visioactive

There is no use fighting it. Regardless of how you feel about it, the web has been incremented to version 2.0. So now that it is here, what do we do about it?

As I finally kick off my blog at the beginning of this new year I thought I would start by talking about some key focus areas for improvement if Web Analysis is to meet the challenges of Web 2.0 for 2007 and beyond.

First you have to count it.

This may seem simple but I can’t tell you how many vendors of “Web 2.0″ applications I have worked with of late who provide for little to no means of capturing activity data within their application. There are plenty of applications that have page view tracking thrown in at the last minute but when a lot of the most valuable activity happens inside the page this is just not enough. Perhaps I am fortunate enough to work with all the right vendors, but I rarely see a RIA that truly integrates capturing meaningful behavior into the core of it’s architecture. As new applications are being developed or refined, architecture, and the integration of analytics into the core of the development process will play a key role in furthering the cause of Web Analysis. The hard part for many companies will be finding analytics savvy tech resources to help drive integration.

The Page View is Dead

But is it really? I’ve seen this stated many times in a number of different ways over the past year and it simply isn’t true. What is dead is the analytics community’s willingness to call any hit that means something a “page view”. To meet the needs of the community, vendors of analytics tools should be expected to move to more flexible data models where hits with meaning (which I prefer to call Events) can be type identified for counting and analysis. Page views will still exist as one type of event but will be joined by many others such as map scrolls, post views. This event class should also encompass other existing standards such as impressions and clickthroughs.

Containing the Clients Explosion

Browsers, Widgets, Gadgets, Mailers, Readers, Aggregators, Proxies, Portals, Cell Phones, Refrigerators, Oh my! With the rapid expansion of internet clients displaying information through the XMLization of content and AJAXified APIs, Web Browsers are becoming just a fraction of the ways Users can interact with a site. With some clients now automatically synchronizing, personaly specific and robotic in nature, analytics vendors need to evaluate the top end of their data models as to what truly identifies a user. To able to fully analyze and identify the best drivers of high value audiences, a highly specific client identification layer will need to evolve. This layer will also need to have the ability to capture and correlate multiple identification methods across clients if it is to attempt to really identify “Users”. It may sound hard but it has been done before in the realm of email marketing. A lot of the techniques used there directly translate into methods of tracking clients such as RSS feed readers.

Quality vs. Quantity

It’s not about the page views, it is about the users (something I heard). Well, yes, but is 10 users really better than 5. What if those users view twice as many page views than the 10? What does counting really tell you other than volume. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of users is great and if you have a lot of users I surely am happy for you. But how many of those users are valuable users doing valuable things on the site? To gain this understanding of the volume of users you have measure the things, identify the users and provide the context of meaning in relation to business goals. As the industry progresses I expect to see many more conversations on value focused KPIs such as Engagement.

Who do we report to again?

Perhaps the lynch pin in the effort to provide good information to those who need it continues to be the Business Process. Just as businesses need to grow in the acceptance of web analytics and using analysis to make better business decisions, so too does the realization that the product of the web analyst is important to every department. If the group is to succeed there will need to be structure for how the Web Analyst group can work with the various organizational divides to collect the goals of the organization, provide the data to collect specifications, get the necessary tools implemented, provide the relevant detail to each consumer. Without this process the analyst is more likely to become no more than a generator of reports that may or may not be meaningful and/or have any impact on the business.

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Well, there you go. Quite wide range of topics for my first post. These are just some of the areas I feel are important to growing the web analytics industry to the next level. I promise from here on out my posts will be more focused to a particular topic. Feel free to agree or disagree with me in the comments or email me directly at ian[dot]houston[at]visioactive[dot]com.