In the last couple of years, web analytics has morphed from being a business luxury to a business necessity. With the internet becoming the driving force behind business, web analytic tools need to do more than just provide valuable insight into a site's health and measure the success of any campaign. To provide clients with relevant service offerings, analytics technology needs to evolve with trends and accommodate the sophistication of web analysts.
Beginnings
In the early years of web analytics, products were available as a means to simply track visitor behavior using metrics like page views, visits, and clicks. Although these reports presented a simple representation of a site's health, they were widely adopted by most businesses. There were two reasons behind this:
1. At the time, most businesses did not have a web presence or they were using the web as an "electronic billboard," sending visitors to a physical location.
2. Web analytic tools were primarily used by the adult industry and casino sites, thus getting a bad reputation and not being adopted by all businesses.
As businesses began using the internet as a revenue-producing medium, web analytics tools were slowly adopted. In response, more tools were developed and existing ones were updated in order to track emerging technologies and trends. With increased user sophistication and the need to have the most current data, web analytics vendors not only increased the capacity of their infrastructure, but they also created new tools that supported these changes. This rendered the previous generation of web analytics tools obsolete because of their lack of scalability and the cost incurred by a vendor to modify the architecture. One example of this is Omniture's announcement that it would be terminating service to Hitbox Professional on March 31, 2009.
The acquisition trend
One trend that has been seen lately in the web analytics world is the "big fish eats the smaller fish" effect where one company acquires the technology of another, as seen in Google's Urchin purchase and Omniture's acquisition of Visual Sciences. This can bring a set of advantages and disadvantages for both the client and vendor. Let's look at both of them.
Advantages. The greatest advantage is the ability to take a product and either integrate it with another or improve the existing product to make it a better one. For example, take Google, which after purchasing Urchin improved on the technology and released Google Analytics -- a web analytics tool that offers some of enterprise but without the cost. The same is true for Omniture, which took the Report Builder technology from HBX, as well as the Discover platform, and integrated it with the SiteCatalyst architecture. By looking at the architecture of another platform and analyzing its limitations, a company can either meet or exceed technological expectations by creating solutions that can increase accuracy or track new user behavior.
Disadvantages. As with any acquisition, there is always apprehension regarding the financial stability of the company and maintaining the integrity of the existing web analytics tool. Keep in mind that enterprise solutions are as much an investment as any physical property because the data and reports directly affect a company's revenue. With an acquisition, businesses oftentimes ask is if their relationship with a vendor's representative will remain the same afterwards. Many of these relationships have been going for years at a time, and that representative knows better than anybody how to cater to a client's needs. Eliminate that personal touch, and all you have left is a self-service module that's destined to fail.
You must also consider factors like migrating from one platform to another. This can involve re-implementation of tracking codes, as well as re-creating any custom solution in order to retrieve the same type of information. Although not welcomed by all clients, a migration can be a useful opportunity to optimize a site and further dissect the factors that might prevent a site from flourishing.
Why there are changes
In the web analytics industry, success is achieved by maintaining a tool that can provide qualitative numbers, regardless of the vertical, and effectively keep up with technological trends. Because of the rapid speed of technology, a web analytics tool's lifespan is only a few years -- unless companies merge their technologies to create more robust, sophisticated solutions to satisfy every type of client.
Current battles
One barrier that the field of web analytics is currently tackling is the need to create cohesion between the offline and online worlds in order to fulfill marketing goals. In the past, if a visitor entered a site, viewed a product, and completed the conversion by contacting a call center, web analytics tools could not connect the action that was initiated online. By bridging the gap between both environments, web analytics can paint a more defined picture of how marketing efforts are affecting the overall experience of a client. This shows that web analytics is more than just tracking a defined space.
Technology is also assisting this effort. When looking at a web analytics suite, each tool (whether it is the analytics piece, A/B testing, or the keyword bid component) works independent from each other. If a marketer wanted to tie a set of keyword bids to an A/B test, it was necessary to either modify the implementation or insert the data while finding common factors. This was the best way to create a meaningful report. As the sophistication of clients and their needs increases, marketing suites have been integrated to tie all data together into one nice package.
A look ahead
Because of the explosion of web analytics as a practice, marketers need to study marketing trends that relate to their field and learn what technological advances can help track those trends. The same can be said for the web analyst, who used to specialize either in implementation or reporting. Today's web analysts have transformed into web marketers. Just like the technology that they are working on, they have evolved by breaking the mold to learn marketing strategies and disciplines, as well as using a barrage of tools in order to produce meaningful reports, project traffic flow, and forecast future visitor behavior.
Web analytics has become more than an extension of a business; it has become the driving force that determines a business's viability. Moving from a simple tracking tool to a marketing solution that provide greater insight into a site's health, marketers are now able to address different user personas and merge multiple marketing initiatives into one interface. As web analytics and its practitioners continue to evolve with digital trends, businesses will gain further access to their clients' behaviors. This information will arm marketers with valuable information to make savvy business decisions, and as businesses continue to crave ROI, I would expect analytics to become an even greater component of online marketing.
Ridder Manzanet is a data quality analyst at Geary Interactive.
