Our COO Niel Bornman attended the international eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit last week in San Jose, California. This is the first of two posts in which Niel shares his experience of the conference, as well as insight into the web analytics industry.
Are we still behind the rock?
“How far behind are South African web analysts?” is a question I pondered the entire week at eMetric
I spent the most part of the last 9 days travelling to and from the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the rest of it interacting with the best and brightest minds in the world of web analytics…as well as some of the not so bright.
The eMetrics Summit is aimed at the web analytics industry comprehensively and attracted people from all three walks of web analytics life – vendors, clients and consultants. Speakers included Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Jim Novo, Eric Petersen and Bryan Eisenberg.
I walked away with a couple of key insights:
1. Technology vendors don’t understand the world of web analytics, they understand databases.
2. Web analysts at large organisations have very tough jobs.
3. If data discrepancies are stopping you from gaining actionable insight, you probably don’t know how.
4. Web analytics is a third world economy with too many of us thinking we are ninjas.
Vendors for the most part are useless
Today web analytics is about two main things. Firstly, it’s about analysing the web, or your ecosystem on the web. It is no longer about web page analytics and this is the first major downfall of most web analytics vendors. They provide webpage analytics and can only tell you what happened on your webpage. Some vendors like Autonomy are trying to change this, but they still have a long way to go.
Secondly, it is about actionable insight. What exactly does that mean? Why isn’t the data from a Google Analytics dashboard actionable? Well, predominantly because it is not directly addressing a problem. Today the problems aren’t to do with how many people visited a page or how many searches they performed on Google before entering your website, they are much more complex.
Today we are asking how influencers on Twitter are causing more purchases; we are trying to address a mixed marketing model including above the line efforts; we need to know if you should buy your branded terms while being ranked number 1 in organic results, etc.
To put it frankly, tech vendors are failing miserably – they simply can’t keep up. They continuously look at opportunities from a technology perspective and get stuck in the constructs of their own database structures. They are slow to embrace the new challenge and when they do delivery is poor. Not to mention the complexities in implementing their technologies, integrating them, maintaining them and using them. TCO (total cost of ownership) remains too high as a result, especially due to my next takeaway from the Summit.
The eternal struggle of the web analyst
80% of the web analysts I spoke with at eMetrics struggle with two things. Firstly, they don’t have high level buy-in and sponsorship. The execs simply don’t understand the value of web analytics and part of the problem is of course that they have never seen the value. That brings me to the second major problem, which is governance.
At a large organisation you need a governance model, you need to have the role players defined, you need to have an involvement and sign-off process, and you probably need a committee comprising of all levels of individuals making decisions that the organisation is collectively able to act on. Lastly, the people who are directly affected by the web analytics requirements must be responsible for the execution of the decisions.
Once a governance model is in place, it will be much easier to achieve one successful case study within the organisation. It is then up to you, the web analyst ninja, to make the most of this case study to ensure increased high level buy-in and adoption.
Consultants and consultancies have major roles to play in helping organisations to get the buy-in they need, establish a governance model, create the first major success story, help drive internal adoption of decision making based on key insights, and then taking action based on those insights.
Be sure to stop by at Scent Optimisation later this week for part two of Niel’s article which discusses his third and fourth key insights regarding data discrepancies and web analytics in a third world context.