Interesting Rand Schulman Article

Interesting article from Rand Schulman and some of his time in the industry. Interesting to note some of his comments on WebSideStory and the subsequent Visual Sciences stuff. Not only that but also making a case for cross channel applications and optimisations with his new company Unica.

A few interesting snippets from the article, enjoy.

"People woke up and started to understand that the online business was really very much the same as the offline business."

I think people are still coming to terms with this in the larger organisations with an offline history. If you were to look at the numbers of people supporting / analysing the online channel compared with those in the offline world within an organisation and take into account the money the channels bring in, I think the web is still rather undervalued even if you believe that the web channel should be a more efficient tool for reaching customers.

"One of my major contentions was in 2003 that web analytics is not inherently a stand alone application. You can’t just look at the numbers, but you must take action on those numbers."

Again I think this is still a problem. Many organisations have never got to a point where they have a good enough grip on there numbers to feel empowered to take actions. In my experience, those that do are often the marketeers spending those large sums online who are on average doing the most in this area, not the site analysis /content /conversion people. Lets face it, its the marketeers who have the majority of the money and its usually easier for them to switch on and off campaigns than the site based people. Whether they are taking good actions on the numbers they see it always arguable :-)

"I think at the time WebSideStory was the first mover around the integration of actionable applications, and the creator of the first suite of standardized and public APIs"

First mover in the online space perhaps. Other vendors had for some time been trying to open up systems and databases to enable application development.

"but marketing people just don’t need the infiniteness of the slicing and dicing of real time data"

Thanks goodness someone said it.

The reason why you do need the slicing and dicing is because people havent figured out a simple way of representing the data that is needed so give you access to all to cover their bases.

However, that doesnt mean that marketeers shouldn't slice and dice. They should have applications that do the slicing and dicing automatically for them to come up with the best results, but then marketeers should have the key figures presented to them in an easy to understand manner with explanation of how the figures got there. (The last thing I want to see is millions of marketeers all slaviously following the output of black boxes.)

"If you agree with my primary contention that web analytics products collect data, and then they trigger other applications, there is no “visual” requirement about a triggering mechanism whereby you threshold the business rule, and you take the actions."

See note above about black boxes. The problem with people who build clever applications is they often dont think about the users and the feedback they require to either

a) make sure the app isnt going off the rails
b) gain insight to make the app or other sections of their business better in some way

"The market is going full circle to encompassing cross-channel marketing and cross-channel action, not just cross-channel reporting, but cross-channel action, and combining online and offline action."

360 degree view of the customer is not news.The thing is vendors are only now building the tools to cope with it properly and all vendors have their weakness, yes, even Unica...

"But, all the vendors are talking about this “cross-channel” thing now, and what they are really talking about is cross-channel reporting."

Again, thats what a lot of the web analytics people are saying, but look at people like Omniture and our Touch Clarity solution? What about SPSS and their predictive applications? Its pretty simple, companies whose emphasis is one reporting will continue to have those leanings, but that doesnt mean there arent a lot of application builders out there.

"That’s going to be a fundamental shift back away from the client side to the server side, where log files and tag information will come together."

Very interesting. It will pose difficulties for those vendors who are not used to dealing and integrating with different data sources. Many of the web analytics vendors have had data processing relatively easy as web logs have been of a relatively standardised format for years and if you're tagging you can make your own data structures no problemo. New systems, new data sources, then integration gets really interesting...

"Secondly, we are going to have to have a notion of the correlation of orthogonal web-based events” versus the linear display of a series of page view- based events"

Not sure what that really means. Orthogonal in my book is perpendicular, correlation implies they are lined up - orthogonal != correlated !!

I'll cut him some slack as I really like the article. I suspect what it means is a move away from pages that can very easiloy be linked together and causaly related to things that operate a little more independently. I dont expect this will be unsurmountable its simply that vendors will need to organised their data into a specific level and report on it, like say customer level. I expect data mining type stuff to become more prevalent.

"Some of these are finding out that the client’s greater engagement on the website means lower conversion to their store."

Needs to be said to a lot of people. There's process and engagement. You want to be able process as quickly as possible. You want to be be ableto engage as long (or as often) as possible. The same website can often have both and depending on who you're speaking to in an organisation, both can be important.

"Yet we have these huge and vast stores of personal information that are going to be employed for the benefit of us all as individuals. Those benefits will help us live richer lives."

And lets not forget the corporations who own the data and the people who build the apps...