Is Web Analytics Easy? Hard? How about…Mandatory?

You’ve prob­a­bly already heard the news about Yahoo acquir­ing Index­Tools, a small Euro­pean web ana­lyt­ics com­pany.  We think it’s great and wel­come back Yahoo, an impor­tant part­ner of ours, to the world of web ana­lyt­ics again. There has been some recent debate about how easy or hard Web ana­lyt­ics is to do well, and to me, the answer is that it’s easy for many, and hard for many, depend­ing on your expe­ri­ence, your objec­tives, your tech­nol­ogy, your net­work of folks to lean on, and other fac­tors.  But what we should all be excited about is that this acqui­si­tion is fur­ther evi­dence and a timely reminder, that web ana­lyt­ics is indeed, manda­tory for all.Between 2000 and 2004, back when this was a fledg­ling lit­tle indus­try, I was out on the road hit­ting every major city, and a few minor ones, deliv­er­ing 3 hour sem­i­nars on the busi­ness and mar­ket­ing value of web ana­lyt­ics. The room was usu­ally packed with IT types, and sparsely pop­u­lated with mar­keters.  My fel­low mar­keters just didn’t get it yet, and the IT Types just wanted it to be less of a has­sle for them.  On one tour, I started brashly stat­ing that every­one doing busi­ness on the Web will be using web ana­lyt­ics within 5 years. I was hop­ing to instill a bit more urgency within their orga­ni­za­tions to start some conversations.

Well, it’s been less than 5 years, and It’s sat­is­fy­ing to see that this pre­dic­tion has come true.  No one doing dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing or any form of dig­i­tal busi­ness can sur­vive with­out it. A web site with­out ana­lyt­ics is sim­ply a hobby.  So does this acqui­si­tion turn the world of ana­lyt­ics upside down? Hardly.   Is it a good move for the indus­try?  Sure it is. Yahoo is a great media com­pany, and as such, they want to sell more adver­tis­ing.  They are fever­ishly devel­op­ing their new behav­ioral tar­get­ing net­work to sell more adver­tis­ing. This move will help them sell more adver­tis­ing, and so it’s a smart move.

Not widely known is the fact that a few years ago, Omni­ture actu­ally acquired Yahoo’s enter­prise ana­lyt­ics cus­tomers that it had inher­ited from its pur­chase of Over­ture, who had ear­lier acquired Keylime, another early provider in this space.  Yahoo’s motive with this acqui­si­tion is clearly to pro­vide a ser­vice to their thou­sands of small busi­ness cus­tomers.  These cus­tomers would have oth­er­wise migrated to Google for their ‘free’ ana­lyt­ics solu­tion.  Mid-sized and enter­prise cus­tomers, on the other hand, demand advanced prod­ucts, spe­cial­ized busi­ness ser­vices and deep domain exper­tise to help them opti­mize their online busi­ness.  Yahoo wants to be the best adver­tis­ing plat­form it can be, and with that, we know our cus­tomers will want to do busi­ness with both of us.

Our joint cus­tomers will buy adver­tis­ing with Yahoo, among oth­ers, and opti­mize that spend as well as all other aspects of their dig­i­tal efforts with Omni­ture.  What this will do for Yahoo is to give more small busi­nesses access to web ana­lyt­ics, so they can see how well their online ad spend­ing is work­ing and buy even more.  All of this is good for the gen­eral matu­rity of the Web as a seri­ous chan­nel for busi­ness, and the most account­able medium for marketing.Web ana­lyt­ics is cer­tainly foun­da­tional, but where it gets really excit­ing is when the ana­lyt­ics become the fuel for a much broader plat­form that not only mea­sures, but also opti­mizes and auto­mates decision-making across all online mar­ket­ing channels.

The news deliv­ered by ana­lyt­ics may be good or bad depend­ing on the mar­ket­ing chan­nel, depend­ing on the offer, depend­ing on the time of day, depend­ing on the audi­ence, you get the idea.  Yes, any form of mea­sure­ment is bet­ter than none and for that we applaud this move and wel­come Yahoo! back to the world of web ana­lyt­ics.  And, for the data dri­ven orga­ni­za­tions that need inde­pen­dent report­ing and ana­lyt­ics, opti­miza­tion and automa­tion, we wel­come you to the plat­form where this will lead you.