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Web Analytics Now a Priority for E-Retailers TMCnet Contributing Editor For those who find going out and shopping akin to therapy, online shopping translates into even more comfort and pleasure. In recent times, web analysts have observed an increase in the frequency  and value of economic activities undertaken over the Internet. Owing to the flourishing e-marketing business, companies are spending a lot of time and money in designing their own websites to lure customers and induce purchases.Consequently, such companies have to study and interpret the behavior of site visitors in order to determine the efficacy and impact of their sites. It is imperative for them to know which features on their site grabs the most attention and culminates in actual sales. Thus, the role of Web Analytics cannot be underestimated in today’s time. Web analytics refers to the process of critically assessing and evaluating a website’s activity in order to determine its performance. It aids in understanding a users behavior through tracking their online activity and displays critical data such as the most number of times a page was visited, how did the user land on a particular page (entry), last page visited by the user (exit), and so on. This data helps the company to check the workability of all the pages contained in a website. Several web analytics software and services are available on the market these days; however, the task of choosing the most appropriate one can be a challenging task. With a view to help companies assess the strengths and weaknesses of vendors dealing in web analytics’ software and classify the usability of their products, CMS Watchtm, carried out a comprehensive research recently. Wholly owned by the CMSWorks, Inc., USA, CMS Watchtm was established in July, 2001 and run by its founding editor Tony Byrne. The company operates as an independent research firm, offering valuable advice and suggestions on content technologies to prospective buyers. The in-depth assessment of various technologies provided by CMS Watchtm assists project teams in evaluating and selecting the optimal product that suits their requirements with respect to cost and time. Functioning as a vendor-neutral analyst firm, CMS Watchtm drafts reports that reflect the buyer’s point of view, not that of the evaluated vendors. Following its comprehensive research of the Web Analytics marketplace, the company has released a report that assesses 13 Web Analytics suppliers. The findings are based on an exhaustive vendor research, customer interviews and practical testing of solutions. Researchers observed that owing to increase in business activity on the Internet, web analytics has moved up in the list of priorities for both enterprises as well as vendors. To achieve maximum benefits, web analytics is used in many e-marketing services such as promotion via email, keyword bid marketing, and customer segmentation. According to Phil Kemelor, lead analyst for the report, “Web Analytics vendors are moving quickly to try to become the 'brains' behind their customers' e-marketing efforts more broadly.” “This makes a lot of sense, but web executives and marketing managers are finding they often lack the human and infrastructural resources required to take analytics to the next level, and we think 2007 will see enterprises addressing this more directly as Web Analytics appears more frequently on corporate radars." The CMS report is not subjective in nature. It is expected to act as a guide for developing a detailed and business-oriented plan of action using the prowess of Web Analytics. It prioritizes vendors and their services for helping enterprises control costs as well as time involved during selection. Among the 13 vendors considered for the research, the major players are: 24/7, AuriQ, ClickTracks, Coremetrics, Fireclick, Google Analytics, Nedstat, Omniture (News - Alert), SageMetrics, Unica, Visual Sciences, WebSideStory, and WebTrends. The report states that suppliers such as WebTrends and Coremetrics are planning to launch new data mining and customer segmentation solutions in the near future to increase the effectiveness of their services. On the other hand, Omniture and Fireclick, in partnership with other e-marketing vendors are equipped to offer their customers the best quality of web analytics’ tools. Additionally, it stated that nowadays e-marketing heavily depends on IT resources for more complex or refined data and other requirements related to process integration. Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch, said in a statement, “At an enterprise level, we anticipate a convergence with more traditional Business Intelligence (BI) approaches -- especially since classic BI challenges of system performance, metadata, archiving, and data integrity are emerging among Web managers struggling to deal with ballooning data sets.” Byrne adds, “Today we see little interest in Web Analytics among traditional BI vendors, but savvy enterprises will encourage BI analysts and website analysts to get outside their separate silos.” One of the distinct advantages of Web Analytics is that it helps in website optimization. However, the process is gradual as well as slow. Moreover, the upgrade the website, one has to wait until the process of tracking, analyzing, and optimizing is over. --------- Rahul Prabhakar is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. |