As you probably know, the Organization that joins the efforts of the Analytics professionals from the world regarding standards, best practices, Ethics, etc, is the Web Analytics Association. The Web Analytics Association born in 2003 when the abundant enthusiasm for an independent web analytics organization was readily apparent after only one evening in the lobby bar at the 2003 Emetrics Summit in Santa Barbara… Hundreds of phone calls and thousands of emails later, the three founders made the idea legal and convinced Seth Romanow from HP, search marketer Andrea Hadley, and web analytics executives Rand Schulman (WebSideStory) and Greg Drew (WebTrends) to join the inaugural board.
The first Board of Directors’ meeting was held in Portland, Oregon in the Summer of 2004 preceded by another gathering in another lobby bar…. (More History here)
About eight years later it is changing its name to Digital Analytics Association. Why? Well, the industry is moving very fast, if you are an analyst you know that the information must be analyzed in context, in this case the context is all. In 2003/2004 the Analytics World was completely different and the online world was another completely different thing. Internet was a sum of websites, most of the people had no idea what web analytics was, KPI’s was something that people was talking about but most of them where not very useful, Google Analytics (Today’s market leader in quantity of accounts) was not even in the market, actually Urchin was not even acquired by Google yet. Take a look at the WA Memorabilia from 2003 
Well, I guess that the above is clear enough to understands that in 2003/2004 the Online World was totally different, that’s why the term Web Analytics became a little small and non-representative of what a today’s Analyst does (I wrote about it in the Post “Web Analytics, Digital Analytics…Why don’t we keep it simple“. So some time ago we started, from the WAA (Current DAA) looking for a new name that represents our work. Jim Sterne, chairman of the board and founder of the organization, announced the rebranding effort at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco (2012). The new positioning reflects the focus of the not-for-profit, volunteer-powered association created to unite professionals in a common effort to enhance the capabilities of data analytics and address the challenges associated with turning big data into business intelligence.
So, welcome Digital Analytics Association! Watch Jim Stern’s announcement video here