Web Analytics Challenges

An article on ClickZ today calls analytics 'the bedrock of interactive marketing'. Whether this is wishful thinking or just lazy writing is unclear, but the article does include some interesting insights into the issues with applying analytics to online marketing. Some of the better quotes: * The (sic) dilemma begins when an analytics tool is plugged in, turned on and starts spitting out reports, then ends with a general lack of interest and finally dies in a fog of ennui. * True customer and business understanding does not come from online metrics alone -- they come from a combination of online data, offline data, order data, financial data, and external data. * The analytical culture is different from the general business culture at most companies. In the high accountability business model, people are driven by testing and performance-based results. * Most Web Analytics solutions provide such an overwhelming array of reports that most users cannot focus on the key metrics that drive successful outcomes. * Although the data we have is precious in terms of helping us understand visitor search behavior so that we can optimize our algorithms, finding the manpower to conduct the analysis is difficult. These insightful comments point to just some of the challenges in using analytics to make better decisions. But dispite the difficulties there really is no choice - without analytics you're flying blind. Posted by Craig Danuloff at April 19, 2005 12:28 AM