Finally! Standards come to Web Analytics

Last week I had the pleasure of traveling to Columbus, Ohio to participate in Web Analytics Wednesday, hosted by Resource Interactive’s Tim Wilson and generously sponsored by the fine folks at Foresee. We opted for an “open Q&A” format that turned out pretty well. Turns out the web analysts in Ohio are a pretty sharp bunch so all of the questions I fielded were of the “hardball” type.

One question in particular surprised me, and the answer I gave forced me to elucidate a point I have been pondering for some time but have never voiced in public. The question came from Elizabeth Smalls (@smallsmeasures, go follow her now) who asked, and I paraphrase, “How can we best explain the differences in the numbers we see between systems?” and ”Is there any chance the web analytics industry will ever have ‘standards’?”

Long-time readers know I have followed the Web Analytics Associations’s efforts to establish standards closely over the years, helping to create awareness about the work and also pushing the Association to “put teeth” behind their definitions and encourage vendors to either move towards the “standard” definitions or, at worst, elucidate where they are compliant and where they differ from the WAA’s work.

Sadly the WAA’s “standards” never really caught on as a set of baseline definitions against which all systems could be compared to help explain some of the differences in the data. As a result practitioners around the globe still struggle when it comes time to explain these differences, especially when moving from one paid vendor to another. But none of this matters anymore for one simple reason …

Google Analytics has become the de facto standard for web analytics.

Google has become the standard for web analytics by sheer force of might, persistence, and dedication. By every measure, Google Analytics is the world’s most popular and widely deployed web analytics solution. Hell, in our Analysis Exchange efforts we focus exclusively on the use of Google Analytics because A) we know that 99 times out of 100 we will find it already deployed and B) nearly all of our mentors have had enough exposure to Google Analytics to effectively teach it to our students.

What’s more, as Forrester’s Joe Stanhope opined the recently published Forrester Wave for Web Analytics, web analytics as we knew it doesn’t really exist anymore:

“Few web analytics vendors restrict their remit to pure on-site analytics. Most vendor road maps incorporate emerging media such as social and mobile channels, data agnostic integration and analysis features, usability for a broad array of analytics stakeholders, and scalability to handle the rising influx of data and activity.”

Joe says “few” vendors remained focused on on-site analytics, but it would be more precise to say “one” vendor — Google — has maintained interest in how site operators measure their efforts with any level of exclusivity and sincerity. In fact, I don’t think we need to call the industry “web analytics” anymore … it is probably more accurate to say we have “Google Analytics” and “Everything Else.”

Everything else is enterprise marketing platforms. Everything else is integrated online marketing suites. Everything else … is all of the stuff that has been layered on top of solutions we have historically considered “web analytics” as a response to an event that can only be accurately described as the single most important acquisition in our sector, period.

Google Analytics is the de facto standard for web analytics, and this is great news.

Assuming you take care with your Google Analytics implementation, whenever there is a question about the data you will have a fairly consistent[1] view for comparison. Switching from one vendor to another? Use Google Analytics to help explain the differences between the two systems! Worried that your paid vendor implementation is missing data? Compare it to Google Analytics to ensure that you have complete page coverage! Not sure if a vendor’s recent change in their use of cookies impacted their data accuracy? Yes, you guessed it, compare it to Google Analytics!

With Google Analytics you have a totally free standard against which all other data can be reconciled.

Now keep in mind, I am absolutely not saying that all you need is Google Analytics — nothing could be further from the truth. Despite a nice series of updates and the emergence of a paid solution that may be appropriate for some companies, I agree with Stanhope when he says that “Google Analytics Premium still lags enterprise competitors in several areas such as data integration, administration, and data processing …”

But that’s a debate for the lobby bar, not this blog post.

If you’re looking for a set of rules that can be universally applied when it comes to the most basic and fundamental definitions for the measures, metrics, and dimensions that our industry is built upon, you don’t have to look anymore. Google has solved that problem for the rest of us, and we should thank them. Now, thanks to Google, we can focus on some of the real problems facing our industry … which again, is a debate best left to the lobby bar.

What do you think? Are you running Google Analytics on your site? Do you use it when you see anomalies in data collected through other systems? Have you used it to validate a move from one paid vendor to another? Or do you believe that the WAA standards already provide the solution I am ascribing to Google?

As always I welcome your opinions and feedback.

[1] Yes, when Google changed the definition of a “session” that impacted their consistency, but once they corrected the bug they introduced it seems the number of complaints has gone down significantly. What’s more, the change made sense and in general we should be in favor of “improving on standards whenever possible” don’t you think?

Posted Tuesday, October 11th, 2011 | 30 responses | Share, Save or Email

Ben Gaines

This is an interesting/compelling thought, Eric. Thanks for writing it up. I suspect you’ll get some good discussion!

I can’t say that I’ve used Google Analytics to resolve a data discrepancy between systems, but as I think about it (especially based on my time researching and working in the implementation auditing space), I think it’s important to reiterate — you mentioned this, but it’s worth repeating because it’s a HUGE caveat — that whatever system you’re going to use as a basis for comparison must must MUST be complete and up-to-date. In my experience this is easier said than done, especially if you’re talking about implementing and maintaining multiple systems. (This is easier when tag management comes into play, but even in that case, oversight is possible.)

Depending on the size of the site and the number of cooks in the kitchen (and on a few other factors, too), I might be just as skeptical of a Google Analytics implementation as I might be of an Omniture implementation or a Yahoo! implementation or an IBM implementation (or any other vendor, for that matter). That’s not a knock on Google (or any of the other vendors); it’s simply a reality for many companies that fail to implement completely/accurately and maintain that implementation integrity. Just because GA is very easy to slap on your site doesn’t mean (a) it’s going to stay there in working order and (b) it’s going to be implemented on every new page, every new template, every new mobile app, every new video, etc.

So my recommendation is: if this really matters to you (e.g., you know you’re about to be switching vendors), first get an audit of your implementation(s) using one of the auditing solutions out there so you can say with certainty that GA (or other vendor) is going to be the tool of record because it’s a complete data set.
http://www.atlantaanalytics.com Evan LaPointe

Great perspective on this, Eric.

So, I hate to comment on one of the secondary points of the post, but interested to hear your perspective on this, based on the Forrester evaluation:

The one thing I would urge people to really think about is the tools touting “data integration.” I think we should be holding our tools up to higher standards when it comes to this.

While it is true that many enterprise platforms do allow data import, what I don’t see is a quality join of that data, nor do I see suitable interfaces for analyzing this data. In many cases, the data you import into tools is married to a time dimension (day, hour, something like that), and almost nothing else. This does allow you to overlay trends of activity in your email or display campaigns against trends in your visitor, visit, pageview, and event volume, but it doesn’t allow you to understand any of the influencers at the level we expect in a web analytics platform, or that we could dive into in a more suitable platform. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be thankful for what we have (and it is a step in the right direction), but calling this “integration” is like me calling my bike a rocket bike if I attach bottle rockets to the handlebars.

Since the infrastructure of all analytics platforms are based on the hierarchy of event > pageview > session > visitor, and little data that you import into these systems can join against any of these things, how can we call this “data integration?” If I can’t see the keywords and session (paths, pages viewed, events incremented, etc.) that drove activity in my call center, can we say that data is “integrated?”

And even if that data is capable of being joined to something more precise that would provide analytical (not just reporting) value, what interfaces do these platforms offer for analysis appropriate to these data? Nearly all web analytics platforms are built rigidly around the set of web dimensions and metrics they are designed to gather, and at best, additional data can be brought in as an additional column in a report summarizing site or campaign dimensions. The interfaces just aren’t well suited to dive deeper into the call, email, display, social, offline, etc. data you may be bringing to bear.

The answer to this doesn’t lie in the analytics tools as they are right now, in my opinion. It lies in the many awesome BI and data visualization tools that are available. The issue, of course, is the lack of quality data export and API options (APIs that simply replicate the interface’s reports in XML/JSON/etc. are not enough; you need full access to the data and data processing systems to get whatever you want, whenever you want it). Because all of the web analytics tools are trying to bring data IN, they have fallen behind in the quality of their options for getting data OUT. And I think this is a mistake on our part, particularly at the enterprise level: we are inflating our switching costs by sinking our businesses deeper into a particular platform that is ill suited to the task of data integration. When we house data in our own databases or 3rd party BI tools, the sources of that data can be more nimble and changeable, which is a very smart move in today’s web analytics climate where many legitimate competitors can offer businesses superior tools, but ultimately are not chosen because of switching costs.

Sorry for switching topics, but I’ve seen this brought up a few times and I’m interested to hear others’ perspectives and experience with this.
http://www.gilliganondata.com Tim Wilson

Interesting thoughts, Eric. While GA is continuing to push hard to improve their on-site analytics capabilities (and have long since surpassed some of the paid solutions in some aspects — but Stanhope effectively called out where they continue to fall short), they are remaining pretty site-centric.

As the paid vendors are realizing that they can only stand in the ring and slug it out Rocky-style for so long with their direct competitors, they’re looking to broaden the scope of where they play. For now, those all seem to be pretty ambitious aims that have not yet come to fruition beyond the marketing hype (I have trouble reconciling the Wave’s placement of IBM with what I see day-in and day-out in the analytics community and with our clients).

GA, on the other hand, is focused more on “getting everyone online.” If Forrester’s stat that 84% of business are running web analytics is correct, then GA is looking to dominate the capture of that remaining 16%, including helping those businesses create web sites if that’s the reason they’re not using web analytics (once they have a site and site analytics…they’ll be ripe prospects to become Adwords customers). Because of their model, they’ve got the luxury, for now, to stay fairly site-focused. And, in my experience, they’re pretty good stewards when it comes to behaving responsibly when it comes to their product roadmap and their maintenance of their own “standards.”

I’m hoping that this post will generate some dissenters, as I’m starting to feel like a bit of a GA homer based on how logically constructed your case seems to be. Where’s the fun in that?

Oh…and it’s no surprise to me that the web analysts in Ohio are a sharp bunch. But, my thanks on behalf of the #cbuswaw crowd for the acknowledgment! :-)
April D. Moore

@ Evan LaPointe, I’m in total agreement with you on the shortcomings of data integration in current web analytics solutions. There is a whole lot of “smoke and mirrors” but not a lot of substance. Great comments.
http://www.waomarketing.com/analytics-notes/ Jacques Warren

Hi Eric,

Again, a very provocative post (as we like’em!). If I read you correctly, you say that GA can be the platform against which results from other solutions can be verified? If so, it’s hard for me to agree; this would imply that GA is the *correct* one.

Le me give you a trivial example: Webtrends will still count a visitor who doesn’t accept cookies, whereas GA won’t. So, if you compared visits numbers found in WT with those in GA, the latter one would be under-reporting. Saying then that WT is reporting too many visits (although I have never seen a manager be pissed at the solution with the bigger numbers!)would not be accurate.

Anyway, am I getting your thoughts right?
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Ben: Thanks for the note and absolutely I agree, the quality of the implementation definitely impacts the utility of the data. Always.

That said, at a higher-level, if you agree with my thesis, even if you don’t have 100% perfect data, you still have clear definitions for what each of these critical terms means — page views, visits, visitors, etc. That too has been lacking for so many years and never manifest through any kind of consensus-driven approach. Google just came in and trumped the process …

Evan: Great comment, but likely a conversation for another day. I don’t disagree with you, BTW, but I think there are a number of ways to skin this cat and time will tell which is best (or whether there really is a “best” way.)

Tim: Agree, agree, and agree. I too am hoping someone will disagree with my thesis. Sometimes people are shy about that — not sure why — but I posted my thoughts in hopes of generating a dialog (not just because I knew if I didn’t you’d take my idea and run with it … ;-)
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http://www.michelehinojosa.com Michele Hinojosa

I think I am being overly semantic here, but I would argue that, because of its widespread use, Google Analytics may be becoming the “default” – not the standard.

Perhaps this is because of my thinking about standards. I am considering standards to be more of the “agreed upon best definitions.” Google’s are prevalent, but I don’t know that that makes them “right” or the best to uphold as “standards.”

For example, just because Google changes the definition of a visit, does that mean it’s the right standard to set? Not necessarily. Maybe we’ll conclude that it is, but just because Google decides it, doesn’t mean it automatically resets the standard.

By default, I’m thinking of it as the thing that people may translate from. (In the, “Okay Google Analytics does this, what does Solution X do and how does that translate? Alright, now I understand” kind of way.)

I do agree though that it’s helpful to have when checking for inconsistencies from system to system, though to Ben’s point, it too (obviously) needs to be implemented properly. I just wouldn’t go as far as standards.
http://www.whencanistop.com Alec Cochrane

As much as Google Analytics appears to be the de facto use for all standards in the industry it does frustrate me hugely that they aren’t consistent within their own tool.

If we’re going to use unique page views and visits as two different metrics we need to be able to explain why one is used in one place and the other is used in another. We also need to make sure that referring domains are allocated consistently across various different campaigns and non-campaigns, which isn’t happening so far.

In terms of how they define their standard metrics, I think they’re pretty average – they frequently don’t quite mean what the users of the tools outside the analytics world think that they should mean. Landing pages for example, are the pages that Marketers specifically create for campaigns so that users can land on them. Unique page views sound an awful lot like visitors to the uninformed. % Exit sounds suspiciously like exits divided by visits, not page views.

Reconciliation of similarly tagged sites is near on impossible because of the hidden filtering that is done in the background that most tools (including Google Analytics) won’t tell you about. Totals might be similar, but they’ll never be the same. I can’t believe the countless hours I’ve wasted trying to explain why different tools are producing different results on the same website.

Of course I use Google Analytics all the time, so I can’t complain too much, but then I (like to think) know what I’m doing.
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Michele: Great to hear from you and thanks for sharing your opinion. No doubt that Google Analytics has achieved some type of “default” status by virtue of their breadth of deployment, but my thesis is that because of this default status, and lacking a set of widely accepted “standard definitions” that we don’t lose anything by treating Google as the standard.

Don’t get me wrong, if the WAA definitions had more widespread adoption I would never have published this post — I wouldn’t have needed to. But when Elizabeth asked me the question, the very next think I asked was for a show of hands: “Who is in the WAA?” and “Who is aware of the WAA’s standards efforts?”

Sadly, no more than five hands went up … in a room of nearly 80 people.

Without critical mass you cannot gain widespread acceptance of a standard. Google has the former, and again I’m not sure there is any particular harm to assign them the latter.

In fact, to Alex’s point, it might be a good idea to say “Google, you are the shepherd of the standard” as it will/should encourage them to be more thoughtful about this position. I’m not saying they are not — but this is just my opinion — but Nokia’s Symbian OS ** used to be ** the same kind of de facto standard for mobile phones. They took their eye off the ball and look what happened.

I’m not sure the same fate could befall Google in our ultra-micro-niche of an industry, but stranger things have happened. I mean, I used to work at Webtrends back in the ’90s and at that time Webtrends was the de facto standard …

Anyway, awesome of you to share your thought!

Alex: Great points all! I suspect that there are perfectly good reasons for all of the challenges you cite — in fact, I know there are. But again, if Google Analytics were to rise to this challenge and become a steward for standards in what we nominally call “web analytics” perhaps they would also be willing to either A) clarify some of their decisions or B) consider becoming more standardized in their own user interface.

I’m not sure about that, since historically none of the vendors gave much thought to changing their core technology based on this conversation, but again stranger things have happened and it is pretty clear that Phil Mui and the Google Analytics team are taking things in a new direction.

Anyway, great commentary, thanks!
pascal

GA is very good of course, but I think it would be nice if you spent a bit of time evaluating the open source alternatives out there, in particular Piwik. Piwik is used by 150k users worldwide and seems to be extremely popular. This has the potential to FREE web analytics data worldwide, instead of having Google tracking every one of your moves over more than 50% of websites worlwide!!! (yes scary).

Maybe you could post about the risks of web analytics monopoly and consider the open source alternatives :)
http://www.blackbeak.com Steve Jackson

I think the new Premier version of GA will prove to be another huge milestone in the web analytics space. Unfortunately I can’t say anything about why until it filters out as public information as Kwantic are part of the GACP program.

But from an independent agency perspective I’m impressed.
Bryan Cristina

When you brought it up I didn’t disagree and I still don’t. Whether it’s a standard like you say or more the default like Michele says, it definitely is the most widely used and that’s what more people will know.

But more importantly it’s probably what most people these days have started with. My first tool was NOT GA, since it didn’t exist. I also didn’t deal with any sites that had Urchin. I used, barely (since I didn’t think it was that great) SurfAid before moving onto Webtrends.. and I tend to think in terms of WT’s measurements. Most people will start with GA and think of things in that way, and in that sense it will be their standard.

So it’s not really a matter of agreeing or disagreeing as to what the standard is but rather acknowledging that more people will have started with GA than not, and therefore it will be the standard in their eyes as to what some of these terms mean and methods to calculate them.

The danger with GA, of course, is changing those “standards” without much discussion (Average time on site 4 years ago and Visits very recently).
Brownie

My experiences (they don’t mean anything in and of themselves, but perhaps others can indicate whether they resonate with them?):

When a site has GA and a paid solution, I’ve tended to find the following is true:

1 – The GA implementaiton is less robust/complete than the paid tool equivalent. It’s the ‘skin in the game’ phenomenon at play. It’s free, so somehow it doesn’t merit the same attention; I don’t mean in terms of data consumption, but in terms of the more difficult business of iteratively confirming and validating the integrity of your implementaiton. The result is that data from the paid solution is *usually* more accurate.

2 – As a result of 1 above, I have more direct experience of paid solutions identifying issues/erros with GA implementations than I have the other way around. By a long way.

3 – The GA implementation often piggy-backs the paid solution implementation. In these cases, 1 above is no longer true, but instead GA’s effectiveness as a barometer of paid solution data integrity, including its role as an independent checkpoint comparing deltas between usurped and replacement paid solutions, is consequently compromised.

Tag management will help address the conerns above, but I think it will always be the case that the free solution – however highly-regarded – will never attract the same degree of scrutiny as the paid solutions for the reasons given previously, meaning there is, on balance, more reason to question the free solution data. This is why, again in my experience, the GA figures – whilst very useful – are not those shoved upstairs to the execs and consequently not the numbers used to drive online change. It’s difficult, therefore, to envision a future where the seconday/support figures assume ‘standard’ status.

Of course, where GA is the only deployed tool, none of the above applies. What does the GA market share look like when it is deployed in isolation versus deployment alongside another, paid for solution?

Lastly:

Sadly, no more than five hands went up … in a room of nearly 80 people.

If you’d asked:

“How many people know how, precisely, GA defines a visit?”

…how many hands do you think would have gone up? And of course, this applies as much to the other vendor tools as it does GA, but I think this highlights the fact that the issue is, as much as anything, a lack of transparency from all providers.
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Jacques: Sorry to have lost your comment but great to hear from you! On your point about “GA being *correct*” … I’m not saying that at all, and honestly, I’m not sure any of these solutions are correct or not correct. Outside of a carefully controlled environment how could we possible know that?

What I am saying is that GA potentially provides a very wide range of companies the ability to make the exact calculation you describe. Play your example out against Elizabeth’s original question: If Webtrends counts a cookie-less visitor but GA does not, and then the company moves to Omniture, then the cookie-free definition of a visitor is the standard or baseline against which Omniture and Webtrends can be compared.

Again, neither is particularly right, but given the breadth of deployment and awareness that Google Analytics currently enjoys, this simple baseline has the potential to make the analysts job only that much easier. What’s more, practically speaking, companies are doing this all the time — but I’m not sure they’ve thought about it in this context.

Have you?

On the point about a manager not being mad about bigger numbers … well, that’s a lobby bar conversation ;-)

Pascal: Thanks for your input. I wasn’t actually evaluating solutions or considering open source or anything like that. I was making a point about a solution that is rumored to be deployed on MILLIONS of sites an likely BILLIONS of web pages and postulating about how this breadth of deployment could be used to our collective advantage.

Also, I’m not afraid of Google and how they use our data. There are much, much scarier things on the Internet than Google and that whole thesis has become somewhat tiring.

Steve: Great to hear from you. Congrats on being GACP!

Bryan: Excellent point. Of course I didn’t start on Google Analytics either — in fact, I started on Webtrends, which itself was somewhat of a standard back in the very early days. Times change, and that was my point to Michele — just because you are the big dog doesn’t mean you’ll stay the big dog.

Woof.

On Google changing their definitions, yeah, that’s a good point. Although one change four years ago and one change this year is a pretty good track record given the pace of change on the Internet. But agree, they could have been more transparent, etc.

Still, Google is not saying “we are the standard” … * I * am proposing that they have become the standard. Google technically doesn’t have any obligation to any user, perhaps save the Premium customers who I expect will get (or expect) a little more notification about those types of changes, don’t ya think?

Brownie: Agree fully about your points, but it raises a tangential point: Why they heck do companies * partially * deploy Google Analytics (or any solution for that matter?) Ben Gaines and others have made this point, and perhaps I treated it as obvious, but the quality and utility of any web analytics (nee Google Analytics) solution is a function of the quality of the overall deployment.

Now, having GA and a paid solution co-deployed create a completely different set of challenges within the Enterprise, more than are worth rehashing in this comment, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Again, it’s a question of focus and commitment, at least in my experience.

Finally, you make a good point about people not having the WAA * or * the GA definition of a visit in their back pocket. Except for this: * EVERYONE * has free and unfettered access to the GA definition, and everyone can take advantage of that knowledge. The WAA membership when I last checked numbered around 1,700 — a far cry from “everyone” — and so my case about Google Analytics potential is essentially confirmed.

Thanks for writing!
Chris Moon

I think this question is very important to debate and many of the points that have already been made are very relevant. The one thing I would add or argue is that GA are not thought leaders in this industry. And using them as the standard I think is dangerous.

The question centers on Google Analytics being the world’s most popular and widely deployed web analytics solution. But why is it the worlds most popular solution. Because it is the most accurate? Because it has the best customer service? The best business solutions, the best engineers, innovation or userability? The best solution to make business decisions on? No, It is widely used because its free.

I am agnostic when it comes to analytics solutions, and I have used all major solutions including GA (which I am using a lot at the moment as I am working for an agency, so working with clients solutions), and I cant see why as an industry we would allow GA to dictate the standards. The brains of analytics innovation in Webtrends etc, and the enterprise users who push the vendors, who really know their analytics, should be the ones setting the standards. Volume doesnt always mean best.

In an industry that is moving so fast, where too many people are claiming to be experts and giving bad measurements and KPIs (another discussion) I think there needs to be some strong voices/market leaders/collective decisions from those who are using the solutions to there potential to educate the users less advanced.

On another quick note. I once removed GA from a clients site. They were using it to compare accuracy to a paid solution. However, rather then having it as reassurance, it was actually causing mistrust in both solutions, as different departments were using different solutions to make business decisions, arguing over who was right. In the end I took out GA, put my whole trust and faith in Webtrends and educated the clients to do so too. In the end analytics became the centre of all business decisions for the client. It was an extreme move for an extreme solution but it worked out great. But it was because those who had knowledge built confidence to those who did not have so much.
Brownie

“Now, having GA and a paid solution co-deployed create a completely different set of challenges within the Enterprise, more than are worth rehashing in this comment, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Again, it’s a question of focus and commitment, at least in my experience.”

Agreed. But the fact remains – at least based on my experience – that most enterprises do follow the dual-deployment strategy (the excellent WebDem vendor tool would seem to confirm this for all the obvious tier 1 sites that I checked). This is the belt and braces approach and given the belt (or braces) is free, why wouldn’t you do this? But in the fight to ensure implementation integrity, the free solution is always going to play second-fiddle. No-one gets sacked for deploying GA, but if your SiteCat implementation implodes and there’s no return for your multi-thousand dollar investment, it’s probably time to start looking for another job. Which is why the paid solution will always get the greater share of attention.

Now, GAP may be a game-changer in this regard. I think the enterprise has historically eschewed sole reliance on ‘free’ for the same reason that we don’t book the cheapest electrician to rewire our houses. I certainly see potential for GAP at the enterprise level and I’d argue it needs to establish itself as the dominant player in this sector (and not merely play a supporting actor role as GA does currently) if it is to emerge as the genuine default/standard. I certainly think Google has a decent shot at this and much will depend on how/whether they step up to plate in terms of refining a compete strategy can no longer rely on the rather compeeling USP that it is free. I guess time will tell.
Brownie

Please excuse typos. That last line is supposed to read:

I certainly think Google has a decent shot at this and much will depend on how/whether they step up to the plate in terms of refining a compete strategy that can no longer rely on the rather compelling USP that it is ‘free’. I guess time will tell.
Kelly McClean

I’d be be cautious at assigning a single vendor de facto status for all the reasons outlined above – sloppy implementation, user understanding, and vendors changing definitions because it suits their needs.

This debate needs to turn its attention back to the WAA. It’s a damning indictment that after 8 years the organisation has failed to bring vendors and practioners together to agree definitions. Possibly the problem lies in the fact that membership is only 1,700. How many of us turn up to eMetrics, WAW or other grass roots events across the globe?

Maybe it’s time to bypass vendors and the WAA alike and go where the eyeballs are. Standards could be debated by those that use them before suggestions are put forward for formal adoption. Possible the WAA could redeem itself by being a conduit and publisher of such an approach, you might get more than five hands next time you ask ‘Who is in the WAA?’

P.S. Eric, you could always just expand your Big Book of KPIs to include definitions, or have you been waiting for one of us to suggest that…
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http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Chris: You make great points, but I fear you have taken my thesis too far. I am not suggesting that anyone would “allow GA to dictate the standards” (your words) by any means, far from it. I am merely pointing out that A) we have collectively long proclaimed that “standards were needed”, B) yet none have emerged in any useful and practical sense, but C) Google Analytics is so widely deployed it has become a de facto standard and thusly can be used as such if one chooses.

Hell, I’m thinking more and more that this is not a responsibility that Google actually wants, but when life hands you lemons you make lemonade, right?

Now, on your thesis that Google are not thought leaders when it comes to web analytics … this is one of those topics for the lobby bar. Some people I know believe that they are, without a doubt, the thought leaders in the sector — hell, they have figured out how to provide a pretty good solution to the entire world for free. That’s something that nobody else has really figured out. Other people are very much anti-Google (or, probably more accurately, pro-[INSERT YOUR VENDOR HERE]) and so the “thought leader” designation doesn’t resonate.

Me? I don’t think it matters.

What matters is that Google Analytics has the market awareness and breadth of deployment that would allow companies to use the solution as I have suggested. Nothing more, nothing less.

Kelly: I think you might be confusing the tool and the use of the tool — none of the vendors, Google included, encourage sloppy implementation, poor user understanding, or random changes in definitions, at least not to the best of my knowledge. Also, I’m not assigning them de facto status for any reason other than … they have it. Google Analytics is in so many places there is little or no work to be done for companies to take advantage of this recommendation — aside from doing what they should have done all along, give reasonable thought to their implementations, etc.

On the WAA: Fair enough. There is a membership meeting next week, perhaps this topic will come up.

On my KPI book: I would never pre-suppose to set the standards we should all follow. My books are but a position, not the final word. Plus, I am not likely to have time to update the KPI book anytime in this lifetime so it’s a non-starter anyway … ;-)

Thanks to you all for your comments!
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Jason Thompson from our partner Keystone Solutions wrote a blog post in response to this post and I would encourage you all to go have a look:

http://emptymind.org/standards-belong-to-the-community/

Jason’s thesis is that “standards belong to the community” and that we collectively should set standards for web analytics, not the vendors, and specifically not because one vendor based on their breadth of deployment. He states that “[The thing that] makes standards so valuable and meaningful, is that they are universally accepted amongst all users and vendors.”

I don’t disagree, except on two points:

1) We, collectively, have trouble making decisions. There are a lot of reasons for this — personal interests, personalities, lack of understanding, etc. — but at the end of the day I’m not convinced that standards will come from a consensus-based approach. I’m just not.

2) I’m not proposing that using Google Analytics as a de facto standard is “valuable” or “meaningful” … I’m proposing that it is practical. Back to point #1, if collectively we cannot decide, are we not better off having a reasonably good and practically applied alternative, or should we just have nothing?

It seems perhaps that some readers have taken my post to an illogical extreme. I am not telling anyone to do anything, to change any behavior, or to adopt any technology that makes them uncomfortable, unhappy, or uncool.

All I pointed out is that there is a technology that I believe is pretty well thought out that is, oh, by the way, deployed in every nook, cranny, and corner of the Internet that, if properly managed, has the potential to solve a problem that we have had in web analytics since the first company changed vendors.

Thanks to Jason for taking the time to share his thoughts.
Brownie

Some people I know believe that they are, without a doubt, the thought leaders in the sector — hell, they have figured out how to provide a pretty good solution to the entire world for free.

Even if it were true that Google “figured out” how to provide GA for free – rather than just did it because they could, using the same logic that underpins the decision of the biggest supermarkets to sell bread and other staples at a loss – I’m not sure how this makes them “thought-leaders”?

When I consider the term “thought-leader” in just about any context, I’m imagining a person or company that has forced me to think in a different way about the subject-matter that this person/company specialises in. Considering it is free, GA has no right to be anything like as good as it is, but I’m struggling to think of examples where it could be accurately described as having pushed the envelope.

Generally speaking, one thing a thought-leader doesn’t do – purely by dint of being a thought-leader – is provide his/her/their services for free. Which is why we have to pay Jim Stern to speak and part with cold hard cash to acquire one of buy Eric Peterson’s books. :-)
http://www.chinaweboptimization.com Michael Lee

Hi Eric,

Many of the Google services does not work consistently in China due to Google’s conflict with the Chinese government. China has more Internet users than the population of the United States. And who knows when Google will have conflicts with other regions in the world that has different a political culture. So it is much more than just a tool, or data quality.
Max

You don’t call something standard when it change the definition of a basic metric to different than everyone else, and probably for the reason of attributing more traffic to AdWord. In fact, I keep telling people lately to treat whatever tool you are using as a benchmark, and use GA’s data as a ‘nice to have’.
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Louis Slade

I use Google Analytics on my personal website and I’ve found that having it installed is extremely useful. Although there are a couple tools out there that allow you to go deeper into research, Google Analytics, I would have to agree, is the standard tool, and should be installed on all business websites.
SleeplessSF

GA’s visit definition update caused massive complains. http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/08/update-to-sessions-in-google-analytics.html

Because it is free, Google can change anything without considering your business impact. I won’t agree to use GA as standard.