Enter the Mysterious world of Web Analytics

that's my latest love on technology front. Web Analytics, hot happening and interesting subject. Would like to share the 10/90 principle as called out by Avinash Kaushik. (Courtesy: Avanish's blog). I will be sharing more on web analytics practicalities and optimization opportunities and building your websites better for each user.

Goal: Highest value from Web Analytics implementation.


Cost of analytics tool & vendor professional services: $ 10.

Required investment in “intelligent resources/analysts”: $ 90.

Bottom-line for Magnificent Success: Its the people.

The rule works quite simply. If you are paying your web analytics vendor (Omniture, WebTrends, ClickTracks, CoreMetrics, HBX, etc) $25,000 for a annual contract you need to invest $225,000 in people to extract value from that data. If you are actually paying Omniture, WebTrends, HBX etc $225,000 each year then…. well you can do the math.



Most people reading this post probably think this is way overblown or silly or just plain stupid. I can understand that. Here are some of the reasons I have come to formulate this rule:



If your website has more than 100 pages and you get more than 10k visitors a month you can imagine the complexity of the interactions that are happening with your website. Drop in marketing campaigns, a dynamic site, SEM, more pages, more traffic, promotions and offers and you have a very tough situation to understand.

Most web analytics tools will spew out data like there is no tomorrow. We seem to be a rat race, one vendor says I can do 100 reports, the next says 250 and the one after that says I can measure the eye color of people who look at your web pages and on an on. Bottom line is that it will take a lot of intelligence to figure out what is real in all this data and what is fake and what, if anything in the canned reports, is meaningful in all this.

It is a given that if you open most web analytics tools that they show the exact same metrics, almost all of them measured and computed differently! You are going to have to sort this out.

Finally actionable Web Insights (or as I have now copywrited: KIA’s, key insights analysis) does not come simply from ClickStream, you are going to have to have people who are smart and have business acumen who can tie clickstream behavior to other sources of data / information / company happenings.