Online analytics: for marketers it was initially seen as a panacea – at last, all the data you require at your fingertips to help make better informed decisions. Yet, talk to many marketers and you’ll hear a familiar cry – with so much data, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff?
This is one of many questions facing marketers at a time when online analytics is at what many believe to be a critical stage in its evolution. A stage where, according to Summit Media’s managing director, Hedley Aylott, website analytics has become a ‘commodity’, hence the expectations on analytics providers has increased due to the free availability of the continually improving Google Analytics. In this changing landscape, argues Aylott, businesses, “no longer want just data – they expect recommendation and insight that can be exploited to increase performance.”
The question remains, is the analytics community responding to these wishes? Perhaps more pertinently, are paid-for analytics solutions offering marketers anything over and above what they can get free from Google Analytics? Or should marketers, as Hedley suggests, take the free solution and hire an analyst?
Are the free tools sufficient?
Let’s start by looking at Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s relatively easy to use (or so we’re told) and is continually improving its capabilities. The latest round of upgrades in October 2009 added further customisation features and what Google calls Analytics Intelligence, a facility which, among other things, provides automatic alerts of significant changes in data patterns of site metrics.
In May last year, Google commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the use of web analytics technologies in US-based organisations. Forrester surveyed 198 web analytics decision-makers and found that 53 per cent currently use a free solution as their main web analytics tool, while 71 per cent use free tools in some capacity. A third of those surveyed pay for web analytics technologies.
Are they right to pay? Well that depends what you want from your analytics. When asked what the best-of-breed paid-for vendors such as Omniture, Nedstat and Coremetrics bring over and above Google, marketers mention greater customisation, better support and stronger integration across marketing platforms.
Such sentiment is in line with another recent report called Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q3 ’09 which found that five vendors achieved ‘leader’ status in analytics by showcasing innovation and vision. According to the report, Omniture, Coremetrics, Unica, Webtrends and Nedstat all “offer the flexibility of near-limitless customisation and the ability to meet client needs on many levels.” Google Analytics achieves ‘strong performer’ in the same report, having ‘significantly enhanced its enterprise capabilities.’
Google Analytics, then, is seen by many as being ‘entry’ level. We put this to Graham Cooke, eCommerce senior project manager, EMEA with Google. “Two years ago, that would have been fair,” he says. “But the development of our features in the last.”
Nobody spoken to disputed that Google Analytics is a quality product. “It has really shaken up the analytics industry,” Stuart Wheldon director of client services, EMEA & APAC at Eloqua Corporation, explains. “It gets you to a certain point but what it comes down to is what does your business need?”
John Darcy, head of analytical services at MRM London, takes the argument a step further. “The move to online marketing has really pushed the development of free tools such as Google Analytics to become an almost enterprise-level solution. While this has happened, current enterprise tools such as Omniture have begun to place themselves more in the business intelligence sphere.”
Why data is not enough
The crux of the issue is that the expectations of analytics providers are changing. As Neil Morgan, vice president EMEA of marketing and channel at Omniture, says, “People are gathering the data but not doing anything with it – yet that’s what it is all about. In B2B, where marketers are often focused on lead generation, there is a lot you can do with the data.”
Wheldon points out how the past two years have seen improvements to analytics technology so you can now gain remarkably in-depth insight into the buying cycle. “So what we’re saying is let’s look at different stages of the sales model and monitor the conversation into the sales funnel,” he says. “We’re monitoring conversion rates and making sure that, at each stage, clients have enough people coming through. We’re lead scoring, and tracking people’s digital body language to find out exactly what affect marketing is having on the business.”
Integration is high up on the analytics agenda. You might have separate streams of data from various marketing channels – email, your website, social media and so on, but they are all measuring things differently, says Morgan, “Behind all of these channels you need an underlying repository that can understand the different language they are all talking. Analytics is at the heart of this, allowing marketers to compare campaigns and channels.”
This ability to compare channels is seen as vital by Andrew Robinson, managing director of Lyris. Too often, he argues, marketers put web analytics, email response, paid search and so on into separate boxes. “What we are moving towards is where we are analysing all of these things in the same place and against the same standards,” he says.
Integration is key
This shift towards integration is seen by many in the industry as critical in the next stage of analytics. Ulrike Ziegler, vice president of marketing with Nedstat, argues, “Integration leads to enrichment of data which leads to value. This value can multiply when there are several integrations. Integration with search, email, CMS and other marketing automation applications are crucial for the value appreciation of web analytics. Then it becomes business critical.
“The integration with back office systems is critical for the import of data like demographics of registered users from a CRM system or margin information from a financial back-office system. The combination of customer and other relevant data with web analytics data provides enriched insights for more effective targeting. Provided that the analytics solution has a fully integrated segmentation function, marketers can zoom in and look at the behaviour of visitors of a certain age group or focus on visitors that mainly purchase high margin products and target content and campaigns accordingly.”
One thing yet to be mentioned in all of this is social media. Omniture, like other analytics vendors, has extended its capability to track social media activity, although there are limitations in terms of what can be measured. Morgan says the focus is on measuring the percentage of negative comments by looking at the language being used. “In Twitter, for instance, our technology will show how many positive, neutral or negative comments are being received,” he says.
The analytics of the future
Nedstat is also using clever technology to allow in-depth social media tracking. Even online videos that have been placed can be measured. Ziegler says, “Sitestat [Nedstat’s core analytics product] measures the viral effect of embeddable videos throughout the web, on what sites they have been placed and how viewers interact with them.”
It’s impressive stuff and offers a hint of how far analytics might go in the future. When looking to that future, most people approached mentioned the idea of real-time responses in line with client user habits.
“I think the next stage will see us being told by analytics what we should be changing now, almost in real-time, in order to segment users into the most appropriate journey through the website,” says Cooke.
Morgan draws an analogy with a sophisticated engine management system which corrects itself so the driver doesn’t need to stop and, for example, change the oil. “Sites will be able to change automatically, based on what is happening in a campaign,” he says.
As data becomes a commodity and the insight becomes the value, there are, argues Aylott, implications for analytics vendors. He says, “[They will] have to decide where their work starts and finishes – what will marketers be expecting in terms of tracking, reporting and insight? Certainly a single view of all channels, showing attribution and de-duplication including the traffic’s interaction with the website.”
But what about the implications for marketers? For Cooke, the biggest shift will be where the marketers of tomorrow take ownership of the metrics involved in analytics and start to really get to grips with the data. “In the past, IT has often carried out analytics in isolation, not necessarily setting the same marketing goals in terms of metrics,” he says. “As they work together, and analytics starts to drive core business decision making, we will see a huge change.”
