Web Analytics Theory?

I was at Bentley College today with Joseph Carrabis and Judah Phillips, where we were interviewed about the practice of web analytics by the business school’s usability studies team. I haven’t been in an academic setting in quite a while, but a ghost of academia came up when we were asked whether there was a “theory of web analytics.”

I know the word “theory” well from graduate school. Every academic discipline has “theory.” Take cultural anthropology: there’s structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, neo-Marxism, positivism, processualism, post-processualism, even functionalism. These theories underpin the conclusions drawn from cultural-anthropological research. But at Semphonic, when I tell Gary I’ve got a “theory” about something, it usually means something like “I think the s.VisitorNameSpace variable is not configured right, causing the cataclysmic bug on site X.”

I suppose we’ve got “Functionalism,” but most of what’s in our white paper is methodology, not theory. The “theory” of Functionalism might be something like “All pages on a website have a specific function.” This sounds like theory – just as the theory of Marxist anthropology might be phrased as “all human activity is the result of class struggle.”

But what other “theories” are out there for web analytics? Here might be some examples:

“The value of all websites is a combination of ad-revenue, ecommerce, call-avoidance and branding.” (valueism?)

“The final KPI for all websites is expressed in $ terms.” (pecuniarism?)

“Success of a website is measured by the psychological engagement of the visitor.” (psycholigism?)

“The only way to measure the success of a website is through actual visitor behavior.” (behaviorism?)

“The homepage is by far the most important page on a website.” (homepageism?)

“Website activity can only be studied in conjunction with the offline business.” (integrationism?)

“Every website is different, so there can be no universal theory of web analytics.” (nihilism?)

Can there be, or should there be, a web analytics theory? Perhaps it’s a combination of all these “ism’s” above. Perhaps we’re just not at that stage yet. Perhaps there can be, but it will be relegated to obscure scholarly journals. Or, perhaps all web analytics practitioners implicitly have a theory behind all the web analytics they do, but it is never formalized. Who knows – maybe I’ll enroll at Bentley College.

Comments

[pere rovira]

i guess most web analytics is positivist and functionalist, in that it assumes a website and the behavior of its users can be measured with numbers. however, if we allow other sources of data for web analytics, such as usability testing, market research, surveys... we could say web analytics is rather more constructivist/qualitative... you could even argue for web analytics as being relativist when we accept no measurement technology gives the right numbers...
i guess when they asked you about a theory, they were probably asking for a theory of knowledge, that is, how you conceive knowledge or what is knowledge for web analytics...
i think the discussion can be interesting, since it makes you think of what exactly you're trying to measure, and whether your approach is correct or is missing important information.
cheers
pere