Where Web Analytics Tools are Headed
This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.
A couple of weeks ago I met up with executives from Omniture here in the UK to get a bit of an update on the products and the product roadmap. After all the acquisition activity over the past 18 months and the subsequent integration of the various operations, a number of product launches and the rebranding of some of the businesses, it was useful to get a perspective of the Omniture business as it stands and where it’s headed.
After having talked for a couple of hours it seemed to me that Omniture have got most of the bases covered. SiteCatalyst offers core web reporting and analysis capabilities and data integration requirements are managed through the Genesis programme with dozens of partners covering most digital marketing disciplines. Optimisation capabilities are offered through the integration of the Offermatica and Touch Clarity into the “Test and Target” service. High end analytical requirements are covered by the Discover product including the Visual Sciences product rebranded as Discover onPremise. And at last we see one of the benefits of the Instadia acquisition through the launch of Omniture Survey which allows survey response data to be integrated with web analytics data.
Having been through a number of company and product integrations in the past in the marketing services industry, I understand the challenges involved in bringing together a mishmash of different services and cultures into something that looks like a coherent product line up. From what I have seen I think Omniture have done a pretty good job. The presentation of the services makes sense and you can see how they can deliver against an organisation’s needs as they evolve and grow.
This is not meant to be an ad for Omniture but I did come away from that meeting thinking that if Omniture can be used as a proxy for the web analytics industry then the industry is at an interesting point in its development. Over the past couple of years a number of the vendors have broadened from the core application of web reporting, either through acquisition (as in the case of Omniture) or by being acquired themselves (as in the case of NetTracker). The question is: where next? Will web analytic tools develop into enterprise level systems capable of supporting multi-channel analytics or will they remain a “point application” for the digital marketing channel?
The model for hosted web analytic systems is that everything is fine if you want to analyse and manipulate the data within the system itself. Generally the tools are getting better at analysing and reporting web data and the systems are getting easier to use. The challenge comes when you want to either report or analyse the data in a different way or even using a different tool. Let’s take an example.
Everyone knows that the “last click” attribution model for measuring campaigns is naïve. Advertisers want to understand better the relationships between different digital channels and their impact on an eventual conversion. The standard model in most tools is to use the last click with an option of using the first click to allocate a conversion to a channel. In some cases you can also allocate the conversion equally across all channels involved. If the advertiser wants to look at different ways of attributing conversion to marketing channels in a typical hosted environment then they would need to get the data out and analyse it separately. This then presents another challenge.
Hosted web analytics systems generally offer an “all or nothing” approach when it comes to exporting the data. You can export the topline reports into Excel or similar and that’s it, or you can also have all the raw clickstream data. It’s like saying you can have the drips from the tap or you can stand in front of the hose and get soaked. Few organisations are equipped to handle raw clickstream data which is why they opt for a hosted service in the first place. There is too much noise in the data and part of the value of a web analytics system is that it manages and processes the data into something that is analysable and reportable. But in the process sometimes it dampens the noise too much so that it’s hard to see what’s going on. The example of the campaign attribution is one example.
What organisations increasingly need from their web analytics systems is the ability to have access to clean, summarised but granular data. WebTrends have made progress in this direction with the Visitor History File. It allows you to export on a regular basis a series of attributes against each visitor that comes to the website. It includes for example the first campaign that attracted the visitor, the last campaign, the total number of visits and so on. It doesn’t solve all the problems but it is a step in the right direction. Increasingly organisations will be looking for tools that allow them to integrate the data more easily into other marketing or corporate systems so that they can understand all the customer touch points. It will be interesting to see how the industry responds. Will it see itself as a solution for digital marketing only or will it be an important component of the broader mix?