Jun 11th, 2007
Why Analysis And Synthesis?
I wanted to come up with a witty title for my blog. It doesn’t compare with Occam’s Razor, which I had to look up on Wikipedia, but I came up with “Analysis and Synthesis”.
In my opinion, good web analytics involves both the process of analysis and the process of synthesis. According to dictionary.com, analysis can be defined as:
1. the separating of any material or abstract entity into its constituent elements (opposed to synthesis).
2. this process as a method of studying the nature of something or of determining its essential features and their relations: the grammatical analysis of a sentence.
Synthesis, on the other hand, is defined by dictionary.com as:
1. the combining of the constituent elements of separate material or abstract entities into a single or unified entity (opposed to analysis).
2. a complex whole formed by combining.
Even though analysis and synthesis are considered to be opposites, I find that both are essential to what we do as web analysts. Analytics tends to bring together the opposite ends of all kinds of spectrums. Think about it; business users and web programmers, answers leading to questions, quantification and qualification, online and offline. There is virtually no other line of work that offers such a wide variety of business decisions, practices or personalities.
So here’s why I think that both analysis and synthesis are essential to web analytics:
Analysis
- Finding sources of traffic - where did our users come from?
- Splitting a site’s structure up into a taxonomy, or hierarchy - what parts of our site are the most popular?
- Dictionary.com’s definition 5e is “a method of proving a proposition by assuming the result and working backward to something that is known to be true.” - how many times have you been asked to do that?!
Besides, we call it web analytics, of course analysis is involved. Besides, we deal with numbers a lot. But synthesis? Consider:
Synthesis
- Correlating user behavior - what are the most popular pages for our English-speaking users from Canada?
- Consolidating online with offline data - when we run an Internet campaign, do our offline sales increase?
- As I mentioned above, we bring together all kinds of different people, from the geek to the marketing agency hipster (who secretly want to be geeks anyway)
- Creating personas out of various user attributes and navigation behavior
- Combining numerous user properties and navigation elements to decide which advertisement or article to show to a user on the fly (behavioral targeting).
- Putting together various bits of data to create KPIs, then putting all of those KPIs into a single dashboard report for Executives and other decision makers.
- Making sense of seemingly disparate information (analysis) in order to drive a successful business decision or strategy (synthesis).
So hopefully, I’ve won you over. It seems like a lot of thinking around something as simple as a blog title, but I hope to keep blogging for a while, so it was important to come up with something that made sense and communicated something about what this little piece of Internet real estate is all about!
What do you think? Is this name lame like my puns? Insightful? Do I have too much time on my hands, or is it worthwhile to consider these small things every once in a while? Let me know.