A view from this side of the water

Having agreed to write for ClickZ, I then immediately got writer’s block and started thinking  “what am I going to talk about?” I ended up thinking that maybe a good place to start would be to provide a personal perspective from over here in the UK on the world of web analytics and compare that to what I feel is happening in the US at the moment. You see, I had the opportunity to take a close look at this recently when I attended both the Emetrics summits in Santa Barbara and London this year.

Actually, I first went to an Emetrics summit in Santa Barbara a couple of years ago in 2003. At the time I was just starting up my consultancy practice in web analytics in the UK and I wanted to see what was happening the other side of the Atlantic and understand where best practice was at. Emetrics was obviously the place to go!

I have to say that at the time I came back thinking that there wasn’t a lot of difference between what was happening in the US and what was happening in the UK. A lot of the issues seemed to be the same. Indeed, I wrote in a newsletter at the time:

“There are some issues with scale in the US which are not as applicable to European markets but the fundamentals are pretty much the same; determining what it is that needs to be measured, getting reliable measurement systems in place and extracting the “nuggets of gold” from the data generated. It also seemed to me that the business techniques and processes being used in the US to analyse e-channel operations were not any more sophisticated than those being used in the UK, no doubt in part to the active market here in web analysis tools and systems.”

So, had anything changed by 2005? Were the issues and solutions the same or had things moved on in the US?

I think I knew the answer to that question before I went but didn’t realise it until I got back - hindsight is a wonderful thing! That answer is “yes”. Things seemed to have moved on faster in the US and for a number of reasons I believe.

First of all I think that the issues of scale in the US market have meant that developments in the web analytics have accelerated over the past couple of years. Whilst in the US, businesses are expressing concerns about the shortage of skills and resources dedicated to web analytics, it seemed to me that at least most businesses had at least one person who was doing the job. Some companies had three or more delegates at the Emetrics conference in the US. Maybe that was something to do with the location! In the UK market it is still rare to find a person dedicated to analysis of e-channel business performance. It is only the largest and the most enlightened businesses that have made that investment. In a lot of instances it’s considered part of somebody’s “day job”.

A couple of years ago I felt that the UK and European web analytics vendors were holding their own. I⿿m less convinced this is the case today. A couple of years ago European vendors were very active and developing some innovative technologies in the space. Since then, I think that the scale of the US market has enabled the US vendors to invest the money into R&D to develop and enhance their products to a greater extent than the UK and other European players.

This has meant that when looking at functionality across the board, US based vendors have probably increasingly got an upper hand. I know this comment will not endear me to the UK vendors! However it doesn’t mean that I think that they can no longer compete in the market, I just think that they are going to have to think more carefully about what their points of difference are. These might be in technology features (like visualisation), or local industry expertise or indeed in areas like customer service and account management.

Finally, one of the things that was in greater evidence at the Emetrics summit in the US was what I call the trend towards “web intelligence”. This is where multiple sources of data are used together to generate an overall or holistic view of what is happening on the site itself. In particular, this is about the combination of “site centric” data divined from a typical web analytics tool with “user centric” data coming from other sources such as surveys, panels and focus groups. This is something I’m going to be looking at in more detail in future articles.

So where does that leave the UK and European web analytics scene? Well, I’m actually very positive about it. I think there is a lot of best practice that can be gained from the US to speed up the developments in the market, particularly in areas such as A/B and multivariate testing, data integration, visitor identification strategies and so on. However, I also think that there is some really interesting stuff happening here as well, such as technologies for campaign targeting and optimisation, visualisation approaches and so on. Of course, as I continue to come across them I will let you know about them!

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