A web analytics client recently conducted some market research to help them better understand the needs of their customers.

What they learned, though not entirely surprising to me, helped to confirm what I see as some of the key issues facing analytics customers today.

Two things are increasingly clear: Firstly, Google Analytics is now by far the dominant analytics tool, with fully 94% of web analytics customers using it on their websites.

However what's also clear is that many customers are using other web analytics products in addition to Google, in some cases products which are expensive and complex, which indicates that even though Google Analytics fills a critical need there are at least some business requirements that it doesn't (or can't easily) fulfill.

What Products Do Customers Use?

The additional analytics products which customers use include Omniture (28%), WebTrends (17%) and Yahoo Analytics (11%), among others. There are a slew of lesser-known (but in some cases up and coming) products, such as CrazyEgg, Woopra and StatCounter.

We also found that 30% of analytics customers are not completely happy with their current analytics products, and a further 5% are actively dissatisfied with them. Clearly there are a lot of users out there who would like some better analytics.

Different Strokes...

For most analytics customers, the analytics products they have are used by a variety of different user communities, including management (78%), marketing (78%), and various technical staff (75%). In view of this, it makes sense that customers would need multiple toolsets, as those tools which are powerful enough for technical users won't always be easily usable by less technical business users.

The Benefits of Web Analytics

Web analytics tools are mostly used for the obvious reasons, including landing page analysis (97%), traffic patterns (92%), and website effectiveness (89%). However the key intangible value customers place on such web analytics are increased conversion rates (61%), enhanced website performance (44%) and better market data (42%).

So clearly the primary business reason that drives their use of analytics tools is to improve their website's performance and get more customers. That's not exactly a surprise, but it demonstrates that the real value of web analytics to most customers is to get more customers, not just more data. That's what "actionable intelligence" really means.

So What?

Putting this all together strongly suggests that there are two classic, somewhat opposing requirements at play here: On one side, the technical users of web analytics need a rich and powerful feature set to create more sophisticated statistical analyses and reports;  whereas business users want a web analytics package that can deliver actionable intelligence in an easily understood format - yet one that still allows them to quickly tease out the key pieces of information to improve their website and ultimately, capture more customers.

So the solution for many customers seems to be to use different web analytics packages to address the different needs of the multiple user communities within their organizations. And the companies that do so, are happier overall with their web analytics.

 

So, you have a website. Your site is accessible from various search engines and other linking websites on the internet. Visitors are finding your site and viewing your content. But how do you know your website is performing optimally? More specifically, is your website doing exactly what you want it to do, as effectively as possible? It's a fairly basic question but, judging by how difficult it is to navigate some websites, it's an often overlooked consideration.

Any website is inevitably created with certain goals in mind, tacit as they may be. For example, at a minimum it suggests the goals that someone actually views your website and understands basic information derived from its content. A website created for a company or organization likely has specific core goals related to business functions. Often companies and organizations have a lot at stake based on their websites' performance of these goals. For example, the viability of a company which only takes sales orders online depends on the viewability, content, layout, and order-placement functionality of the company's website.

 

Because so much is often at stake regarding website functionality, a process has evolved for evaluating website performance. Web analytics is the process of quantitatively measuring the number of visitors, performance, and overall effectiveness of web sites. Utilizing analytics tools – typically software placed on an organization's web server – web analysis provides quantitative measurements, called “metrics,” about the site's accessibility, design, content, and efficacy. Use of these metrics allows a series of specific, measurable, business-driven performance goals to be specified for any website. Performance against these goals can then be used as the basis for business decisions about the website and, sometimes, even the business itself.

Web analytics tools generate a series of statistical measures (for example, summaries and averages) about how the website is being accessed and navigated. Generally speaking, the purpose of web analysis is to create actionable information gathered from two realms of focus: external and internal. The statistical measures related to how users a website is accessed, linked to, located by users, or related to the internet generally is external web analysis. All other statistical measures and analyses related to how a website is navigated, its content and functionality as viewed by visitors, how long visitors view specific pages, why they leave the site, and how performance goals are being met within the website itself is internal web analysis.

Most web analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics) are very effective at external analysis, however very few provide an adequate set of internal web analysis functionality, so it’s important to select a web analytics tool (or a combination of tools) that excel at both. For example, with a typical e-commerce site it’s critical to measure and analyze the number of visitors who leave the site either because they can’t find what they want to buy, or because they get frustrated with the buying process. With careful analysis, the reasons for this visitor “friction” can be determined and its impact significantly reduced (and measured quantitatively).

Once organizations define clear performance goals for their websites, web analysis can be extremely effective in not only assessing website performance and functionality, but also wider considerations like company marketing campaigns and programs. Even non-commercial websites may set specific and tangible goals for its visitors (such as user registrations, surveys completed, views of relevant information etc.)

The key to effective use of web analytics is establishing clear goals for the website and accurate methods of evaluating performance – especially as they relate to business functions. There's little benefit in collecting wide-ranging metrics that are irrelevant to the desired performance of the website. For example, web analysis that focuses on how visitors link to the site but ignores the sequence of pages viewed, and the steps a visitor performs, to successfully place an online order, misses the mark. Successful web analytics depends on integrating the relevant external and internal metrics as they relate to clearly defined goals.

 

Here’s a scenario I come across much more frequently than I want to:  In a meeting discussing a new marketing campaign at a medium sized corporation, a typical marketing manager will say something like “We should put the call to action above the fold and to the right of the graphic”. My response (other than a silent internal sigh) is always along the lines of “How do you know that’s better?”

All too often their answer will come down to one of three things, either “I read somewhere that…”, or possibly “At my last company we…”, or my favorite, “Our customers want…” All of these answers are bogus, probably wrong and quite possibly harmful to the potential success of the campaign and also the company’s business. If they were really being honest, in most cases what this person should really say in response to my question is “I don’t know.”

The reason is that many otherwise smart people don’t use hard data to verify their assumptions. They don’t test those assumptions by running comparisons of the different possible approaches, or they don’t use the data they collect usefully, and they almost always don’t know their customer audience as well as they think they do.

The reality is that people are fickle and unpredictable, particularly customers, and particularly customers on the Web. What worked for one company and one product might not work for another; what worked last month might not work today; and how you think users will behave is not always intuitively obvious. That’s why it’s critical to always test, measure, and analyze any assumptions you make about your customers.

Of course in reality there are certain general principles about website layout and campaign management which hold true in most situations, most of the time (particularly with large, well-defined audiences), and experienced web marketers and designers know this. But it really doesn’t hurt to be sure. More than once I’ve seen seasoned web professionals eat their words when an analytics report disproved their pet theory… They didn’t know what they didn’t know, and some cases what they didn’t know can (and does) hurt them.

Part of the problem is that most marketing folks aren’t scientists and aren’t trained in the use of the scientific method, so the idea of constructing an experiment to determine the best ways to persuade their customers either doesn’t occur to them or is sufficiently daunting a task that they don’t know how to approach it effectively.

Another, bigger problem is that many of the software tools out there supposedly designed to help users test and measure website results are complex and ugly, and are really aimed at highly-skilled technical users with statistical and programming expertise (not a description of the average marketing manager). If it isn’t easy and obvious to obtain the analytics you need to make good decisions, then you’re probably making bad ones.

What’s needed in many companies and marketing departments is a mindset that it’s great to be creative and think outside the box, but always test (design A/B tests for all your assumptions), measure (using web analytics), and analyze (use analytics software that’s easy to use and presents information in a digestible form). Most importantly, use the analyses you create to drive your collective marketing and website decision making, so you’re always on solid ground and maximizing the effectiveness of the dollars you spend on both.

Because otherwise what you don’t know can hurt you… and it will, if you’re not careful.

 

Let’s face it, Google Analytics isn’t exactly the pinnacle of web analytics products. True, it’s free, and yes, it’s very widely used and well-integrated with Google AdWords (the fact that Google generates a lot of advertising revenue from AdWords certainly helps them to provide Google Analytics for free). But there are many great other web analytics tools out there that are not from Google, and many customers using Google Analytics also deploy some other tools to augment the basic Web Analysis functionality available in Google Analytics. So I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the other web analytics products out there and come up with a list of the Top 10 Web Analytics Tools That Are Not Google:

1.     Omniture (www.omniture.com)

Recently acquired by Adobe, Omniture is at the high end of the web analytics spectrum, providing a suite of tools for web site management, marketing and optimization. The suite includes SiteCatalyst, a Web Analysis and Performance Measurement tool, and Discover, providing information on website visitors and performance. Aimed primarily at large enterprise customers, the Omniture suite comes with a correspondingly large price tag and associated configuration, training and ongoing maintenance costs.

2.     Yahoo! (web.analytics.yahoo.com)

With its acquisition of IndexTools, Yahoo! Web Analytics provides perhaps the most significant challenge to Google’s dominance in the free web analytics arena. Like Google, it provides a basket of commodity Web Analysis functionality, but doesn’t stretch the feature set too far. The product’s primary draw is the scalability and the free price tag, although the goal is again to draw the user to Yahoo’s web advertising, in direct competition to Google.

3.     Overstat (www.overstat.com)

A relatively new player on the web analytics scene, Overstat provides sophisticated web analytics as unique (and very cool) 100% Flash-based overlays on top of your own web site that make it very easy to use. As well as basic web analytics reports, it also offers simple a/b comparisons, heatmaps, form funnel analysis and other advanced features for efficient web analysis and website review and optimization. Pricing is currently free (while the product is still in beta), but will ultimately have a free version and various paid options depending on page loads and support.

4.     Woopra (www.woopra.com)

Although currently also still in Beta, Woopra’s desktop tool, Live Tracking and Analytics product shows promise in the area of visitor tracking and commodity analytics. It has a variety of web analytics reports and other features that make it easy to perform a thorough website review. Although pricing is unknown at this point, it is likely to be aimed at the lower end of the spectrum.

5.     Coremetrics (www.coremetrics.com)

Coremetrics also provides a high-end suite of website marketing and management tools, including a web analytics product, with an emphasis on marketing optimization, merchandising, and website content analysis, integrated with marketing automation. Like Omniture’s suite, the Coremetrics product line leans towards the high end of both target customer size and price.

6.     ClickTale (www.clicktale.com)

Clicktale provides a hosted service for visitor analysis featuring a variety of basic web analytics features plus some more advanced ones, such as heatmaps. Their claim to fame is the ability to playback pre-record videos of user sessions to watch how the users move the mouse, scroll and click on your site. The pricing depends on the number of pageviews on your site and the level of support, varying from a basic free version up to several thousand dollars a year for the enterprise level product.

7.     Webtrends (www.webtrends.com)

One of the early players in the web analytics market, Webtrends also has a suite of tools for measuring and managing website visitor performance and advertising. Their Analytics product is still more aimed at the developer level or technical user, and although they have made progress with their user interface it’s still more suitable for larger organizations with a network of internal support and deeper pockets.

8.     Lyris (www.lyris.com)

As part of their search marketing/email marketing suite, Lyris (formerly ClickTracks) offers HQ Web Analytics, a campaign oriented web analysis suite, to measure the effectiveness of email and other online campaigns, and to better understand the behavior of visitors on your site. Features and Pricing are aimed at the higher end of the enterprise market.

9.     FireClick (www.fireclick.com)

The focus for FireClick is web analytics in conjunction with email marketing. Their Advanced Warehouse product provides real-time web analysis and ad-hoc reporting against an analytics data warehouse, and tightly integrates with their Advanced Marketing Suite. Pricing is competitive with other products in its class.

10.  StatCounter (www.statcounter.com)

StatCounter provides an invisible web tracker coupled with a hit counter, which can be installed on your site to offer detailed web statistics for web analysis and reporting. Pricing is based on the number of monthly page loads, with the lowest level being free, and pricing bands that increase from there.

I was recently given a test drive of the forth coming Overstat web analytics (OS for short) and user tracking package; in a phrase I'm impressed.  It is not trying to replace Google Analytics, Webtrends or Omniture but rather augment the visitor information in a visual format the leaders miss.  What I mean is that Overstat provides a visual representation of how visitors are actually using your site.  You can (and should) continue to use GA to track your Ad Word campaigns, but use OS to get a real feel for how users are moving througout your site.

What pages they move to, where on the page they click, what pages they exit from....and all of this is displayed directly over the actual web pages.  This differs from the standard stats packages that simply offer Spreadsheet style lists of the top pages, top links, etc.  Designers rejoice at finally being able to determine where on a page people are clicking (links or not) and what Click Paths are the most successful.  Usage trends that were hard to extract from lists are crystal clear when presented with thumbnails and overlays.

All of the regular statistics features are also included, but have been given a face lift with the help of Adobe Flash and Flex. 

Listen up folks (and you heard it first here)....this is going to be a game changer for Web Analytics and User Tracking.  Last I checked, they were still accepting Beta Registrants for free.

http://www.overstat.com/