Top Concepts in the Web Analytics Blogosphere - May and June 2008

We’re all obsessive web analytics blog readers (and bloggers) here. We’ve all spent many a working hour soaking up the insightful musings of Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Manoj Jasra, Ian Thomas, and many others. But we’ve all longed for a way to imposed semantic structure on the chatter and buzz, on the heated analytics debates and the asynchronous optimization musings. We’ve yearned for a way to hold a mirror up to the community and have it reflect the aggregated substance of our conversations back to us.

Today, we’re thrilled to publish the results of our deep-dive open-text analysis of web analytics blogs for May and June, 2008. Using our proprietary text analysis algorithm, our researchers have quantified the top themes and the dominant concepts that 30 of the leading lights in the web analytics community are blogging about. In addition, we’ve crossed popular themes with one another, in an attempt to determine collinearity and concordance. The result is the first ever open-text analysis of the web analytics blogosphere, which contains a plethora of insights on what the smartest people in the space are saying.

Three impactful findings that leaped out at me were:

- All the furor surrounding engagement seems (perhaps mercifully) to have died down. The tricky concept, which was on every bloggers’ mind earlier in the year, was present in only 1% of all total concept occurrences in May-June. There’s still no consensus on whether engagement is just an excuse or whether it represents the unified field theory of web analytics. But it looks like the blogging community has moved on to other hot topics.

- One of these hot topics is social media measurement. Here’s where the technique of concordance becomes helpful, as it helps us to outline what topics are being mentioned in conjunction with one another. When bloggers were musing about metrics, they were glossing on the application of measurability to social media platforms in 64% of the cases. This speaks to the metric maturity of the more well established online verticals, as well as the need to define consensus on just how the hell you go about measuring success on sites like Facebook, Last.fm, and Friendfeed.

- Despite the heightened buzz surrounding social, bloggers aren’t losing site of ROI just yet. Conversion was the leading concept associated with the terms “website,” “visit,” and “track,” suggesting a dedicated collective focus on site outcomes that lead to healthy bottom lines.

These are just three things that stuck out to me. There are many other “aha!” findings in the report, including the surprisingly low amount of chatter on the topic of integration and the ubiquity of bounce rate. We’ve taken a snapshot of the blogging community for this report, but future reports will include trending analysis and should yield even greater insights.

Please click here to download a copy of the report. Happy reading!

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