The Quick Ten
The latest developments in Web Analytics
Mergers and acquisitions
Adobe’s planned acquisition of Omniture will help to focus the growing trend for web analytics to become a bigger part of online activity.
Investment in people
Brands are recognising that there is no one web-analytics tool available that has all the answers. It is only through the efforts of people applying the data generated by the tools that true value can be derived.
Email and web analytics
Increased visibility of behavioural email is a sign of how, in the next six months, more companies will be running their email campaigns around proper segmentation based in large part on web-analytics data.
Continued integration
According to Garry Lee, director of web analytics at RedEye, web analytics will continue to integrate into other areas of marketing – such as search – to supplement existing information.
Media attribution
As media attribution evolves, web analytics will emerge as the best-placed method of helping brands to gauge the performance of their digital-marketing activity.
Free limitations
Just about every digital marketer now uses some form of free analytics tool, but some are realising their limitations. The moment that a brand wants to understand something that is not available as a standard report, these tools fail to deliver.
Multi-channel conversions
David Hudson, director of sales and marketing at Intellitracker, says marketers are turning to web-analytics providers to attribute conversion across all activities for a clearer view of what works.
Matching content to users
Historic web-analytics data means users can be categorised according to their online behaviour. This information is fed through to a CMS platform so users can be served appropriate content.
Mobile measurement
Mobile is becoming more important in digital-marketing campaigns, and web-analytics providers are striving to improve the mobile environment.
Proving its worth
Econsultancy says 91 per cent of marketers believe that web analytics are either ‘essential’ or ‘important’ for gathering intelligence to improve customer engagement.
Second Opinion
The term web analytics can be applied to everything from simple page-view statistics through to website traffic analysis and behavioural targeting.
For those just setting out on the road to digital enlightenment, the free page-view stats systems are a great starting point. However, their inherent limitations will soon be the cause of frustration.
The systems can provide volume-focused reports for the weekly management meeting, but are unable to explain the inevitable questions of why something has happened and what course of action needs to be taken to improve it.
For all those keen to drive their online businesses, the need for information to help explain why something is happening is key. It is vital for a situation to be understood before a good decision can be made.
Every digital marketer should be asking questions such as: which marketing campaign or keyword yielded the best results? Is there a user journey that involves multiple visits to the site from more than one type of campaign? If I want to optimise my ad spend, which campaign should be repeated and which should not?
To succeed in today’s demanding world, analytics solutions must track website-visitor activity and make this information easily available. It’s not just about page views any more.
A successful solution needs to build a holistic, lifetime view of a website visitor, while at the same time profiling the behaviour of a number of different online consumer groups.
David Hudson is the director of sales and marketing at Intellitracker