In more than 10 years of experience I had the chance of trying almost all the well known web analytics tools, and I found some points that in my opinion Web Analytics tools developers must consider for their products.
1- Flexibility: Web Analytics tools are becoming more and more simple but at the same time less flexible. The possibility of manipulate the information inside the tool is a must, and in a lot of cases is not even available an API.
2- Cost: Prices are in general ridiculous. When Google Analytics was launched I thought that prices should decrease but they don’t. So in one hand you have Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrix and others with unaffordable prices and on the other hand Google analytics for free.
3- Heterogeneous information: every web analytics tool has different technologies and the ones with similar technologies have a different way of processing it, so comparisons became very difficult.
4- Heterogeneous technology: There are two main technologies, “log file analyzers” and “page tagging”, but also hybrid and packet sniffers among others. All seems to be technological correct, but at the same time track and process the information in a completely different way.
Hi Juan,
Nice picture! Wehre did I see that before? Ah, yes, that’s my team!
i quite gree with your assumptions, we need cost effective Web analytics tools to demonstrate ROI of these investments and ideally set-up the best practice processes to make sure we measure things right and don’t compare appels with pears.
We also see, here from little Brussels, centre of Europe, an increased need for integration of data so flexibility, yes, both in & out!
Kind regards and please let us know of your thoughts,
Aurelie
Hi Arelie, thanks for visiting! (and for the picture). Regarding my thoughts I guess you are right, lot of people compare Apples with Pears even when they don’t even guess so.
It´s important that people stop thinking just about just pageviews because pageview is just one indicator that must be contextualized, otherwise it has no value. But it’s also true that people think just about pageviews because pageviews mean money with the actual advertising model. More pageviews = more money, but today more and more people is understanding that traffic has nothing to do with results.
Finally web analytics tools in general are, in my opinion, no flexible at all, and the trend is, as I say above, becoming more and more easier but less flexible. You can’t create your own metrics, or cross variables inside the analytics tool. And probably the more ridiculous thing is that lot of them have no API, so you must export and join the info in an excel file by hand.
PS: Brussels, what a place!