My perfect web analytics system

At around the same time that I was talking about macro and micro integration in my last columns, an interesting thread appeared in the web analytics forum run by Eric Peterson. A poster was commenting on the recent announcement from WebTrends about the ability in the latest release to be able to access the data via a standard ODBC connection. The poster made the comment that “the real ‘value’ in a web analytics solution is the data collection (tags) and storage/processing (data warehouse)” rather than in the reporting interface.

I have to say that I agree with him. A number of vendors responded to the post saying that it’s been possible for a long time for their data to been analysed using standard reporting tools as well as via a custom interface. Interestingly a number of these vendors were some of the early name vendors who had had built their technology originally on the foundation of log file analysis in databases sitting on the customers own servers. Over the past few years this deployment model has declined in popularity against the “ASP” model where the data is collected, stored and managed by a third party.

The ASP model is great in many respects. The organisation does not have to commit IT resources to managing and storing vast quantities of web data. That becomes someone else’s headache. A web reporting interface provides easy access to dashboards and standard reports. There is off course a trade off between the cost of managing your own data and paying someone else to do it but there is also another trade off which is the ability to integrate and analyse your data in different ways.

By the nature of the ASP service, your web data sits somewhere else. That presents some challenges when it comes to interrogating it in “non-standard” ways. You either have to set up a data feed to your own databases or you have to access the service provider’s databases remotely. Many of the larger ASP vendors provide a capability to export data from their systems but there is naturally extra effort and hence costs involved.

So, as the trend towards data integration continues where organisations want to be able to look at their web data alongside other data sources, where does the value of a web analytics system lie?

First of all, value lies in the ability to collect the data in the first place. As anyone who’s involved in the field knows, web data is horrible messy stuff and there’s lots of it. Data integrity is key to robust reporting and analysis. Web analytic systems are specialist applications for collecting and cleaning web data whether that is from log files or page tags.

Secondly, value lies in the standard reporting of that data in a speedy and reliable manner - real time if needed. Web analytic systems have evolved to do that well. But there is only so far you can go in the development of dashboards and other reporting interfaces.

Ultimately, the real value lies in the ability to be able to gain insight into visitor and customer behaviour. This requires a number of things:

  • the ability to quickly segment and looks at different groups of visitors and customers based on any number of criteria
  • the ability to be able to aggregate and summarise data in a way that makes it easier to observe patterns and trends
  • the ability to integrate site centric data with other data sources to get a holistic view of the customer

Whilst some web analytic systems do some of these things quite well, as a rule I think that they tend fall short on one or more of these attributes. Other tools such as classical Business Intelligence systems and also specialist data analysis systems can probably execute these tasks better than the majority of web analytic systems once the data is in the right format. And therein lies the rub - getting the data into the right format.

I believe that as the needs of the organisation move beyond the requirement to simply report on web data and to be able to integrate it and analyse it in different ways, the differences between the various systems on the market become greater. Clients that I have worked with in vendor selection programmes have found it difficult to distinguish between the various vendors until we get beyond the dashboards and standard reports. As your data requirements continue to develop and change, so too may some of the economics around how you manage and access that data.

My perfect web analytics system would not be one that could do everything for me. It would be one that would allow me to have fast, reliable access to my core data on the site and also allow me to easily and cheaply access and extract the data in different formats. Then I can analyse it in a variety of ways using the best tool for the job. I’ll take a look at some of these other tools for analysing customer data next time. Till then…

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