Web Analytics in 2008

In my last week’s posting about key 2008 trends I mentioned Web Analytics as one of the most important areas for our marketing discipline that will get even more attention while the year progresses.

There will be three major issues that Web Analytics in 2008 has to deal with:

• Inaccuracy of current Web Metrics. There have been numerous reports about the high level of variance for simple metrics like Web Visitors across the major web reporting companies like ComScore or Nielson. Some of these numerical differences went as high as 50%, where one provider reports 1 Million Visitors while another claims 1.5 Million Visitors. This quality issue will hinder the growth of web marketing if it is not sufficiently addressed.
• Integration of Web Metrics into overall marketing metrics. Most Web Analytics work is been treated and managed like a totally separate universe with no apparent connection to any other marketing metrics. It’s not enough to state that two third of all consumer electronics buyer research online before any store visit, we have to get more detailed and sophisticated to understand the true causal correlation between Consumer’s Web Behavior and Offline purchase pattern. This lack of knowledge of channel interplay represents a huge opportunity to truly understand consumer behavior in a multi-channel world.
• Design of Web 2.0 Web Metrics: There does not exist a lot of break through work of how to measure the Web Social Community impact on marketing programs and consumer’s shopper behavior. Facebook and MySpace still feel like metrics virgins beyond the basic enumerations of visitors, visit frequency, and site visit durations. There is a strong need for more thorough Web 2.0 metrics that help a marketer with the decision if and how one should market at these social community sites. Web 2.0 needs new metrics.

In 2008 we will see how the Web Analytics discipline will improve its accuracy and deepen its understanding of web behavior while enhancing its meaning power across the whole marketing channel spectrum. Hopefully Web Analytics can even accelerate the sophistication of any other channel specific marketing metric.