What’s out there?

The tools themselves have evolved a long way in recent years but issues still exist. Forrester’s January evaluation of analytics products describes the market as a decade old, but yet to settle down. A “proliferation of vendors” has made it difficult for users of analytics tools to focus on one product amidst the “sprawl”.

Gartner details somewhere near 60 vendors in the analytics market, although Gassman believes only 10 actually demonstrate real cultural knowledge and do the hard work to understand people’s needs.

Vendors with hosted application models have embraced web analytics, some of the big players including NetRatings, Omniture or WebSideStory all operate in this fashion. Others such as WebTrends offer both licenced and managed versions, and Google’s hosted package is available completely free.

The main advantage of hosted products is, of course, their low IT resource requirements, while licensed in-house products offer far greater flexibility and capability for integration.

As the market settles some of the confusion may dissipate—Google is forcing the pace but for the business looking at tackling its own website some broader concerns could also become apparent in time [see sidebar].

The bottom line, however, is very positive. With the likes of Google there are some really easy and cheap ways for a business to test the waters using enterprise-class products.

In Australia, the initiative to adopt analytics-based websites is really only now gathering momentum. The time is ripe, there are great opportunities to really drive the web channel while competition is still lagging.

With the growth of ecommerce generally, the potential for innovation with analytics is really only beginning to be tested. Web analytics is already proving to be one of the most useful yardsticks available to a business, but time is also beginning to show that it is one of the most fundamental.

Industry issues

The rapid rise of web analytics has had its side effects. Like any industry that quickly gains notoriety and popularity, the scramble is usually to just get on board and get it going before those concerned with the industry’s situation can really begin to consider its long-term role or best practice.

One growing issue is a lack of benchmarks according to Caslon’s Bruce Arnold. “There is a lack of standards across the industry in how this info is collected, in how it’s handled. There are still basic disagreements about fundamental definitions and a lack of a meaningful code of practice. For example, say you are talking about print advertising, there is independent monitoring you can trust that that particular paper has a circulation of so many thousand. You can trust that figure because it’s independently audited. With web advertising and web analytics generally, there is no such auditing,” he says.

The problem becomes clearer still if you compare the same month through two different web analytics systems. You are likely to find that there are quite significant differences in the results simply because of the differing ways that the systems collect and track the data.

Every system will have different guidelines and approach the data collection from different viewpoints. Where one might view a visitor who remains inactive for an hour as an entirely new session when they become active again, other vendors might see this as the visitor continuing the session.

The great difficulty is that vendors view the way they calculate metrics as a source of competitive advantage, and so are uninclined to make their methods public. Amplify’s Tom Petryshen says this is something that really needs to change. “It doesn’t help the industry and it doesn’t help the companies I deal with. I think it’s a way of locking people in,” he says.

In the US there are efforts to establish a professional organisation to address some of these issues. Most of the members of the Web Analytics Association (WAA) for example, are actually analytics vendors, but how effective such a body can be remains to be seen.

Privacy and cookies

There is also a rapidly growing global consciousness about data privacy. A lot of these issues are starting to appear and because the web analytics environment is fairly new and dynamic, there is very little established in terms of industry code of practice. Just what could happen to data is not certain, and there has been a number of privacy-related legal settlements in the US surrounding analytics and the use of cookies. Cookies received plenty of attention at the time of the legal action (2002) and some perception problems still reside for some users who see cookies and analytics as stalking or a form of spyware (and anti-spyware vendors seem to somehow encourage this).

Last year, a Forrester report titled Web Analytics Cookies: Perception Versus Reality, recommended that businesses adopt a variety of best practices designed to allay many common users’ fears and “perceptions”. These included suggestions that businesses switch from third party to first-party cookies (cookies from third-party analytics vendors attract far more anti-spyware attention), being open and transparent (rather than vague about what you do with data collected), offering value for users to retain cookies (rather than deleting after each visit—enabling tracking over repeating visits), and even offering a separate company analytics policy in addition to a company privacy policy. As a last resort customers could also be offered an “opt-out”.

In the long run, these issues will emerge and be tested. A key stage in the maturation of the industry, the sooner best practice and industry standards can be established the better.

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