Gap closing between free and paid-for analytics

A survey by Lynchpin and E-consultancy has revealed that the human touch is still the answer when it comes to understanding online behaviour and shaping digital strategy.

The survey of 800 UK businesses showed that 12 months on from the last study, UK businesses are still not getting a good return from online analytics and that people, expertise and resource are the answer, not technology.

Companies are gradually shifting their spending from technology to internal staff and consultancy, but it is a very slow trend.

The increase in client-side analysts has been minimal, yet companies still claim to be trying to grow their investment in people.

Andrew Hood of Lynchpin said: 'While the technology gets more sophisticated (and arguably more accessible from a cost perspective), the challenges in interpreting and actioning the data only get bigger.

'Resource is still a massive issue, and while companies are looking to increase their spend on people there looks to be an underlying skills shortage operating against this.

Omniture's market share of paid tools has grown from 18 per cent to 42 per cent in the space of a year and Webtrends has dropped from 27 per cent to 19 per cent.

80 per cent of companies are using Google Analytics compared with 66 per cent last year.

This indicates the market is rapidly polarising into two camps, with free Google Analytics at one end and tools such as Omniture at the other.

More importantly, there is very little difference in the value of free or paid-for analytics with more than half of the companies surveyed reporting they are still failing to get any return on their investment in paid web analytics tools.

The barriers to getting return on investment remain lack of education, strategy and senior management buy-in.

There are still more than twice as many self-employed web analytics consultants than there are working in web analytics consultancies, suggesting that this end of the market is still highly fragmented.

Linus Gregoriadis, research director at E-consultancy, said: 'Companies are focusing on analytics that help them improve both customer acquisition and customer retention.

'They are prioritising information requirements that relate directly to business efficiency.

He added: 'There has been a shift from spending on technology to spending on internal staff, but there are still too few companies with an internal strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives.

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