The increasing diversity and complexity of “Web Analytics”

This week I’ve been starting to get my head around the presentation that I will be giving at the Emetrics Summit in Washington in October. I was looking at the agenda and was struck by the vast breadth of material being presented over a full three days, with 11 different tracks and 3 workshops. I consider myself to be a bit of an Emetrics veteran (this will be my eighth) and it used to be considered exciting when we split up onto separate tables for an hour or so in the conference room to discuss different topics. Now we can go to a whole track on it and not see each other for 3 days except at the networking events.

The Emetrics Summit is a bellwether of the web analytics industry. It’s not just the growth in the size of the conference that reflects the dynamics in the industry but also the increased diversity and complexity of the subject matter and the content. At the Washington Summit there are tracks on subjects ranging from Marketing Optimisation to Public Sector measurement to Web 2.0 analytics. This shows how the industry is developing in lots of different direction and effectively what we are seeing is the emergence of different disciplines within what we call “web analytics” and I believe what we will see is the emergence of different specialists within these different disciplines.  I expect it won’t be too long before practitioners and consultants within the space will find that they cannot cover all the ground and in common with other marketing services industries (ie market research, direct marketing, PR etc) we will see specialisation increase.

For example, take the development of Web 2.0 and social media. The Web Analytics Association has recently set up a separate committee to look at this whole area, as “traditional” approaches to web analytics are not suited to measuring and understanding the impact of this evolving medium. It’s likely that as social media continues to develop that different measurement tools will evolve, perhaps requiring different skill sets to analyse and interpret the data. I draw a parallel with the market research industry that I worked in for a few years; you had people who were essentially skilled in “quantitative” analysis and those that were specialists in “qualitative” analysis. Few could do both well.

The track that I am speaking at in Washington is another case in point. The “Statistical Success” track is a new track to the Summit. Whilst that sounds pretty scary even to a bunch of web analysts, again it’s an indicator of the development and maturity of the industry. The track includes a number of presentations that talk about the use of various statistical and advanced analytical techniques in evaluating online marketing performance. This is relatively new to web analytics but it’s not new to consumer analytics. The direct marketing industry, for example, has been using advanced analytical techniques such as regression analysis, decision trees and so on for years to predict likely response. The market research industry has been using techniques such as cluster analysis to identify and understand different consumer segments.

Now these techniques are being used to help understand more fully different aspects of visitor behaviour on websites and the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. Techniques such as multi-variate testing and behavioural targeting are statistical processes that have been productized and packaged up into services by companies such as Optimost, Offermatica, Touch Clarity and the like.

What we are also seeing is statistical analysis, data mining and predictive analytics  being deployed in an ad-hoc way by analysts skilled in these techniques using tools such as SAS, SPSS, KXEN and the like. These packages have long been an essential tool of the “offline” marketing analyst and now they are finding their way into the online marking analyst’s tool box as well. In my presentation at Emetrics I will be looking at these advanced analytical techniques in more detail and how they can be applied in online marketing analytics. Since not all of you are going to be making it to Washington (I assume), its something that I’m also going to be covering here over the coming weeks.

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