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.