Rethinking Web Analytics
Not your father's web analytics
It's interesting to see the Web Analytics and the Marketing Analytics markets converging. It reminds me of the now old discussions regarding ERP BI tools vs the 'open' data warehouse tools. Now that the web is synonymous with marketing it isn't a big surprise to see web analytics and marketing analytics converging. Good things are bound to come of this convergence. While web analytics (IMHO) started out as interesting yet raw data that was essentially unusable. It is safe to say that today (or at least the past 5 years) it would seam most of the really interesting analytics developments have grown out of the web analytics market. Some of the best examples of embedded data mining/predictive analytics, text mining etc etc are put to use in web applications.
A nice book and blog to read if you find yourself getting asked more and more about web analytics is Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics An Hour A Day. While I am a bit cautious to support the notion that 'insight' is a web analytics '2.0' deliverable the book and video (found here )of his presentation at Google earlier this month are worth the time. That said, I'd suggest using the FF button for the first 13 mins.
