Web Analytics a Whole New Ball Game

Direct marketing has long been leading the charge in information-based decision-making and this was never more true than it is today as companies large and small find innovative ways to leverage the Internet. In the wake of the news of Yahoo! acquiring IndexTools web analytics in an effort to compete with Google Analytics, I thought I would share another web marketing story I read yesterday. DMReview's article "The New Online Reality at Fox Sports" on their BI channel gives an interesting view into how this multimedia giant is using analytics to leverage its web content on its sites that function as an income stream.

The article discusses Fox's "secret formula" that it uses to measure and tweak its NFL, NBA and MLB products. These metrics are considered critical to running a successful web marketing engine, but the article stresses the value the editors bring to the table to make content decisions initially, the quality of the reporting, and the deep understanding of their markets necessary to know what will be interesting to their viewers. In a highly competitive space like web sports media, analytics support, rather than replace, high-quality decision-making that keeps Fox Sports in the game.

Measuring time spent, where readers come from, where they go, revenue generated and a host of other web metrics is a daunting task, both in complexity and volume of data. In a sidebar, the article points out that standard BI software is not optimized to manage the massive data points that are tracked across many web pages and that this type of data is not typically fed into traditional data warehouses. Special web analytics packages fit this growing niche. Interestingly, the difficulty with using this data is not cited as a lack of data or technology to access it, but a lack of analysts who understand the data. It seems that web analytics is still uncharted territory to a great extent, awaiting a few cowboys to ride in and rustle the data. (Did I go too far with that analogy?) Similarly, companies are looking for marketing VP's and managers specifically with electronic media expertise.

If you have a website, you need to measure what is going on there, bottom line. Even tiny companies are figuring out how to leverage a web presence to gain market share, generate leads, and create new income streams, and to manage these efforts effectively, you need goals, metrics (leading indicators and success measurements), you need to know where your traffic is coming from to effectively focus your marketing efforts...all the same things you need to know for a traditional marketing program. But as this article points out, different technology is needed for this rapidly-changing channel. These days, there's no excuse for a company of any size not to be on the web and even less excuse for companies not to measure their efforts there, since it does cost to be on the web, but even small companies can have some level of analytics through something like Google Analytics which is, shockingly, free. It seems even analytics are being democratized.

For more information about the evolving field of web analytics, check out The Web Analytics Association.