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Why I don’t like Web Analytics

There - I’ve said it. There’s no turning back now. I’ve come clean. I don’t like web analytics. That may seem a somewhat strange thing to say for someone who has been involved in the industry in one form or another for over six years but it’s true. I don’t like web analytics.

I had better clarify what I mean. It’s not that I don’t like the activities that we think of when we talk about web analytics, it’s more the name for what we do: “web analytics” Why? Well, it’s because I have increasingly come to believe that the term “web analytics” misses the point of what people are trying to do. It’s not about the “web”, the “web” is just a channel. It’s about doing business over the web. And it’s not about “analytics”. In fact whilst I know what “analytics” is, I struggle to understand what it means. One definition I’ve seen of “analytics” suggests it’s the logical process of analysis.

It seems like the industry has developed it’s identity on the outputs of a certain technology rather than to solve a business need. The proverbial technology solution in search of a problem. This issue has been addressed to some extent by the definition that the Web Analytics Association has come up with the industry which is “Web Analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.”  Here we are talking about analysis with a purpose.

But surely it’s not about the process of generating analysis, it’s about the process of generating insights that people take action on. So I think that web analytics needs “rebranding” and the industry needs to broaden its scope.

I am convinced that by spending the majority of our time and efforts focussed on the outputs of site-centric measurement systerms that we are failing to answer some of the fundamentally important questions. This has become clearer to me as I have done more consulting work for organisations whose primary purpose is not to sell stuff over the web. I sat in on a number of the presentations on the public sector track at the recent Emetrics conference in Washington DC and essentially watched organisations struggle to measure the effectiveness of their online investments with metrics that we get from our web analytics software.

In a recent project I worked on for a non-for-profit organisation, I interviewed a number of stakeholders in the online channel to understand what it was they wanted to know so that they could better understand and optimise their return on investment. Consistently people told me that they really wanted to know were the answers to questions like:

  • Are we attracting the right types of visitors?
  • Do people think we are providing a quality service?
  • Are people satisfied with what they find on the website?
  • Can they find what they are looking for on the website?

All very important questions, all very difficult to answer using site-centric metrics.

So, what’s my point? I think that there are two points actually:

  1. The web analytics vendors need to think about how they can develop their technologies to improve the ability to measure the value of a visit when there are no discernable conversion points
  2. The web analytics industry  - vendors, associations and customers - needs to broaden it’s scope to include additional ways of measuring ands optimising online marketing performance. Site-centric metrics are necessary but not sufficient.

The first point is that techniques, methodologies and approaches need to be developed to help organisations measure quality as well as quantity. All clicks are not equal, some clicks are more important than others. In a commerce environment this is easier; you can measure orders, sales and so on. In some non-commerce sites it can be done by measuring registrations, downloads and on. But how do we measure the value and worth of content? What is the return on investment in generating hundreds or thousands of pages of content on the site? How can we better measure the quality of this content?

To help answer these questions I think the industry to broaden its scope beyond the outputs of web analytics software. It needs to more formally include areas such as customer satisfaction surveying, user profiling and so on. These skills need to be recognised as the one of the skills required of what we today call a “web analyst”. The danger otherwise is that the data will remains in its functional silos and web analytics will just become a special interest group of the business intelligence industry.

And what should we call the industry if we rebrand?

During the 1990s the Market Research industry became Consumer Insights and market researchers became Consumer Insight managers. Aren’t we really in the E-Business Insights industry and shouldn’t we be looking for generators of these e-business insights in either any of the tools, processes or people we employ? What do you think?

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