I noticed that I hadn’t wrote anything on Analytics for some time, so I decided to take a Darwinistic approach to this post and give you some ideas of how I think this very important sector will develop in the future.
The Early Days,….(the Volume Phase)
If we think back, web analytics is quite a new industry, but has recently become a billion dollar industry (See what Eric says at Web Analytics Demystified), but it all started back in mid 90’s with the infamous web counter, showing your visitors how popular your site was. Soon after commercial companies, namely Webtrends got into the act and started to parse web server logs and sort data into pretty looking charts and tables. I was working as a Customer Operations Manager for a large Web hosting provider at the time and we had countless calls from customers complaining about the quality and reliability of the Webtrends reports.
Adolescence….(the Aggregation Phase)
As businesses started to understand more about their users and the online traffic, they searched for new metrics, new ways to measure, new ways to aggregate and collect data. Web logs were joined by web beacons, packet sniffing and the very popular javascript tagging. New players entered the market, Coremetrics, WebSideStory, Visual Sciences, HBX and Omniture with shiny new apps to help businesses better understand their online traffic. (Funny thing here is that HBX and WebSideStory merged who were then bought by Visual Sciences, who only just recently got bought by Omniture, something of a little fish, big fish thing going on here). Then in comes Google and most recently Microsoft with their free analytics tools. This whilst making the price of analytics affordable to the general public, also helped raise awareness that businesses needed to take analytics seriously. Companies began to invest part of their budget into understanding how better to spend that valuable marketing money and gain better Returns on their investments. Aggregation of mass quantities of data helped this, but it also flooded the industry with literally hundreds of traceable variables. It was time to start making sense of all these metrics.
Maturity….maybe?(the Intent Phase)
As analytics grows in statue and new technologies establish good cause for their share of the corporate budget, it’s the intellectual understanding that will bring home the proverbial bacon in terms of competitive advantage. As the rules of economics align the differences in technologies and the number of competitors in the market fluctuate, it is the Intelligence Quotient of those utilizing the tools that will add the value and help corporations and individuals alike understanding the motives and intent behind the ‘Why?‘ a consumer/customer/browser acts the way they do on our precious websites.
It’s an exciting time for those passionate about online business and human behavior as we now have the tools and the reasons to better understand, what in the world is going on out there?