Web analytics - is it time for change?

Following an extensive survey of the marketplace, UK-based firm Intellitracker is introducing a new approach to web analytics.

The web analytics industry is now well over a decade old and has matured significantly over the past few years.

The emergence of Google Analytics has created an entry-level product freely available to businesses of all shapes and sizes, which companies have been quick to adopt.

Increasingly, web analytics is being seen by business leaders and marketers as a must-have.

Following such an intense period of change in the marketplace, leading UK web analytics firm Intellitracker polled a cross-section of web analysts and online marketers, to determine how well the industry was meeting expectations.

In particular, Intellitracker focused on the following themes.

How do marketing managers perceive web analytics? What is the industry doing well and where can it improve? Is web analytics delivering on its promise? The results make for very interesting reading.

Firstly, marketing managers believed that the marketplace was filled with a number of 'me-too' products that looked and worked in a similar way.

Secondly, they felt that many web analytics tools lacked a true marketing or customer focus and were either inadequate or over-complicated.

Thirdly, most respondents felt that their businesses were being forced to conform to how the analytics industry believed they ought to work with tools that lacked flexibility.

Finally, many respondents feel that their web analytics solution was only focused on volume or quantitative data - how much of something has happened - without being able to explain why? "The results of this research show that while web analytics is seen as necessary by businesses, it has not necessarily been successful in convincing its most important audience, the marketer," said Mark Wilding, Product Manager at Intellitracker.

"We've tackled this head on, ensuring web analytics succeeds as a marketing platform".

Intellitracker has achieved this by taking web analytics back to the drawing board, and creating a fresh, marketing-driven approach, culminating in the latest release of Intellitracker Enterprise, a popular UK-based web analytics solution.

Intellitracker Enterprise has, at heart, a number of important themes: a wizard-based approach to reporting actionable/exportable visitor profiles; visualisation techniques to help explain data and produce results; marketing-focused outputs such as campaign and content delivery.

Intellitracker Enterprise was previewed at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising show in February and the response from marketing professionals was dramatic, emphasising the success of the new approaches.

Scheduled to ship to new clients in May, Intellitracker anticipates a significant shift in emphasis in web analytics as a result.

"We think we have created something which is radically different; we expect this release of Intellitracker Enterprise to completely redefine web analytics", said David Hudson, Head of Sales and Marketing.

Existing clients will be given the opportunity to upgrade as part of their service agreement.

Back to top