Is web analytics that difficult?

A couple of months ago WebAnalyticsDemystified published a report sponsored by the Web Analytics Association on the use of web analytics in organisations and attitudes towards the industry around the world. I was looking at the report again the other day and was struck by one of the results. Over half (56%) percent of the respondents, who were web analytics end users and consultants, thought that web analytics to be “somewhat” or “extremely difficult”, only 15% thought it was easy with the rest in the middle. I started wondering whether this was a peculiarity of the industry or not. Do over half the people who work in Search Engine Optimisation consider SEO work to be difficult? What about email marketing, do email marketers consider it difficult? And what is it about web analytics that makes it difficult?

There were a few clues in the WebAnalyticsDemystified report. The majority of organisations are working with technologies that are relatively new to them. Not many of them having been working with the same system for more than 3 years. There are concerns over data quality, worries about data definitions and issues around reporting functionality. Bit for me one of the most interesting and telling statistics in the report was that the use of web analytics in an organisation is primarily driven by the people on the ground with only a few originations claiming to have corporate processes in place to drive out value from the investment in web analytics. And I think that this is why people find web analytics difficult, it’s viewed as a tactical response to a problem rather than a strategic imperative.

One of the challenges still with web analytics today in my opinion is that it’s viewed in terms of the technology as opposed to being viewed in terms of a philosophy. That may seem like an odd thing to say but web analytics reminds me of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry in the late 90s. Organisations would decide that they would “do CRM” and so go out, buy a piece of technology, implement it (eventually) and wait for the promised results. Often they were disappointed. Organisations that were successful realised that they not only had to implement a piece of technology but that they also had to implement changes in the way that they thought about customers and their processes for dealing with customers. They viewed CRM as a corporate philosophy rather than just as a piece of technology.

So should web analytics be a philosophy? I’m biased but I think that organisations that take marketing performance measurement seriously will ultimately be more successful than those that don’t. A piece of research by Jupiter a couple of years ago showed that US retailers who had embraced web analytics had much higher conversion ratios that those who had not. And “embracing web analytics” doesn’t mean implementing a web analytics solution, it means investing in the skills and resources to extract the insight from it, it means changing the marketing decision making processes to include target setting and performance review on a continuous basis, it means building analytics and performance measurement into the heart of the development process, rather than it being an after thought. In short, it means having strategic intent about online business performance measurement that comes from the key decision makers in the organisation.

There is no doubt that implementing a web analytics system can be a bit tricky. There’s a lot that needs to be thought about and for many organisations the concepts and the technologies can be new to them. But these problems are then exacerbated if the organisation doesn’t align itself alongside the new capability and make the additional investments in resources, skills and training. Also, culturally, organisations need to shift so that when decisions about resource allocation are made, web analytics is seen as being as mission critical as transaction processing. This may seem like the tail wagging the dog but what’s the point of building a new checkout process for example if you can’t measures how effective it’s been?

When I run workshops I always start by talking about strategy, goals and objectives and setting Key Performance Indicators. In short, why does your website exists, what are you trying to do and how will you know you’ve done a good job? If the answers to these questions are clear, then I believe that web analytics gets a lot, lot easier. I usually end my workshops by sharing one of my favourite quotes. It comes from Art Nielsen and it’s this “The price of light is lower than the cost of darkness”. So, if you’re wondering if you can afford to put web analytics at the core of your online marketing processes, the question really is whether you can afford not to?

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