for those needing to upskill or quickly learn about a more specialized topic. Consider taking any of Noble’s marketing-related bootcamps, like those offered for individual social media platforms (TikTok Marketing, Instagram Marketing, Facebook Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing, and Social Media Marketing: Blogs and Twitter) and skills such as Content Marketing, Email Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization. 

Noble also offers a bootcamp to learn the basics of three important tools you will need for data analytics as a Digital Analyst, Microsoft Excel, SQL, and Tableau, in their Data Analytics Technologies Bootcamp. If you need to learn how to utilize just one or two of these tools, you can also take a bootcamp for each individually: Excel for Data Analytics, SQL Bookcamp, and Tableau Bootcamp.