Welcome

It's February 2, 2009. Pretty much a year since my last post in a different blog bryanalytics.blogspot.com, but I decided to start a new one. Why? Well, Web Analyst is kind of weak sounding. Web Metrics analyst isn't very flashy and could get people thinking that I say "how many hits a website has" or something that's very worthless.

So this started as an amusing response to people I used to work with that called a task of theirs "Digital Anthropology." I said I was a "Digital Archaeologist" because, in a sense, I look at a "site" that has remnants of human interaction, artifacts, traces of activity, and I try to make sense of what they did and how they thought.

Makes sense, right? Digital was too broad, though, since everything is digital. Even our thoughts! Well, maybe not quite that far yet (no offense to robots and cyborgs), but pretty much everything is digital. And since everything is digital, saying I track digital things is not completely accurate. My focus is mainly on the web.

Is web still an accurate and accepted word, or is it slang that makes you sound out of touch and foolish? It's the first word in the Web Analytics Association, for one. People still have it in their job titles to make sure they're known as web folks, not just standard everyday analysts. Or is it more like cyber,which is a lame and mostly embarrassing word that old people use to sound cooler and more in the know than they actually are?

I went with the first: That it's still ok and accepted. So why web archaeology and not just web analyst? Because I do so much more than simply analyze. Sometimes I spend time thinking about what I should be looking for. Theories, if you will. Or I'm developing the tools that will make excavation more efficient. Or I'm refining methods to look at the information. I'm building scenarios, I'm developing what-ifs for specific patterns of behavior. And then, after all that, I'm going to analyze the information - if I have time. I'll be honest in saying that developing the plan and tools is, to me, far more enjoyable, but I could never be satisfied if I never did any of the analysis. But if I couldn't think about new ways to gather information and help people who are a little more narrowly focused on a specific set of data I would also be unfulfilled.

So here's where I'll post my thoughts, ramblings, and other possibly unfocused ponderings about web archaeology and my attempt to try and figure out just what the hell people are doing on our sites.

My current plans involve truly understanding the organic search visitor. What did they do, for how long, what words influenced what behavior, and finally, should we change the entire design of our site to cater to this highly specific, highly profitable, and very critical segment? Perhaps, but that's the question I'm trying to answer.