The Coming Bifurcation in Web Analytics Tools

When John was with Forrester Research last year he had the opportunity to do some work for Google that published some pretty bold claims. Among these was his reporting that “a staggering 53% of enterprises surveyed currently use a free solution as their primary Web analytics tool, and 71% use free tools in some capacity (PDF from Google). At the time I commented:

“When [John] first told me that over half of Enterprise businesses were using free solutions I have to admit I didn’t believe him. In a way I still don’t, but perhaps that’s only because I work with a slightly different sample than he presents. Regardless, John’s report paints a picture of an increasingly challenging market for companies selling web analytics and a new sophistication among end users.”

Increasingly my new partner is looking like some kind of prescient seer, although perhaps not for the reason some of you expect. Without a doubt Google is pushing hard to improve their analytics application, and by nearly all measures they are doing a phenomenal job. As I said back in November I personally believe their “Analytics Intelligence” feature is brilliant, and I have little doubt that we’ll continue to see little improvements here and there over the coming year.

But as much as I love Google Analytics for what it does, I am also willing to be honest about what it does not do and what it is not. Google Analytics alone is simply not enough for truly sophisticated web analytics.

Despite John’s findings at Forrester, and despite the fact that Google Analytics is easily the most widely deployed web analytics solution ever built, there are clearly limits to what Google Analytics is capable of today. What’s more, there is nothing wrong with having limits … what is wrong is trying to be all things to all people, which is what this post is really about.

At Web Analytics Demystified we have been talking over the last six months to an increasing number of companies that are considering dropping their historical vendor, almost always in favor of Google Analytics. And at Web Analytics Demystified we don’t do that much work with small, mom-and-pop shops … these are global organizations, name brands, and market leaders in their respective categories. Most of these companies are spending well-over $500,000 per year on analytics technology, and a handful are spending double that.

What’s more, all of these companies have multiple dedicated resources for web analytics. These companies, in many cases, are freaking awesome at putting their tools to work, and in all cases understand that web analytics is a “people” thing, not a “technology” thing. So what the heck is driving them towards Google’s waiting arms?

Limits.

It turns out there are limits to the amount your average business user is willing to invest in learning web analytics tools. As more companies begin to truly take a strategic approach towards web analytics, many of them are realizing that their business users are simply not “getting” the fee-based solution they’ve invested so heavily in. The business users have more or less found their limit, and hit the wall, and are balking at the amount of time it actually takes to learn and become proficient with these tools.

Apparently in an effort to further differentiate themselves from Google Analytics, the paid guys have inadvertantly made their technology so complex that few people in the business are actually willing to use it.

Oops.

Having worked at WebSideStory in the past I have to admit I cringed when one business user complained that [market leading vendor X] “was just too complicated” and that she “really, really missed using HBX because it was simple.” But this is a story we are hearing over and over and over … to the point where I am having to revise my entire opinion about Google Analytics place in the true Enterprise, which I’m happy to do …

… except.

A problem with the wholesale shift to GA arises when we go to the dedicated analysts and consulting teams who actually do get and use the paid solutions, pretty well in most cases. Suggesting to them that they might try and get by solely on Google Analytics is kind of like telling LeBron James that he needs to do his job with only one leg, one arm, and a blindfold on if he wants to keep playing ball. He’d probably still be able to drop 30 on the Knicks, but he certainly wouldn’t be happy about it.

I don’t personally know a single analyst worth their weight in salt who would be happy and willing to standardize completely on Google Analytics, at least not today. Despite awesomeness galore, the decreasing list of things that GA doesn’t do is pretty important to these sophisticated users. True visitor-level segmentation, real flexibility in reporting on custom data, the ability to define custom metrics and dimensions, true data integration … it’s not an infinite list, but it’s still pretty long by my estimation.

And while the list of third-party applications to provide additional functionality to Google Analytics — for example ShufflePoint and their wonderful use of the GA APIs — we have still not seen a solution emerge that confers all of the necessary functionality that “professional” web analysts need to do their jobs well. In my experience there is nothing worse than knowing how to answer a question but not have the tools in place that you need to make the necessary connections.

Notice that I’m not saying that the alternatives to Google Analytics necessarily have these features. You don’t have to spend much time following the Web Analytics Forum or the Twitter #measure tag to see complaints about how hard it is to do stuff that should be pretty simple. But for the most part this rich functionality can be found in the add-on ad hoc exploration tools (e.g., Omniture Insights, Coremetrics Explore, Webtrends Visitor Intelligence, Unica NetInsight, etc.), and it turns out that when you’re competing on web analytics these features are pretty important.

So what am I saying, and what did I mean by “bifurcation” in this post’s title?

I believe that we are about to see an increasing number of companies in the coming year drop their paid vendor’s “basic solution” in favor of Google Analytics and, at the same time, seriously consider adding their vendor’s high-end offering. More specifically thanks to advances in “universal” (sic) tagging, the increasing cry from business users to “get us something simple that we can use”, and the true and present need for experienced operators to have a robust data exploration tool at their disposal, I think we’ll see an increasing number of “Google Analytics + Omniture Insights” implementations.

Some caveats:

I am not saying that all companies will drop their paid vendor in favor of Google Analytics, mostly because “all companies” never do anything;
I am not saying that all companies should drop their paid vendor in favor of Google Analytics, or even that companies should drop their paid vendor at all, especially if you have a pretty solid web analytics strategy in place;
I am definitely not saying that I believe companies can manage a sophisticated web analytics operation using Google Analytics alone, although this statement hinges on the definition of “sophisticated”;
I am not evangelizing for Omniture Insights, even thought I used to work at Visual Sciences and continue to use OI thanks to the good graces of Omniture/Adobe;
I am not evangelizing for Google Analytics, even thought I do think the GA team has made amazing advances over the last 12 months;

The final caveat is that I am only using Omniture Insights in the description below as an example — you can substitute any of the solutions I listed above just as easily, or even use SAS if you’re ready for the coming revolution in web analytics. Heck, if you’re super-motivated, you can take Hiten Shah of KISSmetrics suggestion and build your own clickstream data warehouse and analyze the results using Tableau.

Regardless of the technology you choose, the bifurcated solution looks kind of like this:

For your business users you simply do an awesome job implementing all the great new functionality present in Google Analytics;
Using very simple Javascript libraries you “copy” the data you’re sending to Google Analytics and pass it along to Omniture Insights (OI);
At the same time you add whatever other information you need to pass to OI, either because GA can’t handle it or you’ve filled all your custom variables;
In OI you transform the data to match what GA is doing as closely as possible, knowing full well the data will never match because of GA sampling and the reality of our industry;
In OI you add to the data with whatever you need, either via transformation, lookup tables, custom metrics and dimensions, whatever …

With these technologies in place you now have two things:

A very appropriate solution for your internal business users, one they will likely embrace thanks to it’s simplicity, it’s beauty, and it’s Googliness;
A very powerful solution for your web analysts that is largely based on what your business users are looking at.

The way the solution set works practically within the business:

Business users get training on Google Analytics, which is surprisingly easy to provide, and if you’re big enough the rumor is that Google’s own evangelist will come visit with you (fun!)
Business users get used to the idea that the numbers in GA are not 100% perfect, especially in high-volume situations where GA is sampling;
Business users follow the age old advice to “manage based on trends” and use some of the slickness that is GA to identify problems and opportunities;
When the business finds something interesting they ask the analytics group to work with them to look more closely and provide analysis (not reports);
When the business needs “more accurate” numbers they ask the analytics group to provide reporting from the complete set of data (normal accuracy and precision caveats still apply);
With their newly gained free time, the analytics group can become more of a proactive analytics service organization and less of a barrel full of “report monkeys”;

Yes this involves some internal education, but c’mon people, all web analytics involves internal education. You’ll need a clear explanation about the “goodness” of the GA data in high-volume (e.g., sampling) situations; you’ll need to provide training on Google Analytics, but there are some amazing people out there who can help you; and you’ll need to manage two vendor relationships … although if John’s data from Forrester is correct, 71% of you are already doing that!

Clearly this solution is not without risks, but from where I sit, I am having more and more trouble putting together a viable and workable alternative. Web analytics is becoming an increasingly critical function across the Enterprise and awareness of the solution set is bubbling up more rapidly than ever. As this happens, an increasing number of internal stakeholders are starting to ask for direct access to web data.

But the fee vendors, again for pretty good and obvious reasons, have evolved their base solutions to an unprecedented level of complexity, especially when you look across many vendor’s “complete” base solution (e.g., Webtrends 9 plus the requirement to use Webtrends Live for a lot of stuff, Omniture SiteCatalyst plus Omniture Genesis, etc.) Nobody is blaming them for the push upstream … especially since nobody I know could think of an alternative to differentiate their solutions from the 8,000,000 lb gorilla that Google Analytics has become.

At the end of the day in many, many cases you end up with business users frustrated by their inability to effectively and efficiently self-serve, and analytics professionals frustrated by the amount of time they spend pushing out basic reports. Quickly the situation becomes what is politely described as “inefficient” or, in more colloquial terms, FUBAR. You choices are then to A) lump it and suffer or B) do something about it.

I’m not a big fan of suffering.

The bifurcated solution, if you think about it, is actually pretty awesome. You get the best of both worlds, and one of the solutions costs you nothing and so (hopefully) frees up budget to hire more and better people to manage your web analytics efforts. I’d rather see a company put $500,000 equally towards an ad hoc analysis engine and smart people to run it than the case I see too commonly today where the lion’s share of that $500,000 going directly to buy a solution that is not meeting the needs of the business.

What do you think?

If you’re a company of any size and history of investment with any of the big U.S. or European vendors, and if you’ve been considering something similar, we’d love to hear from you. While we’re already providing guidance to some pretty large clients making this move we are always eager to collect additional data as an input to our thinking. We’re also happy to hear from consultants and vendors who have a clearly vested interest in the outcome I’ve described. And yes, if you need to bitch at me for suggesting that Google Analytics is anything short of manna from heaven, I suppose I’ll approve those comments as well.

Posted Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | 50 responses | Share, Save or Email

http://www.johnfernandez.com John Fernandez

Isn’t it more than a bifurcation at this point, though? Not only do you need “Basic” tools (Google Analytics), “Advanced Tools” (Omniture, Coremetrics), but you have a lot of other special analytics tools. You can have Marketing Analytics which often interface with Web Analytics (Eloqua), Sales Analytics which often interface with Web Analytics (SalesForce), eCommerce Analytics (a lot of providers), and social media analytics, which are flipping everywhere.

Sure, some of these tools integrate with other tools, and there’s a lot of overlap (what happens when those numbers disagree), but many organizations not only have too much data, they have it in mulitple, distinct areas.
http://www.twitter.com/trumbling Paul Trumble

Eric, I’d say that’s spot on and hardly controversial. You know a bit about our installation. High end tool, oh and Net Insight also. We’ve looked at GA, don’t like that the data is sampled at our volume. But really, it’s good to have a tool for people who just need to count something to balance a report or an invoice, and then a tool for analysis.
http://www.mymotech.com Michael Helbling

Eric, This is a great post. I have thought for a while that vendors should start exploring what it would mean for their GA level analytics product to be free for precisely the reasons you stated.

Vendors face a pretty significant dilemma because for most, if not all, their GA level product is the entry point for all the other tools, and their marketing strategy for the higher end tools are based on market share of the entry level tools.

My guess is that we are a few years from seeing this bifurcation hit the fat part of the adoption curve, but I certainly validate your overall assumption that this is the direction we are headed.

Another by-product of this bifurcation could be an enforcement of standard definitions. Finally by pitting vendors against each other this can happen although I am concerned that Google will have too much sway in the debate.

And not only would LeBron drop 30 on the Knicks he would have 8 rebounds and 7 assists with it. :)
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want.html Adam Marshall

Well Eric, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head!

I’m reminded of this lecture by Joseph Pine (click my name!) on “What Consumers Want”, where he describes a multi-stage cycle of economic value.

If you consider the web analytics “economy” (still in it’s early days, at least I’m hoping so!) the general parallel goes something like this:

Initially, WA was commodities/goods, you got the cheapest little doodad that logs your hits, and you get your resident geek to “take care of it”.

Currently, we’re in the services phase. WA is controlled primarily by the large vendors and their goals, and most companies will either throw money at the latest offering, hoping now that the vendors and consultants will be the ones to “take care of it” – or they’ll decline, either not perceiving the value

Where we really need to be is the experience phase.
Joseph uses the term “customisation” to refer to movements up his scale of refinement – and it applies here also. By customising the end product of analytics, and integrating it with the desires and goals of the end user, the field may hopeful reach a higher maturity. This is where the users themselves are the ones “taking care of it”, and WA becomes not a corporate service, but a departmental experience. Obviously, the techies and the experts will still have to get involved (phew!) – in fact it’s our job to educate the recipients as to how to interpret and communicate with WA.

I think, as JF above, that it’s not even just about a bifurcation, but a complete fragmentation – or shall we say… a modularisation. Still, independent systems, tools and presentation layers should all still communicate, and more importantly use the same rules. (Standards, people!)

Many people are – as you say, starting to realise that there’s different goals at stake for different pieces of work – and with the right people looking at the problem, all can be accomplished independently. The tool that powers your weekly content report widget doesn’t have to be the same thing as what you use to analyse campaign attribution, and MVTS, social media and CRM capture and targeting can, if done right, look after themselves.

People like the guys at jsHub are already offering services which help you manage multiple applications receiving the same data. Many smaller web analytics companies will read any tag you like, and there’s nothing to stop you configuring GA to read marketing and real estate parameters intended for other tools.

I hope, that the future of web ananlytics remains flexible, diverse and open to innovation.

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to… No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
http://www.twitter.com/billbruno Bill Bruno

I couldn’t agree more based on what I’m seeing with clients as well. In all honesty, I love seeing the move to free (GA and YWA (my personal favorite)) for basic analytics, provided the organizations invest the money they are saving into people or more advanced tools (preferably testing). I think there is only so much you can do with a bunch of expensive reports. The value comes from acting on that data. The maturity model seems to speed up in organizations that save cost on the basics and move into the advanced suite of tools vendors have to offer. In the end, having a strategy that balances short term results and long term goals trumps all.
http://twitter.com/danauns27 Dan Auns

Great read. I think that the Franken-tool mash up of “Google Analytics + Omniture Insights” that you present, speaks to the core deficiencies in both offerings. Both are really appealing to their respective practitioners, and those practitioners need a more complete solution regardless of existing tool-set.

I would like to think that this is the use case, and target market that Denis’ team over at Yahoo are working towards with YWA.

Will YWA = GA + Omniture Insights? I don’t think so, but it will be much closer, and much more attainable in terms of project scope an good old fashioned reality.

Franken-projects are not for the feint of heart.

Cheers.

D.
http://www.webanalystsinfo.com Lars Johansson

I guess I should not just tweet a response!

Many vendors offering paid tools fail in the details. It’s not just a game of showing off the coolest specs. It’s just as much about user experience.

Where GA excels is in its user interface. It is, for most part, very well thought through. It wasn’t always, but it is now. Kinda like what one would expect from Apple.

While I preach about KPIs and customized reports, the fact is that what standard set of reports you get out-of-the-box still tells you something about the tool. GA reports provide more value than many paid tool reports. Some basic things are not always standard.

Also, the payment models for paid tools is often very confusing for buyers. How many businesses know their total cost of ownership? I don’t think that aspect should be forgotten when it comes to tool selection.

Is there a future for paid tools? Yes, there is! But they need to focus more on advanced functions, but also on an improved user experience.
Laurie Miles

Great post, Eric, and even better comments. You all are helping educate many of us and give us the insights we need to justify keeping our paid solution. Thanks!
http://bobbleheadguru.com @bobbleheadguru

Seems to me that the “Vendor pie” is changing rather than expanding or contracting. How?

1. Measuring what happened is now relatively less important than gaining intelligence about what we should do next. We have evolved to the point that “actionability” is now relatively more important than “dashboards/scorecards/report cards”

2. The widespread growth of “bobblehead gurus” who focus on the presentation layer to build their credibility is a likely a short lived phenomenon. Soon (I hope), analysts and their leadership will see through the “easy = true” (http://bit.ly/aKBRtS) mentality and begin to spend resources on truly gaining intelligence, so that they can efficiently and strategically to get to action.

3. The key to all of this is having a sound methodology that does not just focus on presenting lots of data well, but instead can identify the right data and use it to take action and get results. This methodology should incorporate quantitative data to drive qualitative analysis. While not a trivial effort, the best organizations already do this.
http://www.analyticspros.com Caleb Whitmore

Eric,

Great post. What stands out to me is that GA, limits included, is still largely unknown territory for most people. Yes, it may be the most widely deployed web analytics solution ever, but that deployment is a thousand miles wide and an inch deep. I just spent two days training a company with a very sophisticated in-house team that is really sharp, and they had a lot to learn about Google Analytics and weren’t using many of it’s more powerful features.

Yes, GA still needs critical features, but the reality is with growing list of good tools based on the GA export API and bolting-on Urchin software to run concurrently with GA you get almost everything on your list of “must have’s.” Unique visitor measurement: check; Custom Variables: check; Custom metrics and reports: check.

So, does it really come down to a lack of features in GA, or that Google has built a tool that is, on the surface, really easy to use for basic analysis tasks, and yet capable of so much more that people just don’t realize.

Best,

-Caleb
http://www.the-omni-man.com Adam Greco

Eric,

At our organization, we have run into the issue you raise of end-users not understanding how to manipulate the “advanced vendor” reports. To combat this, we have build a user-friendly front-end to these reports using Google Sites so most of what they need is already curated for them. An example can be found here: http://www.the-omni-man.com/sitecatalyst/adamgreco/2009/12/21/embedding-sitecatalyst-reports/

It will be interesting to see what happens within the next few years, but I have thought often about a GA+OI set-up and think that would be really cool…
http://www.twitter.com/bigbryc Bryan Cristina

I’ve been pushing for this for over a year. We’re a Webtrends shop, and while I know my way in and out of the tool and tagging and can make the sucker sing Ave Measuria any time I feel like it, it’s still not the easiest thing to use from the end users’ standpoint.

Tagging is tough. Configuration is tough. But we got all that covered – and our users still don’t like the end result. Google is far easier to use and it has the basics covered, taking care of most of the questions from the little guys that are still trying to see if their campaigns are even getting traffic in the first place.

Aside from ease of use, it’s nice to have a different perspective. There’s different competencies, but also perspectives. Webtrends tends to look at a unique instance or things from a visitor point of view, but Google acts like it cares about particular things, events, and the interaction between them in a session more than a particular visitor (which of course sampling would limit even if they wanted to focus on a visitor).

And finally, it wouldn’t take much work. I probably wouldn’t spend the time to get all the variables into Google because we’ve got that covered, but the basic page, segment, and goal information would work just fine for the little guys.

Now, onto convincing the utterly paranoid and confused IT group about such a venture…
http://bobpage.net Bob Page

Great observations and discussion.

I agree the bifurcation is real, but nobody wants it. It’s a reflection of the fact that GA is too simple and OI is overkill for many. You’ve captured the current market reality, but it’s not sustainable. Neither Google nor Adobiture — or their competitors — are blind to this. Imbalance means pain, and pain means opportunity for smart consultant and vendors…
http://www.openwebanalytics.com Peter Adams

I think you are right about a few things here. The commercial tools are too complex and too expensive.

But more to your point, I get a lot of feedback from our user community that the reason they install Open Web Analytics (http://www.openwebanalytics.com) along side of GA or a commercial option is to get individual visitor level insights that are lost underneath aggregated statistics.

Analysts attempting to use web analytics to guide their development or usability efforts are looking for more granular data (user mouse movements, click streams, etc.) that open source tools can provide.
Dennis Kuminski

Eric,

Interesting post but I’m not sure about the choice of vendors. I agree that Google is becoming the dominant player primarily for its ease of use, but how many companies do you know that are using OI? I’m not sure there are more than 100 companies using the solution today and it has been commercially available for at least 7 years.

In OI you have arguably the most expensive and difficult solution to learn on the market. And if anything, what you’re proposing is probably an insult to Omniture in that in addition to having the most expensive tool, it is so difficult that you’ll need a free tool to do the job for the masses.

I just don’t see too many companies with either the talent or the pocket to afford OI.
http://ban.ms Victor Acquah

I suspect this points to a deeper issue – the fact that organizations are still struggling to make web analytics meaningful to them with these enterprise grade tools, and more importantly, the core of the key questions they are asking in regards to their web operations can be answered by google analytics!

Its either they are still not sophisticated enough to ask more esoteric questions about what their clickstream data is telling them, or they simply have a certain level of expectation (in regards to the questions they want the tools to answer) which makes the power of enterprise grade tools moot.

perhaps, it is also a commentary on the failure of both enterprise grade vendors and web analytics practitioners in general to demonstrate the true benefit of having such tools – what does it tell them that google analytics can’t?

I am not surprised at all they are moving en-mass to google analytics.
http://bosilytics.wordpress.com Thomas Bosilytics Bosilevac

Eric, as always you speak the detailed reality of the web analytics space. This time though I don’t think controversy can follow. As an Analytics Program Manager for one of the largest Intranet environments in the world I can say this can be generalized by simple user segmentation.

Publish data to the ones that only listen.
Analyze data for the ones that do more.

The inefficiencies have always swam in the first boat. Just show me the data … wait that doesn’t make since … wait is it correct … this sucks. (Paraphrased from your favorite “report monkey”). Sometimes it is is best to leave the B and C players to fail. That said, we have tried to force our sophisticated analytics tools down their throat so we can all have the same tool.

WRONG

In FY11 we are investigating splitting up our users between those we publish to, and those we analyze for. We have a nice, in-house, reporting tool that will serve the needs of 80% of the users while significantly cutting down on maintenance/support/education. They get what they need at a level of precision we can deal with.

This of course gives my team time to do what we were hired for through our heavy analytics tools. To analyze the TOUGH questions, to transform the dirty data, to educate on the process and not the tool.

I hope my decision works as well in reality as this email suggests. I look forward to sharing more over a beer soon. And @BigBryC we shuld talk!

Here’s to 2010!
http://www.rudishumpert.com Rudi Shumpert

Eric,

I’d love to see Omniture merge their low end (SiteCatalyst) in with their higher end tools. And be less expensive that the current plans.

This is what I personally will be the end result of the Adobe Omniture marriage.

A “Super” tool like this at a better price point would seem to have a great advantage in the the market place.

-Rudi
@rrs_atl
http://www.twitter.com/trumbling Paul Trumble

Dennis, OI user here. Actually Adobe OI now.

Honestly, out of the box it’s the easiest tool to query with the first morning you see it. To get the most out of it, yeah-you have to learn some things.

In any case, Eric gives an example not an endorsement.

The truth, though, is none of the other tools are really that advanced. I see people present what they are doing with site catalyst or web trends, and I scratch my head and wonder why they think what they are doing is so slick. Given the choice between one of those tools and GA, I’d vote with my wallet.

That is also a reason to run two tools, high end tools come with high end price tags for workstation licenses. If all you want to do is compare your google invoice with your records. low end tools are great.
http://www.twitter.com/joestanhope Joe Stanhope

Hi Eric,

As always, a well composed and thought provoking piece.

I’d like to study the numbers around this phenomenon further. I don’t doubt John’s information, but some trending information would be very interesting and I suspect this data is changing over time as GA improves as a product and gains users.

I have recently been thinking along similar lines to the bifurcation concept. Where previously I had considered the Web Analytics market to be a single continuum with GA on one end and Omniture (or your paid vendor of choice) on the other, increasingly I see a pair of parallel markets, one for “mass” Web Analytics and a second for “enterprise” Web Analytics. Although I will also say that this approach to the market landscape is probably a short term view, as GA and the paid vendors continue to evolve along various paths, we’ll have to rethink this market alignment again soon. Exciting times!

I agree with Bryan Christina’s comment about the difficulty around convincing IT departments. Most Web teams I speak with are already overtaxed, and I suspect that they would roll their eyes at the prospect of adding another web analytics application to mix, even in the face of logical reasons for such a move.
Budgetary constraints may well be a driving factor in forcing organizations to consider the bifurcation option and justify these projects with a solid cost oriented business case.

It is also a call to action for paid Web Analytics vendors see this seam in the market as an opportunity to serve multiple user personas, beyond hardcore advanced users, and to continue developing their functionality, interfaces and administration capabilities to provide meaningful insights to business users, while allowing their clients to leverage existing investments in high end solutions.

It will be interesting to revisit this post in 3 months, or 6 or 12, to see how it plays out.

See you in SLC next month!

Joe
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Wow, I guess I really touched a nerve with this post, but I have to say I’m not really that surprised. There are a ton of great comments above and I’m going to struggle to address each one. Thanks a ton to everyone who is commenting and offering their opinion!

Michael: Good points, but my thesis is that none of the other vendors have a “GA level” product really anymore. If you look at any of them side by side, with the possible exception of Webtrends Insights (e.g., “9″ which has it’s own unique challenges), what you see are moderately powerful solutions that confer such an amazing array of functionality that the lay-user appears to consider them “not GA level” anymore.

Jacques Warren also commented that this movement might give Google too much sway in the “standards” debate but I’m not 100% sure that is a bad thing, are you? Given that we have nothing vaguely close to “standards” (my opinion only) today perhaps having one vendor take the lead by sheer virtue of force would move the process along?

Adam: Great summary of the direction we need to go, I will have to check out Mr. Pine’s work. And agree, the point where end users are doing more to service their own data needs is long overdue, and that’s my point. Thanks!

Bill: Great point, although it’s worthwhile to point out you are both a GAAC and YACN partner (and I am a YACN partner looking to get GAAC’d myself!) I point that out because ALL CONSULTANTS have a vested interest in companies executing on the latter-half of my thesis and putting more powerful tools into play. Why? Because we can do our jobs so much better and ultimately easier.

You make an EXCELLENT point about needing to balance “short term results with long term goals”, thanks!

Dan: I think if Yahoo surfaced the now-but-a-vague-memory “Rubix” application your thesis would be more correct, but until I see Bob and Dennis (and a lot of other really smart people) apply some of the UI principals found in A LOT of other things Yahoo does I’m still going to lump YWA with Omniture, Webtrends, and the others. Nothing wrong with that mind you, especially at the price point.

Also, referring to this mash-up I’ve described as a “Franken-tool” somewhat misses the point. Companies ALREADY HAVE Frankenstein’s monster deployed — did you read that 71% of the companies Forrester surveyed had more than one solution? Problem is, and I cannot confirm this 100% but I have my suspicions, that those 71% are using two theoretically directly comparable solutions (e.g., SiteCatalyst and GA) NOT GA + OI as I’ve described.

So in essence the companies that execute on this vision will be dis-assembling the monster and building a reasonable process and strategy around the technology they use, one that is respectful of both business users and professional analysts. Make sense?

Farris (@bobbleheadguru): Maybe … but there are still an AWFUL LOT of business people who need to know about “what happened” and so trying to just move beyond their needs forgets one very, very important truth: Web analytics is a service organization to the business … we exist to support them, right? It’s easy to lose track of this somewhat obvious point but it’s nonetheless true.

Caleb: Agreed, to some extent, but I do still think that GA lacks fundamental functionality required to do our jobs at the highest level. Maybe I just have more to learn about the app (to your point) but I sort of doubt it. I’ll try and have a closer look at Urchin, but running the business user app in-house may end up being a non-starter for many of the companies I’m talking to.

Adam: Nice step in the right direction, but you’re the Omni-Man (okay, you were … ;-) I think what you’re describing is either too much of a hack for most folks OR basically reinforcing my main thesis. I’ll figure out which one before we do that podcast later this month. LOL!

Bryan: Dude, I laughed so hard I shot milk out my nose when I read your “Ave Measuria” comment. I want to see you sing that at web analytics karaoke sometime! But let me ask you, since you’re a “Webtrender” can you make it work with Webtrends Insights (“9″) and Visitor Intelligence? That is close to what I’m describing … have you tried it?

Bob: A rare opportunity to disagree with you, but I disagree. The number of business users I’ve talked to in the last six months — people with real data and reporting needs from the Internet — who basically say with a completely straight face that they’d really prefer to use Google Analytics leads me to believe they do want it.

Roll in the number of professional analysts I know who prefer using apps like Coremetrics Explore, Unica NetInsights, Omniture Insights, Webtrends VI, etc. because it lets them do their job that much more quickly and easily and I think I have a pretty compelling case for this being being something people actually do want.

Now, why the situation has manifest … well there I will defer to you, you’ve built more of this stuff than I have. But again I’m not sure the solution described above isn’t sustainable, especially when executed properly. A well-run kitchen will have both a wire whisk AND a more complicated mixer, right? Why not the well-run web analytics kitchen? (That analogy was provided by my wife … blame her, not me ;-)

Dennis: Oh, I don’t know if OI is really any harder to learn than anything else out there WHEN THE RIGHT PEOPLE ARE USING IT THE RIGHT WAY. Did I say that loud enough? The BIG mistake we made when I worked at Visual Sciences (two years, just prior to starting my own company) was that we made the assumption that anyone could learn VS — and that was the most incorrect assumption ever, ever made.

This is why I present the pairing I do — keeping in mind that I said I’m using OI as an example and without bias. In the right operator’s hands (see Dan’s rebuttal to you in this thread) people can make Omniture Insights sing Bryan’s “Ave Measuria” or even Queen’s “We Will Rock You” (sorry) BUT ONLY IN THE RIGHT OPERATORS HANDS!

Now, I haven’t heard boo from Omniture on this post, but I kind of doubt they are mad at me for pointing out the power and proper use of their application. They’re mad at me for a lot of other stuff, maybe, but not this. And I am biased here because of my client base, but I know LOTS of companies with the talent and money for OI.

Rudi: I think the merger you describe is Omniture Discover and/or their Data Warehouse, and I know some people really like Discover. Unfortunately that approach doesn’t get you anywhere near the flexibility and power you get in OI (trust me there) and you end up paying for SiteCatalyst even if you don’t use it.

If I had a nickel for every company I know in that position today … ;-)

Joe: THANKS for taking the time to comment as I know you’re really busy getting up to speed at Forrester. While we’ll all be watching this trend, one thing I would point out is that if, well, your own data is correct there is really nothing for IT to do — Google Analytics is already in the Enterprise (and everywhere else, yeee!)

For kicks have a look at our recent Vendor Discovery dataset for Omniture, Webtrends and Coremetrics. Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Now, if you mean the need to retag and split data, or install a high-end tool … maybe, but again with coming advances I suspect you’ve seen in tag management plus the fact that most of the vendors offer managed solutions for their ad hoc visualization solutions, I think this vision coming to fruition is actually a lot less work than you might thing.

Of course, who am I to disagree with Forrester’s Senior Analyst for web analytics. ;-)

Thanks again to everyone who commented. YOU ALL ROCK!
Rhonda (@rj_berg)

Thought-provoking article, Eric! @BobbleHeadGuru I appreciate your thoughts, as well.

I think companies need to step back and formulate specifically what business questions need to be answered, and then choose analytics solutions that can get them these answers.

If GA provides answers to many key business questions quickly and easily, it may be a good choice. The remaining business questions may require an advanced set of tools, including web AND customer experience analytics.
http://www.twitter.com/bigbryc Bryan Cristina

Eric: I’m not sure if I can consistently get my voice that high, at least not since I was 12. But I’ll work on perfecting my falsetto.

Insights 9 is an ok product, basically a different filter for the same ol’ Webtrends reports. It has its ease of use for some people, but there are a lot of things getting in the way from that ever happening, such as login problems, people not aware that Insights even exists, and the utter lack of remembering your login data really hurts it. Plus it does some things worse than standard analytics – It doesn’t even show % of visits for any metrics you view, like Browser, State, etc. Pretty lame.

Visitor Intelligence is a fine product too, but until they get it to where you can use custom parameters, which make up the vast majority of our tagging efforts, it’s fairly useless to us. Now, the Warehouse is a great tool because it DOES allow you to use custom parameters as events, but it lacks the shine of the VI interface (which doesn’t matter much to me, to be honest). VI’s worst issue is its reliance on IE only to run. You’re a Mac guy, I’m sure you’d appreciate that, right? Maybe I’m wrong and it will magically work with another browser, but I couldn’t get it to happen.

There’s a great product under there, they just have to keep working on it.
http://www.anuntis.com riccardo zanussi

webanalytics is wrong, completely wrong.
The real thing is Business analytics. Web analytics is just a pat of that.

If you start thinking about your web analytics is that you are thinking not about business but about other things.

we are making our own tool because
1) integration of business data (at the deepest level) with web data
2) starting points of every analyis are business data not web data
3) GA lies about origin of users and you cannot do anything about it (we are building our own concept of session)
4) omniture and other tools suffer of the point 1) and 2)
http://www.unica.com Akin Arikan

At Unica, our product strategy with NetInsight has been to avoid such bifurcation. Rather, we designed NetInsight as a single product module that adapts on a role basis to basic vs. advanced users.

Within one UI, we aim to provide business users with their dashabords. But as these business users become more hungry for personal metrics we aim to provide them with drag and drop filtering capabilities that can be switched on.

Meanwhile, the power users can access the full range of slicing & dicing functionalities with their logins.

And rather than having to compare sampled data (in Google Analytics) to full data in another solution, we aimed to make both sampled and full data available within the same product. I.e. just toggle a switch to get either one.

Comparing results from two different products is frustrating enough. Add to that sampled vs. full data. Sounds like a nightmare. Add to that trying to create similar metrics and segments in both products.

The word “bifurcation” itself sounds painful enough to characterize where that would seem to lead to.

So I can only hope that you will not prove right this time. 8-)

Akin
Unica
http://www.tomsanalytics.com Tom Miller

It is my opinion that one of the reasons why Google focuses so much of their developer efforts into improving Google Analytics (+GWO) is because they are focused on the growth and widespread adoption of AdWords. The features that make it compelling for companies with >$100 million in revenue (the revenue cut-off from the study) make it absolutely essential to companies with <$10 million in revenue. If you are a company with $100 million in revenue company, and we combined a paid solution with a homegrown one and it worked great for the various constituencies in the organization. The paid clickstream tool that we deployed allowed managers that worked directly on content development/promotion to get the data that they needed while the homegrown solution directly integrated (no API import) into the company’s data warehouse which provided an extremely robust web usage dataset to the company’s sales groups.

Having been there, I think that hybrid solutions like you suggest are going to become increasingly common, because different people need different types of WA for different things within large organizations.
http://www.RetailShakenNotStirred.com Kevin Ertell

I really enjoyed this post, Eric. I also really appreciate all the thought-provoking comments. There are lots of excellent points that I fully support.

There is one point, however, that I would just like to wrap some caution around. That’s the notion of introducing simplicity for internal business users. I often fear there is a dangerous allure to simplicity, and that allure can produce unintended results. Offering up tool with easy and intuitive usability is a good thing, but I would hope we don’t end up offering up really simple data to key decision makers when the situation being measured is complex. In other words, we should think twice before we sacrifice the quality of the data in order to product a simple interface for internal business users.

Of course, complex data and analysis can be explained simply through the type of stories Jon recently posted about. But those explanations take place in a presentation by an analyst who can carefully walk people through the analysis. They’re much more difficult to produce through a self-service tool.
Pingback: SEONITI - Web Analytics – Pick the Right Tools and Talent
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Thanks again to everyone who is commenting and RT’ing and emailing me about this blog post. The response is pretty overwhelming (which is nice!) I’ll try to catch up again on comments …

Bryan: It is my understanding that Webtrends Insights 9 (is that the official name?) is a “work in progress.” I wasn’t at the Engage conference in New Orleans but from what I heard it sounds like they are heading in the right direction. By my clock they’re due another iteration on the product, um, now so hopefully we’ll see percentages, more metrics, etc. soon.

I’ve never tried Visitor Intelligence but a lot of the higher-end apps have a dependence on PC/IE (for example, Omniture Insights only runs on a PC and needs a pretty beefy machine to boot.

Riccardo: Good luck building your own solution. Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics referred to some companies in Silicon Valley doing same (for different reasons) and while I suppose it’s viable I can assure you, you’re in for a wild ride.

Akin: Thanks so much for being the one brave vendor willing to contribute something to this thread. Of course, it was you and John Marshall years ago brave enough to compliment each other’s technology so we do expect a lot from you ;-)

I understand your positioning on the UI and rather suspect your worthy competitors would all say the same. And I haven’t talked to many Netinsight users recently about your UI but will have an opportunity to do so pretty soon so I’ll test my thesis with them as well.

On the “sampled versus full” point, well taken, same for your point on multiple products. I have a long history of basically saying the exact same thing — and I am still somewhat loathe to say “have two completely different sources of data”. With this in mind I too would love to be wrong about this observation/prediction … trust me there.

The problem is John’s research and the finding that 71% of companies have co-deployed paid solutions with GA. Or, I should say, the problem is that with GA in the Enterprise business users are saying “damn the sample bias and differences in the numbers, we want an easier to use solution!”

With this in mind I have proposed what I believe to be the “most reasonable” solution — one where the tools are clearly laid out, as is the rationale behind their use, so that everyone has the “right tool for the job” (as Mr. Lovett has long said.) Not perfect, perhaps, but I see so much “not perfect” in the market today any step in the right direction feels like a big step.

Bifurcation sounds painful, perhaps, but given the number of companies today that are bifurcated, trifurcated, or just plain messed up something clearly need to change.

I’m sure we’ll discuss this again soon.

Kevin: Agree, but on your point about simplicity I think you missed a nuance of what I’m describing. The “hybrid” solution (using Tom’s term from the previous post) is one where business users are asked to use a “simpler” solution — not a simple one. Google Analytics, for what it is and used properly, is far from “simple” and does some really incredible stuff incredibly well.

Motivated business users will get a ton of value out of GA … perhaps not as much as they might have gotten from Unica or Webtrends (or Omniture or Coremetrics or Nedstat or …) but remember we’re talking about the necessity of adding perhaps 5X to 50X the number of business people using these systems. Not everyone will be “motivated” and so the necessity for something more easily learned …

And, and this is a BIG AND, when the business REALLY NEEDS TO KNOW what is going on and the answer is not forthcoming from the business-facing solution, that’s where we go to the ANALYST TEAM who has the big iron deployed. Ideally the analyst team would have your (ForeSee) data integrated into their data, perhaps along with offline customer data, performance data, ad spend information, etc.

Then the analyst can tell the business a story and everyone is happy …

… well, almost everyone.
Mark Coleman

Agree with many here, but particularly Kevin Ertell’s quick comments above.

Think many of the organizations deep into this process realize early on they too were satisfied with the tools first at hand. But as they’ve matured so too have their needs and that feedback hopefully has driven the vendors to new solutions and improving existing ones. It’s this integration of solutions that will be key.

The volume of groups jumping into the Analytics field is growing by orders of magnitude and at rates not seen before – thankfully that too will fuel even more change – free tools like GA have helped tremendously to spur this.

But in many ways seems this period is akin to where early adopters were just even 3,4,5 years ago i.e. the masses entering now will naturally mature too. We need to make sure not to lose focus on continuing to drive for even better solutions due to the clamor for easy simple now based on the sheer volume of new entrants, only to regret going for lowest common denominator later.

Key focus here is not just the tools as so many here have pointed out in many conversations, instead it’s growing the talent pool, knowledge base (i.e. truly understand & not just pull reports) and rigor of this discipline to intern successfully shift the culture with our organizations. Without this we’ll struggle even if all tools are free.

Thanks Eric!
Judah

Hey Eric,

I agree with your thesis. A simple tool, used by the masses, for reporting and exploring data and another tool, used by the classes, with richer functionality for interrogating the data. The hybrid approach. That’s “right on.”

But the stack you suggest makes me want to remove the R and place a K after the C in the third word of your title. GA/OI both essentially lock your data far away from where other business systems can touch them. Sure, there’s a GA API and, yes, you can, sort of, get data out of OI, but how many companies could really automate their marketing or feed their CRM systems or a data warehouse on that stack? Then again, perhaps that’s not a requirement now, but it will be soon.

Another issue I have is cost. GA, free, yeah great. But OI isn’t inexpensive and the more traffic you have, the greater the cost (regardless of any discounting on those DPU’s and FSU’s). If the goal is to “hire more resources” to “tell data stories” with the savings from ending the life of a six-figure legacy tool and replacing it with GA chances are the budget you free up (and then some) will be eaten by the cost of OI. Then, of course, there’s the labor and opportunity costs of retagging the site with GA… The question then becomes, what’s the net business benefit of all this migration or “what’s the profit in today’s dollars of tomorrow’s insights?” Not an easy question to answer. It’s hard. Like web analytics.

Judah
http://digimarketingconvo.blogspot.com/ Pritesh Patel

As a regular GA user, i cannot afford to move away from a free tool until my business sees the importance of web analytics. Here in the U.K. we are still approximately 2 years behind the U.S in adoption of serious web analytics tools and nurturing budding analysts.

One day I would love to use all the tools that are out there and use the one that is MOST appropriate to my requirements. Notice i say MY! As a client side marketer I will use the tool thats going to give me ‘what I need’ irrespective of costs. At the moment GA does everything i need it to do. One day when I am taken seriously in the company i work for I hope to use more advanced tools and more expensive tools obviously.

Until then GA it is.

Oh there other point i wanted to raise is EDUCATION. Why use advanced tools when nobody within the business understands what you are on about? This web analytics bubble we live in in the U.K. is full of self taught, keen, budding marketers and analysts. There is no right or wrong. When we were young nobody taught us how to walk, we got up and walked and its the same with web analytics…learn for yourself, use the tools which you need to use and use it smartly.
http://www.atomiclabs.com Mike Dickey

Hi Eric,

Although I totally agree that using multiple vendors for various levels of sophistication makes good sense, I think there are better ways to go about this than adding more and more page tags code to your web pages.

Not only would this approach multiply the complexity of management, it also makes pages even slower and more bloated than they already are. Page tags also have many basic limitations that make them a poor technology choice when data quality is important. Many companies and researches have found that page tags (regardless of vendor) tend to drop 10-15% of your traffic.

There are better alternatives like Pion available which can capture much better data without page tags, and can easily feed any number of vendors in parallel.
Dennis Kuminski

Eric,

I’m not sure you got my point. You counter me by saying that IF the company has the budget to afford OI and IF they have the talent, then the bifurcation is the way to go.

My point is that those are two huge IFs. In fact those two if conditions make the market size for what you’re proposing about 100 or so companies.

Perhaps that’s your clientele, but I’d venture to say that 99% of the companies interested in web analytics will not fit into this category.

All I’m saying is that what you’re proposing is a niche solution.
http://www.quantivo.com Jason Rushin

Eric,

Your post provoked a few thoughts:
1. Today’s “web analytics” is NOT analytics, it is reporting.
2. The real value in web data is in the deeper insights locked within the data and beyond typical site health reports.

Google Analytics is great for capturing and reporting on web traffic, but the lack of access to the raw data is a huge limitation that forces Javascript add-ons (as you mentioned) to copy the GA data. Webtrends and Omniture can offer deeper/wider/easier data capture, customization, and access, but your overall point is still a good one.

But, regardless of how you capture the server calls – GA, Webtrends, Omniture, OWA – those “web analytics” tools alone do little to help you actually run your business. They only help you understand your website, not your audience and your business. The real value remains hidden in the raw, visitor-level and click-level data.

Aggregated data and summary/dashboard reports are not going to help you impact your business in a big way. It’s the 80/20 rule: typical web analytics tools can answer 80% of your questions, but those only offer 20% of the potential value. The last 20% of questions that standard web analytics CAN’T answer holds 80% – or more – of the value for your business.

Web analytics can’t answer a simple question like, “Who visits my website five or more times per week and always views sports content?” The ability to create those types of simple segmentations – and export the individual user/visitor data to your CMS or marketing system – is where you can really start to drive your revenue, increase marketing ROI, and grow your audience.

Web analysts want to focus on optimizing their business, not their website. To do that, a true analytics solution is required.
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Man oh man I take the weekend and holiday and still there are comments to comment on. Thanks again to everyone who has commented, emailed, and otherwise offered their point of view on this post. I am almost tempted to have a #Tweetup on the topic at Omniture Summit …

Mark: Again I cannot particularly disagree with your or Kevin’s point but it is worth reiterating that I don’t believe that Google Analytics is the “lowest common denominator.” On the contrary, for what it is I think that GA is pretty awesome … as long as you understand the limits of the application.

It’s when we collectively lose sight of what we, and by “we” I mean the entire constituency within the Enterprise trying to leverage web analytics tools, that’s when the trouble starts. And, with the growth you note and that I’m seeing, many people are losing sight.

Judah: Grumpy gus! You didn’t read my repeated admonition that I was using Omniture Insights ** as an example ** nothing more. If you want to substitute your beloved Webtrends (or is it Unica, I forget ;-) for OI then by all means, be my guest. But if you’re gonna try and convince me that with the stack you have today that you have all your bases covered — well, let’s just say I don’t believe you.

The other problems you describe are not unique to GA, OI, or any of the solutions. Didn’t you guys just buy all the traffic from Yahoo?! But you’re complaining about costs for some server licenses from Omniture? Pulllease my friend, tell it to the judge. Complaints about “opportunity costs” associated with retagging?! It’s only a ** cost ** if you’re getting substantial value from your current solution?

Are you? Are you really? ;-)

(Please note that Judah is a very good friend and so I kid him.)

Pritesh: You raise a good point, but at some point either A) your company will “get it” or B) you’ll take a better job at a company where they already “get it” and you’ll be facing the problem I describe. This solution is without a doubt not for everyone (see my responses to Dennis K.) but there are an increasing number of companies for whom the idea is actually pretty reasonable.

Agreed about EDUCATION, which is why we founded The Analysis Exchange. Have you joined?

Mike: It’s not about tagging, but thanks for your comment.

Dennis: Perhaps, but I think you’ve glommed onto OI and not recognized that there are several alternatives. What I’m saying is that WHEN your company has the talent, eventually that talent will A) become frustrated with having to repeatedly explain how to use “system X” over and over and over, hence the nasty moniker “report monkey” and B) become frustrated that they cannot do some seemingly simple things with expensive “system X.”

At this point, rather than go buggy, there is an alternative to deploy this bifurcated solution. You could do it on the cheap with a slick data warehouse and Tableau, you could spend a little more for Unica or Coremetrics Explore or WebTrends VI, you can get crazy and get OI, or you can go “whole hog” and go directly to SAS. Doesn’t matter one lick to me …

Perhaps it is my particular bias stemming from the companies I work with, but I tend to think of my clients as market leaders … which implies that at some point everyone else ends up in the same place. So maybe today it’s a niche solution, but I don’t think it remains that way forever … do you?

Oh, and BTW, if you’re trying to do web analytics right and you DON’T have the talent and aren’t willing to get it … give up and go home. Ain’t gonna happen without smart people, I promise. MY $0.02.

Jason: Great to hear from you … although I’m not sure what you’re saying. Seems like you’re trying to represent Quantivo’s point of view on this, is that correct? If so, I agree, and Quantivo may be a viable alternative to Omniture Insights as described in the original post … also someone pointed out that companies are using Google Analytics and Tealeaf together to do the same thing.

There are lots of ways to get this done, but my point (and I think your point) is that you gotta have the right tools for the job.

BTW, ** my ** web analytics absolutely CAN answer your “Who visits my web site five or more times a week and always views ____ content” although I am lucky to have a bifurcated solution leveraging GA and Omniture Insights ;-)

Thanks everyone for comments!!!
http://www.alightinteractive.com Matt Hertig

Eric –

Thanks for taking the time to share this. Great post and right on in so many respects.

Web analytics faces some real challenges today. Many products are not that easy to use, and in the end are often just glorified tools to track behavioral metrics such as visits and pageviews that can’t be monetized.

This challenged combined with tight budgets and the constant pressure to prove marketing ROI is adding to this analytics challenge.

I agree with you that a hybrid approach makes the most sense. GA does some things simply better and easier than virtually every web analytics tool out there. It does not have some of the sophistication layers that a tool like Omniture does. However, I would make the argument that anyone spending $50k to $500k on analytics could leverage GA in a hybrid model extremely well.

As a company that specializes in Web Analytics and Marketing measurement, we have in fact built our own hybrid analytics tool and data warehouse called Focus Point which utilizes both Tableau and Google Analytics as key components in the architecture as you referred to your post.

The reason our solution works so well as that it provides the hybrid analytics you are talking but goes the next step as we also manage all the tracking and measurement processes for our clients – an often overlooked process critical to measuring performance.

Our approach has become a great alternative for those mid-large companies running from tools difficult and expense to use to a full service measurement solution. Thanks again for your insights as it is great to see that we share similar opinions!
http://cureforcommonmarketing.com/ Joshua Lyall

Another interesting prophecy on the future of web analytics, Eric –

Josh Chasin over at comScore latched onto this today (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=123009) as support for his call that quality content should come at a cost rather than giving it away and depending on the advertising sold to support the endeavor. Though the unemployment office is full of people who’ve questioned the Google business model, I sympathize with his point about people becoming conditioned that the free tool is the obvious choice.

Our company runs into this mindset frequently as we handle the analytics for a number of medium-to-large B2B sites and frequently get pressure from clients to use GA (which nearly everyone in B2B has heard is free and fantastic) – for the most part, we are happy to oblige since their commitment to implementing analytics’ findings is pretty well matched with the “limit” of what GA can provide. For those clients more interested in advanced analytics insights, we recommend using a supplementary tool(s) that will augment GA’s capabilities (your prophecy already coming true). Clients have responded well to the “standard” vs. “premium” options – but I will say, if GA continues making advancements in customizing data and reporting at their current pace, fewer clients will need to upgrade to the “premium” option in coming years.
http://www.omniture.com Alex Hill

Interesting prediction, I really like that you are bold and go out on limbs like this.

I would say that while your assertion is definitely not out of the realm of reason, I also disagree that this major shift is on the horizon.

Two major hurdles GA will never get over:
1) Fox guarding the hen house – Google isn’t just happy to provide free services to make the world a better place. They definitely want data to improve their main $ generator, paid search. Do companies really trust them with their data?

2) How can a free service ever be better than a paid service? The feature gaps you listed in your article are business critical to most of our clients, not just nice-to-haves. It defies logic that they can ever be better than a paid enterprise service.

You do touch on what I feel is a very important point, clients finding value in their investment. The key issues there are, I believe:

1) Lack of people investment on their side. You have to have people dedicated to analytics/optimization, and invest in the training needed for their products.

2) Lack of optimization strategy to begin with. I ask clients every day what their plan to optimize their online business is. Very few have one. Most are very quiet in response as they think about that question. They realize that they don’t have one, and that they should.

Until businesses overcome those two things, no tool will help them.
http://www.tagman.com Paul Cook

Great article and this was exactly the approach we had in mind when we designed TagMan. When were starting the business someone asked me “What’s your Google Strategy” so we set about thinking what else would I need on top of the free stuff to support marketing decisions.
http://www.omniture.com Alex Hill

Also, to be completely open and clear about my comment above, I do work for Omniture. So, I accept my opinion is coming from a certain perspective.
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Alex: Thanks for your comment, and thanks for following up and letting us know you work for Omniture’s consulting services organization. Regarding your questions … I don’t think you necessarily understand what Google’s motivations are, but regardless, recently published data from iPerceptions (owners of WASP) suggest that at least in online retail companies are definitely ready to trust Google:

http://blog.webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/2010/02/who-run-analytics-top-500-retail-web-site-report/

That, combined with the research my partner did just prior to leaving Forrester that found that some 53% of Enterprises were using a free solution and a staggering 71% of Enterprises are using free solutions in some capacity. Given that the undisputed “Kings of Free” is Google, this suggests that the trust in Google transcends the online retail sector:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/10/appraising-your-investment-in.html

On point #2, I think you’re missing the entire point of my thesis. My point is not that companies don’t need you guys, but rather that as the overall base of web analytics users expands your SiteCatayst solution is being described as “too complex” by many of these folks. But yes, they do need powerful analytics, at least the “power users” and analysts do, and I am recommending that they make or maintain an investment in a powerful solution.

As far as “defies logic that they can ever be better than a paid enterprise service” … you apparently have not taken a very close look at the market around you. Do you hear what people are saying about ASI vs. Google’s segmentation? Do you hear what they’re saying about your implementations vs. Google Analytics? Do you hear what they’re saying about your UI vs. GA?

If not, you might want to give a listen. You might not like what you hear.

We are in violent agreement about the need for people and strategy. I don’t say that because what I do is advise clients about people and strategy, I say that because it’s 100% true.

But I wonder if you meant to write “until businesses [invest in people and strategy] no tool will help them.” This is the exact logic that companies are citing when considering dropping SiteCatalyst (and similar for-fee solutions) in favor of Google Analytics … why pay for a solution that they’re not ready to take advantage of?

I mean, I don’t disagree, but it was interesting to hear a representative from Omniture say it out loud.

Anyway, I appreciate you offering your $0.02 on behalf of Omniture and Adobe. While we disagree about the state of things I’ll give you credit for taking a stand.

See you in Salt Lake.
http://jaredhuber.com Jared Huber

Great discussion. Perhaps the most profound piece of the post was in recognizing the flaw in trying to be all things to all people (ie Market segmentation!). Product managers at G and O should take note.

GA, as web analytics tool for the masses, should focus on ease of use and speed at which insights can be reached. Intelligence is a great example of this, but I’d argue several other features move away from this end of the scale (additional custom vars & goals, events), added depth of analysis, but at a cost to ease-of-use.

Omniture, as a web analytics tool for specialists, should then focus on additional functionality (from the sounds of Summit feedback, more eVars), and let GA worry about being easy to use.

I assume, as you have, that ‘ease-of-use’ and ‘depth of functionality’ are somewhat mutually exclusive.

Thoughts?
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http://blogs.omniture.com Kiran Ferrandino (measureTHISgirl)

Eric,

Interesting assessment. You know how much I do respect the thought you put into these pieces. I cannot say I agree wholly with whether that shift will truly occur for large enterprise companies. I am paying attention, however, and I believe most companies that offer a high end solution are.

As for the props you give to Omniture Insights – again – you know that this is a product that I have dedicated a good deal of my career to the past few years. As for the cost associated to it which was raised earlier in this thread – for companies who are committed to resourcing the project appropriately – the ROI can be tremendous.

However, like any other solution, you have to approach it with a plan, a strategy and some level of partnering with the vendor. Pushing years of data into it, building multiple datasets when you may have only been sized for one – those are things that DO have an impact on cost.

The product is amazingly flexible – but the cost issues arise when rather than putting the proper thought, effort and strategy around how you will be using it – you just push everything in and say “Open Sesame.”

And you get frustrated. And then you say, why would I get additional resources for this? I mean, I said “Open Sesame.”

With the right planning and some level of compromise (potential sampling, investing in higher performing hardware upfront to enhance performance) – it can be made into a very cost effective solution for enterprises who want to “free the data” as we like to say here.

Especially if you know what business goals you plan to drive with that data.

Looking at data for curiosity sake is not going to get you ROI.

Sorry to be joining this party late. I feel like everyone left already and the only person left is that really annoying, drunk guy in the corner.

@measureTHISgirl
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