Where Will Web Analytics Take Us?

Statistics have always held a strong interest for me. It started with tracking baseball stats, a great hobby if you are into stats. When I later developed an interest in psychology, I found the statistics courses of particular interest. One thing I discovered is despite the fact that we all feel we are so very unique, the fact is we are all amazingly predictable. Just look at the few number of voters they need to predict an election (although there have been a few upsets over the years.)

Since I started my career in marketing so many years ago, I have always had a strong interest in media. As a result, I always enjoyed the media research and planning that went into the programs that we would recommend for our clients.

Now that the web has become such an integral part of any marketing program, I find that I am fascinated by the ability to now combine statistics, human behavior and media in new and exciting ways. And since every move on the web can be tracked, we have a very powerful tool in tracking human behavior.

This all came together recently when I was at the gym working out and listening to one of my regular podcasts called On the Media, a radio show carried on most NPR stations that examines the media. A recent show included a story about how a university was tracking Google searches to determine where racial epithets like the "N" word are used the most. Of course, answering this question does not necessarily answer the question as to why that word is used more in one part of the country than the other but that's where the human behavior part of the equation comes into play. For the record, it turns out that West Virginia and parts of Western PA had the highest number of searches for that word. Now of course, not every search that includes that word would be someone using it in a racially derogatory way. It could be included in a search for a variety of reasons but interestingly, these researches even factored in things like searches for rap lyrics which you might assume would use that word quite often. Fact is, rap lyrics use a word that ends in "a" rather than "er" and therefore, it did not prove to be much of a factor. Where is the "N" word searched the least, you may wonder? Utah. It turns out that where there are very few African Americans (like Utah) or mostly African Americans (some parts of the South), the word is not searched as frequently. The most searches come from an environment where about 30% of the population is African American. Kind of makes sense when you think about it.

So this one example got me thinking about how analyzing web searches can tell us so much about human interaction. As we review search engine optimization methods and review keywords, we get a hint of this but if we look at broader trends like the use of the 'N' word, just think what we can learn about our fellow humans.

I don't know about you but I am ready to dig in.