Day 1 of Guest Writer Week begins with Intuit’s Avinash Kaushik:
I am surprised that recently I have been asked this question so many times: “Why is Web Analytics suddenly so hot?”. Different people from different places and different spheres of life. So for my first contribution to Manoj’s blog here is an attempt at a thoughtful answer.
There are some very delightful trends that are coalescing together in the marketplace that I would assign causality to. Here are some of them…..
- The web usually is one part of a multi channel strategy for most companies (atleast those that are not exclusive web) and it has tended to be a small part. The great thing is that for a large percent of businesses that is no longer true. The web is making a lot of money and with that comes “fame and fortune”.
- The web is growing up, it is no longer just a cool kid on the block. For the longest time it was ok to show charts of increasing hits or page views and get advertisers or bonuses. That is, sadly, no longer the case. The cool kid has grown up and is being held accountable for its actions (or investments being put in).
- An increasing amount of people have figured out that the web has the power to truly be the lowest cost acquisition channel for customers. We know exactly where we spend how much money and we can pin down, pretty well, the exact rate of return. There is no other channel that can do this as well as the web (think TV or billboards or direct marketing etc).
- Two words: Experimentation & Testing. Traditionally businesses have struggled to learn about their customers in any meaningful way. The web is making it easy for us to create optimal customer experiences by letting the customers tell us what they want. Not just online but also offline. We can test navigation and pages but also price sensitivity and magazine layouts and learn about new products that might work and how best to communicate complicated user manuals etc etc.
- It’s the scale baby! Any company of any size probably now touches more of its current and prospective customers via the web than any other channel. And numbers are going up, up and up. Given this trend there is increasing desire to understand how the website is performing in answering the customer’s questions and serving them (beyond the web server sending pages out).
It is not that we did not think web analytics was important in the past, it is more that the above five trends have created a perfect storm.
All of these trends mean that there is a increasingly urgent need to tap into the web’s vast potential to provide data and help businesses make optimal decisions. All these trends mean that web analytics is really hot, people who sell tools will benefit and people how practice web analytics will benefit. Web Analytics professionals / skills are greatly in demand because web analytics is hard and the golden 10/90 rule.
What makes me personally hyper passionate about this space is that we can measure everything we want, we can learn, update, try again and do it at a pace that was simply not available to all of us in the past. It is great to have the opportunity to play in this space and truly move at the speed of light. And the cool thing is that we are on mile one of our thousand mile journey.
Do you agree? Please share your feedback via comments.
