Brandon Coke
PIPS Host Organisation: Singer Instruments
Project Title: Data Analyst and Marketing Intern

Brandon Coke’s PIPS internship at Singer Instruments focused on analysing Google’s analytic data from their APIs (Google AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, and Search Console) to improve Google search rankings, resolve Google Search Console errors, and enhance user experience. From this analysis, Brandon suggested several actions, including creating a piece of HTML code to lazy-load embedded YouTube videos to reduce render-blocking on pages and decrease page load times. He also made improvements to screen real estate by reducing content redundancy, increasing the prominence of key products, and removing dead links and buttons site-wide. Additionally, he produced a script to generate in-line SVGs for social media icons to address render-blocking caused by a third-party font kit from Font Awesome.

Brandon was also tasked with mapping user journeys to better understand the success of ad campaigns and identify underperforming search terms that the current meta descriptions were missing. He identified key ad terms for an upcoming product launch by conducting market research on competitors’ sites to understand how their content achieved relatively high search rankings for key products and terms that needed to be targeted with relevant product launches.

Other experiences included copywriting for scientific pieces for the site and content for upcoming product launches, as well as producing marketing material (emails, social media posts, and product overviews). The main skills Brandon developed were R, CSS, and bash coding, along with marketing and science communication skills. He learned the power of agile project management to organize workloads and discovered how his bioinformatics skills could be widely applicable to data science roles.