Good day to you Bob.  Please provide us with some salient facts about you.

I’m a Cancer or Leo, and suddenly confused about the difference.   I am tattoo-free.  I’ve been involved in web analytics since it was called web site analysis.  Blood pressure is 118/72.   I had nothing to do with the oil spill.  My middle name is James.  I lead the analytics platform & delivery team at eBay.  I put two spaces after a period.  I live with my amazing wife in Santa Cruz, California, but don’t have a VW microbus and I don’t surf.

You used to work for Yahoo!.  Don’t you miss us terribly?

Yes!  Especially the cake shop near the Budapest office.  Interesting that you’d use the word “terribly.”

How do you prepare mentally for a speaking engagement?

After a lot of trial and error I’ve settled on a routine – sit in my hotel room until a few minutes before I’m scheduled to go on, rearranging slides until I get confused about what follows what.  Then when I am on stage, I am forced to be spontaneous.  Alas, this seems to be the same approach most speakers use.

What is the collective noun for a group of web analysts?

A Cacophony.  No, I jest!  For me, the collective noun is: Customers.  You see, I’ve never been a web analyst, I only walk among them.  I learn their mysterious ways, and then form intricate and insidious plans to provide them with better technology, so that they do less reporting and more recommending.

Who is your superhero-sans-cape in the web analytics community and why?

MY superhero has to be Terry Lund.  When we launched Accrue Software at Internet World in 1996, Terry visited our booth, loved what he saw, bought the product, and for years was one of our best customers – great with product ideas, and his team at Kodak even sent us code patches!  Later after I joined Yahoo!, Terry contacted me and said there was this smart guy writing a book on web analytics, and that I might be able to help with the information on network collection.   Thus Terry introduced me to Eric T. Peterson.

Did you have a nickname during high school? If so, what was it?  If not, what nickname would you have liked?

I didn’t.  I played sports year-round, but also was founder of the computer society and spent my free time in the computer lab.  I guess fellow students weren’t sure what bucket I belonged in.  In college I took the name Fred on Fridays for my radio shift (I was the Music Director, so I was on the air on Tuesdays, because that’s when all the new music came out).  I guess that would have sufficed in high school, even though it would have confused me.

What is your wish for the remainder of 2011?

I wish you would keep doing these profiles.  I always learn something!

How do you explain your job to relatives who ask you what you do?

My team builds the machinery that analyzes eBay’s searches, clicks and purchases, to help understand our inventory, our customers, and how to make the site better.  (Their eyes often glaze over at this, and we go back to talking about the Red Sox.)

What do you think is the greatest threat to the future of web analytics?

That it remains a separate discipline.  Path analysis, heat maps, real-time referrer logs and all that stuff is fun and useful — but if the analyst isn’t looking at the business as a whole — connecting marketing spend with web product usage with business outcomes — companies will pay less attention than they do now.  Analysts (and consultants, agencies, etc) that practice holistic business analysis, of which the web is a rich source of behavioral data, don’t see “web analytics” as a standalone thing.

If you could build the perfect web analytics tool, what would it do that today’s tools can’t?

Well — given the response to the previous question … For a tool that helps business analysis, I’d say it would be a tool that integrates and shows the stages of the customer lifecycle (direct mail, SEO/SEM/email/referrers through “site activity” through transaction through post-transaction activity), integrating cost and revenue, with robust segmentation discovery & management capabilities, overlaid by however the business thinks about its world (e.g. geography, product line, business unit, etc) with information that can be fed back to the operational systems (e.g. for targeting). Since we’re calling it the perfect tool, it should also show high-level dashboards to executives, allow self-service reporting for line/product managers, and enable deep drill-down for analysts.  Oh and it should baseline every metric that the business cares about, learn the periodicity of those metrics, and issue alerts when the metrics deviate significantly.

It should allow *users* of the web site to see what information the tool knows about them, and to opt out of some or all of it.

Finally, it should have robust discovery, annotation and sharing capabilities.  Too many analysts work in silos, not leveraging or learning from each other.  The perfect analysis tool would encourage and support collaboration.

How long have you been sporting earrings?

I got them after Accrue, during my “retirement”, about 10 years ago, for absolutely no real reason.  Idle hands, as they say…  Until a few months ago, I hadn’t even known how to take them out.  Apparently I need some special tool.

Check out the full list of interviews in the Silly Series here!