Today Manoj, over at web analytics world, released a free PDF – where he asked some of the top analytics experts (as he so nicely put it) what topics surrounding web analytics their clients found most troublesome. Along with the issues they provided solutions to help remedy the pains.

Analysts offering their insight and wisdom included:

• Eric Peterson
• Anil Batra
• Jason Van Orden
• Justin Cutroni
• Marshall Sponder
• Gary Angel
• Akin Arikan
• Dennis R. Mortensen
• Avinash Kaushik

I am of course happy that I could add my take on the issue to the report and I suggest you go download the PDF — it is an easy read — and worked perfect for my commute home today. Find my answer to the question below:

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Client Pains with Web Analytics.
(Dennis R. Mortensen, COO IndexTools)

I think it is unfair to boil it down to one unique set of client pains. However; I think it is absolutely justifiable to confirm that clients (and I am saying this with my Vendor cap on) do have pains in deploying and finally operating web analytics to an extent where they actually do have a real return on investment. It would probably have been easier to list those elements of success that cannot be debated, but that was not the question! So here goes a characteristic client pain that might not be that obvious – and at the same time not really recognised as a pain to begin with (it is actually quite often, and wrongfully so, accepted as a web analytics tool choice failure).

Client pain:
“The inability to differ between reporting and analysis and the impact of confusing the former as the end game – thus creating a clear disconnect between investment and use of the deployed web analytics solution.”

I believe very strongly that one have to understand that reporting on any metric at pure face value within a very limited context is unsound and should not be confused with actionable insight from analysis! One should remember that:

• Reporting is produced by tools
• Analysis is done by people
• Processes are deployed by organisations

Concluding the above – we see that solving a client pain of this magnitude – one actually have to employ not only people, but the right people and at the same time create very clear set of processes around ones web analytics efforts. Which is grand wording to a problem that needs a solution today. First task would be to acknowledge that you are in pain as an organisation and I suggest a honest evaluation of the following three statements:

• Reporting does not require action (analysis without action is reporting)
• Reporting does not relate to benchmarking (analysis within your own data silo resembles reporting)
• Reporting is not a forward looking activity (analysis is rarely done from a retrospective viewpoint)

When you have acknowledged the pain (assuming it exist in your organisation) – then comes the long never ending continuous cure called web insight through web analysis!