The health of the web analytics market in the UK

About a year ago I had the opportunity to visit the Emetrics Summits in both Santa Barbara and London. In my first article for ClickZ I compared the state of the web analytics markets between the US and the UK and found that in the US there were some significant differences. Because of the scale of the market in the US there had been much more investment in product and people and there was also greater evidence of data integration to get a more holistic understanding of visitor behaviour.

Although I didn’t make it to Santa Barbara this year I was at was Emetrics time in London again last week. For me it was a good opportunity again to get a take on the health of the web analytics market in the UK and the rest of Europe. First and foremost what was interesting was a strong representation from some of the other European counties with delegates attending from Finland, Belgium, Holland, Hungary and others. This is a sign of the developing maturity of the market in Europe and the need for these types of events to meet fellow professionals and share best practice. It will be interesting to hear back reports from the first continental European Emetrics summit in Munich, Germany next week.

So what was the buzz at the conference in London last week? Well, when I talk to clients about web analytics I like to describe it as a journey, not as an event. You don’t suddenly start “doing” web analytics, you being a process that is unlikely to be complete. I describe that journey as three phases:

  1. Performance tracking  - the business of putting in place the core KPIs and reports; “measuring the right things right”.
  2. Process Optimisation - using data to optimise business processes; “test, learn and adjust”
  3. User centricity - focussing on visitor usage, behaviour and profiles; “customer focus”

Last year I felt that in the US people had moved off talking about the issues of getting business buy in and setting KPIs and more of the focus was on using the data and becoming more user centric. Last year in the UK the talk was more about the challenges of starting a web analytics programme, ie focussing on the first stage of the journey. Would it be different this year?

My overall perspective is that the industry is moving on in the UK. There were a range of speakers across industries and also contributions from consultants and experts. Presentations from end-users in organisations this year were more likely to be talking about how they are using the data to change the way they are doing business online and the benefits they are now getting from it. They were talking about how they are looking at issues like process optimisation, improving the use of real estate on the site and increasingly about put online metrics into the context of a multi-channel environment. Certainly for me there was more evidence of businesses deploying web analytics within their organisations and seeing the benefit.

One of the interesting features from a presentation by a company called Holiday Rentals was about how they had built a separate web analytics database specifically for their Search Engine Optimisation work. They were using one of the vendor’s visualization tools to look at the actual behaviour of search engine spiders on the site to understand how well the content was being indexed. It wasn’t rocket science but it was a really neat approach.

The consultants who were speaking tended to talk about issues around user centricity. Fellow ClickZ columnist Bryan Eisenberg was in town to talk about Persuasion Architecture and I think most people were able to keep up with him! An interesting presentation from Mathew Todd looked at a case study about using web analytics to drive outbound behavioural marketing activity across multiple channels (ie web, email and direct mail). My own contribution looked at the use of segmentation techniques to better understand customer behaviour and profiles.

One of the frustrations is perhaps the lack of any evidence of companies engaging in systematic testing. I think the challenge here is one of scale in Europe. The internal or external costs of running testing programmes are probably too high except for the largest organisations. Hopefully the technology costs will come down enough to enable more companies to use this type of analytics as part of the way they do business in the future.

So, if an Emetrics conference is a barometer of the state of the industry then I think there is progress to be reported. Things are moving in the right direction.

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