Sonicko President Jeff Lawrence recently sat down with Avinash Kaushik, author of the popular web analytics blog Occam's Razor about his views on web analytics, what he hopes to see from Microsoft's upcoming web analytics application, and Web 2.0 technologies. Avinash has also authored an upcoming book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day which you can preorder on Amazon.
1. You've been in the field of web analytics for quite some time, did you just wake up one day and think to yourself that this is something that you wanted to do, or were you thrown into the role and simply adapted to it?
At my last job with DirecTV, Sr. Manager for Enterprise Analytics, I had small amounts of exposure to Web Analytics (someone supplied log file parsed numbers into the dashboard). When I interviewed for the job at Intuit (Manager for Web Analytics) I was quite excited about the possibility of taking all my experience in Decision Support and apply it to a 100% exclusive web environment.
There is something so beautiful and scary and challenging and fun about data on the web. It was too hard to pass up. But it would be fair to say that when I took the job at Intuit I had no idea what "web analytics" was, I had not yet had the fortune to have used any web analytics application. Blaire Hansen, my hiring manager, certainly made a huuuge leap of faith in hiring me.
It has been a amazing ride and yes to answer your question I have simply adapted to it, but since my post MBA experience has been almost solely focused on Decision Support Systems I think I have brought all the learnings from traditional data warehousing and business intelligence and applied it to my current role.
2. What problems if any do you foresee with the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX and the explosion of tab based browsing? Are you concerned about problems of people keeping tabs open when they are not actively browsing the site?
I have blogged about the fact that slowly but surely the page paradigm is dying. That is not saying that the big problem is that the page view metric is going to be crap. It is more that currently almost all web analytics applications are constructed, from an architecture perspective, on the fact that a page view has to happen and all things go from there.
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