The importance of data engineering and tracking
When moving past toy examples, data wrangling and transformation is neither easy nor something to be taken lightly. As described, since most digital marketing spending and interactions are of a digital nature, you are essentially swimming in a sea of data. Your job as an analyst is, as described at the beginning of this chapter, to generate insights in a timely manner. Here, efficient data accessibility is going to become a topic, especially if you work for a larger company with multiple large data sources. While a deeper and thorough walkthrough of data engineering is outside of the scope of this book, as an analyst, you should have a basic understanding of what it is and why it matters.
Don’t moonlight as a data engineer
Excel gives us a bit of a bad habit as analysts: we use it simultaneously as a database and a tool to generate insights. The use of it as a database gives us a false sense of understanding of the need for...
