As I said in the Heavy Lifting post, I think the Web Analytics community is becoming increasingly insular and should be paying more attention to what is going on outside the echo chamber in Marketing Measurement. I also think the next major leaps forward in #wa are likely to come from examining best practices in other areas of Marketing Measurement and figuring out how they apply to the web.
For example, did you even know there is a peer-reviewed journal called Marketing Science, which calls itself “the premier journal focusing on empirical and theoretical quantitative research in marketing”?
Whoa, say what?
This journal is published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, and articles are the work of premiere researchers in visitor and customer behavior from the best known institutions around the world. In case you didn’t know, “peer-reviewed” means a bunch of these researchers (not including the authors, of course) have to agree that what you say in your article is logical based on the data, and that any testing you carried out adhered to the most stringent protocols – sampling, stats, test construction, all of it.
And, most mind-blowing of all, they show you the actual math right in the article – the data, variables, formulas, graphs – that lead to the conclusions they formulate in the studies. You know, like this: