Tag Archives: WAA

Inside WAA Certification: Any Questions?

Analytical Culture, Web Analytics

The WAA has published a lot of info about the new WAA Certification Exam; you might want to first read the FAQ and take a look at the application information and Exam Handbook for the organizational details, and you can see sample questions from the Test at the bottom of the page here.  But something I can just about guarantee about the Certification – no matter how much info the WAA publishes about it, many people will still have questions!

So here, I will attempt to answer other kinds of questions I think people might have based on my discussions with WAA members.

Update: The WAA has answered many Certification questions here.

However, I’m going to approach this topic a bit differently than most of the published documentation – from a Product / Marketing perspective, rather than an Educational / WAA POV.  I can do this because (if you don’t know) I have worn all the hats on this project – developer, marketer, WAA project owner – and I think it might be helpful to tell the business story of the WAA Certification, from the bottom up.

And if you have other questions, feel free to leave them in Comments and I will do my best to answer them!

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eMetrics “ShootOuts” We’d Like to See

Analytical Culture, Analytics Education, Web Analytics

I was in Vancouver for a presentation to CAUCE [kay-yoose, thanks Raquel] and was able to grab a quick dinner with fellow WAA BaseCamp stakeholders Andrea Hadley, Raquel Collins, and Braden Hoeppner.  We’re rolling out a new 2-day format for BaseCamp and got to talking about web analytics education in general. 

We started talking audience segmentation and content at the eMetrics Summit, and specifically the “shootout” format from the old days.  You know, 10 vendors on the stage at the same time taking questions from the audience.  Those sessions were both educational and hilarious at the same time, as the vendors side-swiped each other on topics like accuracy, how visitors are counted, cookie structures, and so forth.

But that was back when the technology was in flux, and now that issue has settled down a lot.  Braden brought up the concept of returning the “shootout format”, but more on the business side.  You know, get some practitioners, vendors, and consultants up on stage and have them thrash out stuff like:

1.  Attribution – does it really make sense to even bother with attribution at the impression / click level when there is often not a strong correlation to profit?  I mean, just because someone sees or clicks on an ad does not mean the ad had a positive effect; in fact, it may have had a negative effect.  Why not go straight to action or profit attribution, instead of using creative accounting?

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Marketing Science (Journal)

Analytical Culture, Analytics Education, Marketing Research

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:

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