Demand Media has tweeted about a job position in the last day, that requires studying how people search and applying that to business practices, from the sound of it. Now, this doesn’t seem unusual for the company, as the business model for their content arm, is widely known to be based on analyzing what people are searching for, and creating conent for it.
The timing of the tweet is somewhat interesting, however, as eHow has reportedly been hit hard by Google’s latest incarnation of the Panda update.
@demandmedia
Demand MediaWe’re hiring! Join us as Senior Analyst, User Engagement & Monetization Experimentation: http://bit.ly/gv28Fd
15 hours ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto
The top responsibility listed: “Apply data mining and statistics to measure and understand the search user experience and feature engagement.”
We can’t say for sure the job opening is directly related to Google’s updates, but with all of the changes going on with Google, I would think “understanding the search user experience and feature engagement” would be a pretty important part of maintaining search visibility.
Keep in mind Google has other new features it is using for ranking signals that could have a direct impact on Demand Media’s performance in the SERPs – things like domain blocking and the +1 button.
Other responsibilities listed for the job include:
– Act as a resource for statistical issues such as sampling and data analysis.
– Well versed in areas of hypothesis testing, mixed model analysis, multivariate analysis (cluster and factor analysis), sampling/stratification.
– Apply statistical methods to answer business and engineering questions.
– Use statistics and predictive modeling to collect, explore, and identify the right data to be analyzed from multiple sources, then construct algorithms to explain or predict behavior and solve a variety of business and engineering problems.
– Design and implement statistical experiments to maximize site performance and profit as well as minimize and manage risk of revenue loss.
– Extract and transform data from existing data stores and perform ad-hoc statistical analyses.
– Proficiency with MS Excel/Office, SQL and SAS.
Write reports, create presentations, tables and graphs for analytical projects.
– Communicate statistical ideas and interpret statistical results to non-statisticians effectively.
The listed requirements are:
– 5+ years of work experience in the statistics/analytics field.
– Solid understanding of statistical methods: Experimental design, Analysis of variance / Regression, Logistic regression and Non-parametric statistics.
– Familiar in time-series analysis.
Solid data management skills: SAS, SQL and Excel (SAS certified highly desirable).
– Effective communication, interpersonal and teamwork skills.
– Ability to explain results and statistical concepts to both technical and non-technical audience.
– Strong problem solving and conceptual thinking abilities.
– Ability to work in a fast-paced and deadline driven environment.
– Ability to handle multiple concurrent projects while working independently and in team.
– Ability to estimate required effort for project objectives and prioritize work items appropriately.
– BS or MS in Statistics or Operations Research or Computer Science.
According to new data from SearchMetrics, eHow.co.uk took a 72,30% hit in visibility, while eHow.com took a 53,46% (in the UK).
Demand Media says it is not dependent on Google, and has certainly put a great deal more focus on social in recent memory, but taking a hit in Google isn’t good for anybody, and search traffic is no doubt still the most significant source.
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