20

May

By Dennis R. Mortensen
11 comments
Tomorrows Web Analytics Technology and Usage

dennis-slides-wa-future

What is the current state of web analytics tools and their usage today? – and to what extent should we expect today to provide us comfort for the future.

What is the current state of web analytics tools and their usage today? – and to what extent should we expect today to provide us comfort for the future.

That is a grand questions and I am not suggesting that I hold all the answers. I do however believe that this is something we, the Web Analytics software vendors, need to ask ourselves on behalf of the entire community from time to time.

I suggest and advocate excellence on today’s current 3 steps of Web Analytics usage:

Today

1. Collect Data
2. Report on Data
3. Insight from Data

I don’t think any of these primary tasks have been solved to the complete satisfaction of our users yet, and I am confident in speaking on behalf of all web analytics software vendors on this. Something as basic as collecting data, is a huge challenge, especially if you think of every one of the Online Business Measurement Quadrants being important to your online endeavors. Reporting on data is far from being solved as well, and providing people a login and password to the analytics interface, is in most cases more harmful than good. Finally, I don’t think we can honestly say that we get all the insight we expect from our data just yet. However; I do believe that all of these point are well understood and that we are making great progress.

That said; we must look towards tomorrow and apply new (or evolutionary) thinking to what we do today. I personally advocate the next two steps clustered around the following:

Future

4. Recommendation
5. Automation

Don’t get to hung up on the words themselves, that’s not the important part. When I talk about recommendation, I want you to envision us, the analytics vendors (and this might not be your traditional vendor), to apply our own modeling on your data, coming up with recommendations, for what you should do next. When I talk about Automation, I believe that you should be able to have your analytics technology (or API like offspring) act upon recommendations without your direct interference.

This is all part of moving you towards the true data driven organization, where we input the objective and let data speak for how we get there – which is where I supposed you are headed? We do have players that do some parts of the above, but not to the degree that I can confidently say that we started these steps.

I am the International Keynote at the Web Analytics Congress in Amsterdam on 28th May 2009. Where I will present and debate the above, which is something I am really looking forward to. I’ll be using the below set of slides to get to my point:

Tomorrows Web Analytics Technology and Usage

..So if you happen to be in Europe>Amsterdam, please drop by and say hello, and perhaps get the one hour version of the above slide set, which without me, as you can see, doesn’t say much.

AND finally; what are your step 4 and 5?   – I’m sure we can’t all agree on this. :-)

Cheers
dennis (@dennismortensen)

n.b.
If this subject is of your interest, I strongly suggest that you go read: http://www.nettakeaway.com/tp/article/377/what-web-analytics-is-missing

  • http://www.clickvalue.com daniel markus

    Hi Dennis,

    Looking forward to hear your presentation in Amsterdam!

    I agree with your view about the future. However, I think recommendation will be part of automation.

    In my view WA tools will start offering automated recommendations in order for the website to drive value; targetted product recommendations, targetted ordering of internal search results and targetted off site messages in email, banners and search.

    Kind regards,

    Daniel Markus

  • http://Webhelder.com Jan de Vries

    Hello Dennis,

    Looking forward to meet je next thuesday in Amsterdam. Automated is one of the things i strongely believe in. Real time alerts, actions or compliments :) based on data in your organisation.

    See u in Amsterdam,

    Greetz

    Jan

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Daniel, Hey Jan,

    Good to hear from you, and I guess I’ll see you shortly then. :-)
    have a great weekend and then I’ll move from New Amsterdam to Old Amsterdam on Tuesday.

    Cheers
    d.

  • http://www.analiticaweb.es Sergio Maldonado

    Hi, Dennis

    I agree on the general division between collecting, reporting and looking for insights. As for the next steps, I do not think they will break so happily from these.

    As reporting becomes more closely connected to our business needs (thanks to APIs, properly defined scorecards and data integration), recommendations can certainly be automated at that level (btw, I totally agree on this: No login/password to a measurement tool’s own interface for any business user).

    Regarding automation, except for Online Campaign Management (no small thing), I think it is the result of other disciplines’ evolution. Meaning: Whatever segmentation we manage to obtain through Web Analytics will be integrated into a CMS, for instance.

    On the other hand, I think the next steps could be web mining, advanced data visualization and the dissolution of Web Analytics individual “missions” into multiple tasks that separately join a variety of mature decision-making processes.

    If that makes any sense :)

    Greetings from Spain

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Sergio,

    Good to hear from you and thank you very much for your input. AND it makes a lot of sense!
    When I talk about recommendation and automation, I don’t necessarily see this as something that HAVE to end up in a web analytics tool. This could very much be the CMS system, as you say.

    Cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://www.bigpictureweb.com jlbraaten

    We’re just to the point where the HiPPO’s (to quote Kaushik) are truly starting to care about analytics. My hope is that recommendation/automation isn’t TOO good that it makes us forget what we’re looking at.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi jlbraaten,

    I don’t believe we can (or should) cut the human out of the loop, I do however think machines (recommendation and finally automation) can do some tasks better and more efficient. So I believe we essentially agree.

    Cheers
    d. :-)

  • jwinter

    What about tying data together to give a more complete view of a visitor? Similar to what some Campaign Management tools and I believe Coremetrics tries to do with it’s LIVE profiles. I think there’s a lot of growth available there. Being able to link sessions together more effectively – across cookies and devices. There’s a lot of value in being able to more accurately create a profile of a visitor over long periods of time.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Jake,

    I believe this is a “Collect Data” issue and that we (as an industry) are actively working on it, such as you describe with Coremetrics profiles. I do agree that this is far from solved, but I also have to say that I believe that this is well understood and something where we will see a slow evolution on – and not a revolution from what we do today.

    Thank you very much for the thoughtful comment.

    cheers
    d.

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