Web Analytics and Optimization Blog

2008 Predictions: Web Analytics

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Yes yes, I’m taking a page from my colleague Avinash Kaushik, but I’m certain that he won’t mind too much :).

1. Video Analytics: as more media sites turn to this medium as a fundamental way to increase revenue by delivering higher CPM ad impressions via pre-rolls; companies will need to know which videos are working, which aren’t and how visitors are interacting. Keep a very close eye for Omniture, Coremetrics or WebTrends making an acquisition of Visible Measures - a company specializing in measuring internet video (and doing some very cool things in this area), even in its distributed form (i.e. embedding YouTube videos). Companies have made inroads here, but Visible Measures is really taking it to the next level.
   Check out a great demo put on by Matt Cutler (VP, Marketing) of their software: http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2008/124778.html
2. Web Analytics Job Market Explosion: the industry is mature enough and there are plenty of people getting their feet wet with analytics that more and more organizations will begin justifying full-time resources for analytics. I expect most organizations (as to be expected) will start small with one analyst (or analytics specialist) and once the model has been proven, blow out resources accordingly to the size of cross-functional departments (see Avinash’s book on centralized decentralization).
3. Vendor Consolidation: Omniture certainly had quite the year for this in 2007 but I think we’ll see this continue with the other vendors. As free tools like Google Analytics and Microsoft Gatineau become more and more sophisticated the enterprise level vendors will have to have a diverse feature set available to sweeten the offering. In some ways Google Analytics actually has a more thought out feature set and interface. I’ll commend Google’s team till I’m blue in the face for having an interface that I truly believe to assist in making analysis easy and data actionable as well as the technical foresight I’ve seen with their event tracking model. If you haven’t read up on it yet I strongly suggest it!
   Innovations like these are precisely what keeps a warm burner under the bums of enterprise vendors to step up their game and differentiate their product offering.
4. Quality Assurance: for awhile now I’ve always been amazed that companies don’t have analytics QA built into their processes and that analytics vendors don’t push this phase as part of their implementation process. At last year’s eMetrics summit in Washington D.C., a company called Maxamine made significant inroads by showcasing a tool that can be used to validate your entire analytics install. Watchfire also offers a similar service and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them making a trip out to eMetrics in Toronto!
5. Bye bye Licenses Hello ASPs: As more and more organizations bang their head against the wall and come to the realization that the ownership of web analytics really doesn’t belong in IT, people will start whispering the words “ASP”. Clearly this is going to only really going to affect one of the “big three” vendors but it’s a way that more and more companies will go, why? Because businesses want intelligent insights, not reports. Screaming at your IT professionals to ensure that a top pages report is being produced everyday is not making the most of a web analytics investment.

Thoughts and opinions are always welcome!

What do you think will be the top things to expect in web analytics in 2008?

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