Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified released a white paper today foreshadowing a ‘coming revolution in web analytics’.
Peterson believes we are on the verge of seeing “third-generation digital analytics tools” that will provide greater insights and opportunities by bridging the gap between offline data (such as market research) and online data.
This white paper describes the impending revolution in digital analytics, one that has the potential to change both the web analytics and business intelligence fields forever. We make the case for a new approach towards customer intelligence that leverages all available data, not just that data which is most convenient given the available tools. We make this case not because we believe there is anything wrong with today’s tools when used appropriately, but because we believe digital analytics should take a greater role in business decision making in the future.
Peterson also believes that first- and second-generation digital analytics tools have failed to live up to expectations in part because companies thought that the tools themselves would lead to meaningful and actionable insights, and as a consequence failed to invest in the resources (aka analysts) that actually create insights out of the data collected by the tools. This is consistent with web analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik whose 10 / 90 Rule advocates spending 9 times more on resources to extract value from web analytics data than on the tools that collect the data.
This raises the question of whether paying for web analytics tools that collect web data will be a casualty of Peterson’s ‘revolution’. Companies who pay for their web analytics solutions are already the minority (this is true even for large enterprises: study finds only 33% of large enterprises pay for web analytics technologies), and of those who do pay for web analytics tools, most are considering displacing them with a free alternative. A primary motivation? Freeing up resources so they can invest more in the people necessary to drive insight rather than the technology used to collect and analyze data.
Seems like this ‘coming revolution’ will be good news for people with the skills to turn data into insights, and bad news for companies who have built their businesses on charging for collecting data.
I wrote a piece titled “Hey Microsoft…. backup much?” over on DailyMe.com about the data loss experienced by T-Mobile Sidekick customers this weekend as a result of a “server failure” by Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick.
Danger/Microsoft’s failure to have a backup (or multiple backups) of their customer’s data is absolutely mind-blowing and is certainly a wakeup call to the ever-increasing number of businesses whose products/services rely on such data.
Techcrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic wrote a (lengthy) opinion about the incident in which he argues that Sidekick customers who lost their data may only have themselves to blame since:
if you didn’t care enough to take care of it yourself, then you didn’t really need it.
Cubrilovic’s advice for those Sidekick customers who find themselves without their contacts, photos, calendars and to-do lists:
The solution may be to do nothing, certainly not to panic. The biggest problem is that we hoard data. We produce more data and information than we ever have, and we are all vain enough to believe that the data we create is so fantastic that it should live on for eternity. Losing the contact list on your phone shouldn’t be a problem – you should know who your friends are anyway. If you are losing sleep because you can’t find an old email you wrote, you likely have deeper issues to address.
However, as Dave Winer and others point out in the comments, in the case of Sidekick customers this kind of misses the point.
Companies who charge customers to have their data stored and available via ‘the cloud’, as was the case with Sidekick customers, have an obligation to protect that data regardless of its ‘value’. And, given all the PR that Danger/Microsoft and T-Mobile have received over the last few days, it is pretty clear there is a strong business incentive for companies who are trusted with such data to make sure they don’t lose it.
Just a quick plug for two upcoming events of interest to those in the web analytics arena:
First, eMetrics is holding the Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington, D.C., October 19-23. This year’s summit is focused on the Art and Science of Digital Marketing Management and features great speakers from digital marketing and web analytics practitioners, vendors and consultants. The kind folks at the Google Analytics blog have shared a promo code providing 20% off a 1-day or 3-day pass when you register for the summit (eMetrics discount code: SPONSORDC09).
Second, the Web Analytics Association is holding its Annual General Meeting (AGM) October 29. The AGM is open to all WAA members (if you’re a web analytics professional and not a member click here to join the WAA). The WAA also moderates the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo! Groups which is a great source of information and support for the web analytics community.
Next New Networks published some interesting data last week about viewership to their family of online video channels, which include Indy Mogul, Barely Digital (home of Obama Girl) and new addition Hungry Nation. The study, conducted with the help of web video measurement firm Visible Measures, showed that the peak period for video viewership was the six hours between 12pm ET to 3pm PT, when many North Americans are presumably looking for a short distraction from work.
Source: Visible Measures via Silicon Alley Insider
This trend is hardly surprising given the type of content that Next New Networks specializes in…. short-form entertainment videos. I recall from my time at Channel 4 that short-form videos were popular during the day and long-form videos were popular during the evening (and I bet if you looked at data for Hulu you’d see a similar trend).
By contrast, the general trend for most online news sites is still a morning peak (for instance, DailyMe.com has a readership peak most days between 7am ET and 10am PT). However, I suspect this general trend masks differences between different types of content on online news sites, some of which may provide a similar lunchtime ‘outlet’ to the Next New Networks videos. Newstogram, our soon-to-launch analytics / intelligence platform, will provide an easy way for online news sites to drill down and find the popularity of different categories, topics, people etc. throughout the day in order to identify the types of content where Lunchtime is the new Primetime.
It was a big weekend in the online news field with the Online News Association’s annual conference (“ONA09″) and the Online Journalism Awards (congrats to all the winners especially the awesome folks at Publish2 who won the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism).
While I didn’t go this year (DailyMe was represented by President / Chief Product Officer — and ONA Vice President — Neil Budde), I followed proceedings closely via the #ONA09 hashtag. I was particularly interested in the various sessions on the use of data and metrics by online news organizations (#ONAmtrx and #ONAdata). As Dana Chinn of USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism (and author of the NewsNumbers blog) pointed out, web analytics is a complex area for online news sites and measuring user engagement requires looking at a number of different metrics (Dana’s presentation is available here).
One of the hits of the #ONAdata strand seemed to be the alpha demo of DocumentCloud, the Knight News Challenge-funded investigative journalism tool that plans to “turn documents into data”. The ‘data’ part of DocumentCloud is powered by OpenCalais. The semantic processing for Newstogram, DailyMe’s analytics / intelligence platform for online news sites, is also powered in part by OpenCalais, so I was glad to see it getting exposure at ONA09. OpenCalais is a great opensource resource and I’m sure it won’t be long until OpenCalais-powered functionality is widespread in the online news industry.
Social Homes