As a digital marketer that relies on web analytics data to measure digital marketing performance, I often hear from marketers:

  • How effective is our web analytics platform?
  • How much of our web analytics tool are we using?
  • Are we getting the value we should from our web analytics platform?
  • Is the total cost of ownership (TCO) outweighing the use and information it provides?

Web Analytics platforms continue to evolve

The marketing analytics world is at a crossroads with itself. Between all the different types of services, products and platforms out there it becomes a convoluted arena of who does what, how and why. But the question for marketers should always be; how do I need to see data in order to use it to make well informed decisions that increase our ability to achieve our goals?

How to select the right Web Analytics platform

The logical next step would be to evaluate web analytic platform partners with that very question.  It’s great to hear what the tools can do and what features they have, but how they relate to your goals is pivotal. Marketing leaders need to rely on analytics and business teams to determine what is needed and to develop a data schema that can be used for proposal and platform development. If those requirements don’t seem to come native to the partner or platform being evaluated, then it’s probably going to be too costly to construct.

That crossroads we speak to is also due to adoption and usage. Be realistic when you are evaluating who uses analytics, what they are using it for and what they need. Different levels of marketers need different data sets and views based on their roles. We can honestly say that most clients are using between 20-30% of what their analytics package is actually worth. The question then becomes, is the web analytics platform worth the investment (if there is any)?

Web Analytics platforms

The Right Metrics and Insights that Drive ROIMarketers are constantly trying to put an ROI on the channels and programs that are currently being managed to a revenue goal or P&L, but what about putting an ROI against your analytics package to see if it is indeed profitable in the information it provides you?

 Being agnostic to web analytic platforms is a great place for us to be. We don’t view analytics as what the tool offers, we view it as what data we need to make better decisions and how we can most easily and cost effectively get that data. The bells and whistles that may accompany that web analytic platform are great and will definitely provide additional opportunities, but at what expense and when is it “nice to have” versus “a must have?”

Our Web Analytics Experience 

As a Digital Agency focused on driving high performance marketing, we have experience with all the different staple web analytics platforms; Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics and Google Analytics, including Google Premium.  And more recently, we have been working with business intelligence and social platforms such as Bime Analytics, Pentaho, Affinity 360, Lithium and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

Which web analytic platforms are you using today that have helped you best achieve your objectives and goals?