Last night I gave a short talk on web traffic analysis to a data mining class taught by my friend, Dr. Aleks Jakulin, at Columbia University. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hilary Mason from Bit.ly and Blaz Fortuna from the Josef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, I decided to present a primer on the web analytics industry and leave the science to the experts.
It is a rare 400 level course with no prerequisites, so some students come from a statistics background while others study mathematics or business. What could I say that would be useful to all three disciplines? The main point I wanted to get across was simply the importance of acting upon your insights, regardless of whether you pursue such interests for academic or financial reasons.
I still find this to be the largest problem within web analytics today. At HitTail, we championed the idea of actionable analytics in 2006 (and even before that in Connors’ client offerings). Now, suddenly other companies keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
