Web analytics, could do better

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 09/10/09 and is republished here with permission.

 In the UK, Econsultancy has released their latest overview of the Web Analytics market and there are some interesting findings and trends that I’m sure are being replicated in other parts of the world. It also highlights though that in some areas that there is still a lot of progress to be made.

One of the findings that immediately caught my way was that “UK plc” is spending 12% more on web analytics in 2009 compared to 2008. So despite the trading conditions the market continues to grow and investment levels are rising. But of more interest was the way that that money is money spent. Accosting to Econsultancy’s research more companies are spending more of that money on internal staff than on the technology itself. At last! The figures showed that the proportion of the total investment in staff had gone from an average of 36% in 2008 to 42% in 2009 compared with a spend of 38% of the budget on the technology. Spend on consulting and other services remained steady at around 18% of the web analytics budget. OK, it’s still a long way from Avinash Kausisk’s famous 10/90 rule he proposed over 3 years ago. Kaushik argued that organisations are spending $10 on their technology, then they should be spending $90 in “intelligent resources and analysts”. I also thought it was a great point as often I’ve seen organisations implement expensive measurement technology without putting in any resources in terms of people to extract the value from the investment in that technology. The result is usually disappointment and dissatisfaction with the return the organisation is getting from their investment.

So from the investment perspective, things are looking up and this trend has undoubtedly been helped by the increased use of free measurement tools such as Google Analytics. Nearly a quarter of organisations in Econsultancy’s research claim to use Google Analytics and no other web analytics tool. The signs are also that people are using it more frequently but I do worry at times about the quality of the data that is being reported and as I wrote in my last column organisations need to ensure that they concentrate on getting good quality data to work with by following some simple processes. Just because the technology is free, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to invest in it in terms of time and effort to get the right numbers right.

One of the more worrying statistics in the report was the fact that less than one in five companies claimed to have a measurement strategy that was tied to their business objectives. Admittedly 60% of organisations said they were working on it but the number actually claiming to have implemented a coherent measurement strategy is worryingly low. I’ve written before about a simple framework to creating a roadmap that links objectives to metrics. It’s interesting to note from this report though how many organisations still implement measurement technologies first and then worry about the business impact of what they want to measure second. In some ways I can understand this. Organisations know that they need to measure more effectively the effect of their marketing activities and therefore know they need measurement systems to do that. However, the tendency to implement the technology in the hope that it fixes the problems without thinking about the problems that need fixing can still be seen.

The other worrying statistic that came out of this report is the fact that only 23% of respondents said that their web analytics definitely provided actionable insights. Why is that I wonder? Is it because the right things aren’t being measured in the right way or is it because companies can action the insights that they get from the data? Having actionable insights requires both the right data and the ability to execute on the data.

So I think the results from the Econsultancy report on the state of web analytics in the UK are a bit of a mixed bag. There are some good signs in terms of the way money is being invested but the worrying aspect is that it still often done in isolation of the main business objectives. As my teachers used to say on my reports “Could do better”…

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