This is no joke! There's a lot of confusion around these different roles and job titles—both here at Auto Trader and across the industry. And we need clarity. The subject is complex enough without getting tangled in definitions.

At Auto Trader, we operate in a highly collaborative environment with a hybrid organisational structure, so naturally, roles overlap. However, it's important to be clear about the unique contributions of each role. In the next few paragraphs, we'll break down what it means to be a digital analyst, data analyst, and data scientist here at Auto Trader.

You're a Digital Analyst

Your focus is understanding user behaviour and how people interact with us online. Auto Trader gets around between 60-70 million visits each month—that's a lot of data to work with! Your insights continually shape and optimise our digital strategy and the user experience.

You typically focus on website traffic, engagement, online advertising performance, and digital media. Embedded within teams that bridge marketing, product, and design, you represent analytics early in the consumer journey across all our digital platforms.

In short, you will:

• Focus on understanding consumer behaviour, not just within our product journeys, but before and after
• Work closely with marketing to optimise performance and create audience targeting
• Experiment holistically, considering marketing, retention, and on-site UX
• Help product ideation from the start, working alongside design and user research, sometimes defining data structures and implementing tracking at source
• Leverage Auto Trader's advanced data platform (we've evolved past third-party platforms like Google Analytics, moving to tools like Snowplow and Databricks)

Real-world impact:

Imagine a digital analyst working closely with marketing to fine-tune an online ad campaign. Your insights drive real-time optimisations, resulting in increased engagement and conversions. You're the early eyes on the consumer journey—helping millions of users connect with their next car, and you're doing it with cutting-edge tools that put data first.

You're a Data Analyst

While digital analysts focus on user behaviour, as a data analyst, you work with a broader range of data—everything from customer demographics and sales figures to financial results. Your job is to clean, normalise, and turn this data into trustworthy insights. You'll help Auto Trader make informed, data-driven decisions, collaborating closely with both digital analysts and data scientists. Your toolset includes statistical methods, software and data visualisation.

In short, you will:

• Drive data-led decision-making and develop the data science capabilities and metrics we use internally
• Experiment with website features through Bayesian AB testing, and contribute to how we track those features by working with digital analysts
• Collaborate with software engineers to create data products and pipelines that enable monitoring and self-serve reporting in our BI tool, Looker
• Challenge stakeholders to back up ideas with data and influence decision-making through insights

Example of collaboration:

Launching a new feature/product on the Auto Trader website? You're at the heart of it—ensuring data-backed decisions. A digital analyst may track how users interact with the new feature, but you're experimenting with Bayesian AB testing to ensure it truly delivers value. Together, you provide the insights that make data-driven product improvements possible.

You're a Data Scientist

You're the conceptual thinker of the group, always looking to the future. Comfortable asking big questions and tackling complex projects, you create new insights from base data, monitoring advancements in the data world outside of Auto Trader.

While a data analyst looks at past data to inform present decisions, as a data scientist, you build models that predict future outcomes.

In short, you will:

• Provide technical leadership and consistency across the analytics group, offering a deep understanding of scientific methods
• Blend the mindset of a researcher and a futurist, seeking to understand fundamental processes to predict outcomes and trends
• Be versatile rather than a specialist, solving a variety of scientific problems
• Pair with engineers across all stages of the machine-learning workflow, from model creation to monitoring, thanks to Auto Trader's advanced data platform

How you drive innovation:

As a data scientist, you're predicting the future. Let's say we want to predict which car models will be most in demand next year. Your predictive models will provide key insights, helping Auto Trader stay ahead of industry trends and ensuring we're always one step ahead in serving our customers.

There are two types of online businesses.
Those that are data-led and those that will fail.

At Auto Trader, our commitment to technology runs deep. We've evolved from a print magazine to one of the most successful FTSE 100 tech businesses by being relentlessly data-driven. We develop and run our own platforms, and our teams of data scientists, data analysts, and digital analysts are at the core of this success.

Our analytics group operates within the product and tech hive, collaborating with engineers, developers, product owners, designers, and researchers. The result? We're not just a tech company; we're a community of innovators, constantly evolving the way people buy and sell cars.

We work within a matrix organisational structure. While each discipline has vertical lines of management and development, analysts and scientists are embedded in diverse squads that focus on specific capabilities, services, or products. This means you'll have both the support of your analytics community and the opportunity to collaborate across different areas of the business. In a Data Scientist or Data Analyst role you could be working on multiple projects or focussing deeply one specific problem/area.

Our analytics group fosters a supportive community, hosting stand-ups, technical planning sessions, showcases, workshops, and hackathons to facilitate learning and collaboration. We're growing fast, If you're passionate about using data to drive innovation and solve problems, this is the place for you.

A Career Where You Can Grow

At Auto Trader, our analytics team is more than a collection of job titles—it's a community built for growth. Whether you're a digital analyst keen to deepen your technical expertise, a data analyst looking to challenge business assumptions, or a data scientist pushing the boundaries of what's possible with machine learning, you'll find plenty of opportunities here.

We have different levels within each discipline, from an Apprentice Data Scientists to Senior and Principal Data Analyst roles.

Each of these roles contributes to Auto Trader's wider business strategy. From improving customer experiences to driving innovation, your work directly impacts the company's success.

Like many things in life, there isn't one right answer to the original question, but we hope this blog gives you our perspective and we'd love to hear yours.
Ready to join the team?

If you're passionate about using data to drive innovation and are looking for a place where you can thrive and grow, we'd love for you to join our analytics group. Explore our current job openings and see how you can contribute to shaping the future of Auto Trader