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What do we mean by web analytics?

There’s one thing that worries me a bit about web analytics and that’s its name. Web analytics… Sound’s a bit scary doesn’t it? They are not two words that necessarily fit comfortably with your average marketer or business leader. It’s also not something that easily trips of the tongue when somebody asks you what you do for a living; “Oh, I work in web analytics”. “Oh, that’s interesting, but what do you actually do?”

I think that’s the point about the term “web analytics”; it’s not very user friendly and it doesn’t really describe what it does. For a long time, nobody really knew what it meant. There were heated debates in forums about what “web analytics” was and what it wasn’t. Some people asserted that web analytics was essentially about what came out of a web analytics tool, whilst others believe that it’s a much broader discipline than that.

So, it was good to see that the Web Analytics Association recently published a draft definition of web analytics:

“Web Analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.”

It’s great to have a definition but does it help the average business person understand what it is and what it does? As Jim Sterne, President of the WAA, acknowledges; it’s a start and that you have to start somewhere.

My own perspective is that web analytics is very focussed on the site and not on the people who use the site, i.e. consumers. It’s a bit like the old days in consumer packaged goods when brands were focussed on selling the product rather than marketing to consumers. So, I believe that we need to think about the issue of optimising website performance from a much wider perspective.

An effective strategy for measuring and optimising website performance has four key components:

  • Good market intelligence
  • Sophisticated visitor behaviour analysis
  • Excellent user profiling
  • Effective site performance tracking

Market intelligence provides the context for the businesses own performance. Whilst the majority of a digital marketer’s time can be spent focussed on the brand and the site, it is important to remember that the neither the brand nor the site operate in a vacuum and that external factors and forces are at play. Some of these factors might include:

  • The natural growth in the market
  • The level of competitive activity
  • The development of new technologies

All of these factors and others are likely to have an influence in the way that the marketing plan is developed and executed. For example; are your assumptions about growth rates in line with the way that the market overall is performing? What would the impact of rising media costs be on the expected level of Return on Investment? What competitive scenarios might impact on your ability to meet your targets? This type of market intelligence data is often comes from third party data sources such as panels (Nielsn NetRatings, ComScore), aggregators (Hitwise) or large scale surveys (Forrester’s Technographics).

User profiling is the process of getting to know who is using your site and why. The basic principals of marketing are about understanding your customers and meeting their needs. It’s no different on the web. By getting to know and understand your users, their behaviour, needs and desires, you will be in a much better position to:

  • Target and acquire more of your most valuable types of users or customers
  • Develop the site in line with their needs and expectations
  • Deliver more targeted and effective marketing communications and offers
  • Make your site more attractive to advertisers looking to reach your particular type of audience
  • Anticipate and act on likely customer behaviour (ie churn)

Data on users usually comes from users. This includes the use of surveys, observation and focus groups, as well as looking at behaviour on the site.

Finally, site performance measurement looks at the effectiveness of the site from a technical perspective. It concerns aspects of the site such as the speed of page delivery, site availability and the responsiveness of transactional processes.

Site performance measurement is often neglected as part of the mix when thinking about measuring the effectiveness of the channel as a whole. It is often seen as a “technical” issue rather than a “business” issue and something that it is the preserve of the operations team rather than the marketing team. However, in terms of understanding how well the marketing is performing and how it can be improved, it is important to do that in the context of how the site is performing as well.

If the analysis and interpretation of panel data and surveys (for example) aren’t part of web analytics, then what is it? I think that its part of a wider e-marketing discipline which is more holistic and puts the focus on the consumer rather than the site or the channel. Increasingly we talk about “e-ci” which for us is about consumer insight for e-business. It’s an approach that puts the consumer at the heart of the matter.

In the next series of articles I will be taking a closer look at some of the other sources of consumer insight such as panels, surveys and focus groups.

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