Really glad I got to meet Gary Angel (SemAngel) a couple of weeks ago in NYC.  If Eric Peterson (Eric T. Peterson, that is) is the real father of Web Analytics (along with Jim Sterne) Gary Angel is it's conscience.  I like the philosophy slant of SEMAngel - I feel like we're studying and referencing Plato while reading about n-dimensional universe. So Cool!  Here's a couple of quotes from Gary's post on We live in an n-dimensional universe - but we only SEE three

"..I want to pause there because I think this point is important. Web Analytics is hard. It isn’t a simple process of applying a few segmentations to obvious variables and suddenly realizing that you can change your business and dramatically improve your website. And the example I’ve given here begins to suggest (at least in some part) why real-world analysis is so much trickier than picking cherries from a tree. Because in the real world, the analyst is in an orchard where only a few of the cherries actually mean anything (are worth picking) and there are millions and millions of cherries to choose from. "

Gary, I'm glad your saying it - Web Analytics is hard.  I know we're soon going to have "Web Analytics for Dummies" and "Web Analytics One Hour a Day" on book stands any day now(and that's cool too - there's also Physics for Dummies - but no one is saying Physics is easy, that is, unless your a Physicist).

I have been saying -  I don't want to see what we do become a commodity - it's clearly not - and probably never will be - especially the way you explain it.

"…The simple mathematics of combination show that a web analyst is faced with more choices than a chess grandmaster in a complicated mid-game. Stumbling hit or miss upon the best move is about as likely as you or I, playing blind, beating Kasparov or Fischer.

And that brings me to my second point. I’ve written before that I think web analytics tools should provide data-driven segmentation. A computer can (easily) sift through those 6 billion cells and tell me which relationships might have significance. Statistical techniques (like neural nets) have existed for many years that can classify visitors into segments based on many combinations of variables (far more than 6). Not only can these techniques do this, they can do it a lot more intelligently. A basic problem with traditional n-dimensional analysis of this sort is that it forces simple on/off decisions about which cells to place a visitor in. A visitor can reside in only a single cell in the entire matrix – and there is no potential for weighting variables or looking at clusters of behaviors.

Neural network and clustering techniques do both these things – allowing you to form groups of visitors with many like behaviors – even in cases where a visitor doesn’t meet 100% of a behavioral specification. This provides a means of grouping "cells" together in an intelligent fashion – but it is really even more than that since the visitors are being classified individually and not at the cell level. That's really important, because it means you can use scalar variables like total purchases, total revenue, site visits or time in an area as meaningful differentiators between otherwise similar visitors. This makes it by far the best way of solving a common and important business question – find me visitors who are "like" buyers but didn’t buy. Without data driven segmentation, this question is – in my opinion – almost impossible to answer correctly."

I guess what Gary is saying (and I did leave a comment on his site that he'll look at when he has the time) is the computer can do this work for us - like "find me visitors who are "like" buyers but didn’t buy" … we don't have to define how visitors are "like those who buy".  What we have today which is N-Dimensional Analytics (but we can't go much beyond 3 levels of segmentation and get much useful as the data sets are too large).

But I also commented on SEMAngel that the human mind, based on intuition, can sort much of this out - that's what Zen was based on - "not thinking", but "knowing" and why the exercises of shooting arrows with eyes blindfolded to hit the apple on top of the persons you most care about head without in any way harming them (and perfectly hitting the mark).

I don't know if the Zen Masters really did that - maybe they did, maybe it's just a story out of an old episode of Kung Fu … I don't know.  Maybe it's more like Star Trek's The Next Generation - Data's positronic brain …. I think a human mind can pick a needle out of a haystack - but we don't know how to turn that on and off.

Anyway, it' would be great to have the data driven analytics that Gary talks about - Check out Gary's post at SemAngel.