Web Analytics Skills Snobbery

"Web analytics" as an industry is funny.

http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/07/19/aberdeen-web-analytics/

"We’re already seeing web analytics job postings with phrases like “strong knowledge of SAS and SPSS highly desirable” meaning employers are looking for cross-platform, cross-tool, cross-channel analysts. The folks with this cross-knowledge set who can also “speak business” are going to be a very hot commodity going forward. Fortunately, most web analysts already “speak business”, it’s part of the WA culture - and speaking business is the hard part for most analytical minds....."

When I started in 1999 you couldn't interest anyone in a spot of proper statistics (or data mining as it had been rebranded in the mid 90's - since then its going through a few more names like "predictive applications") and now we've come such as long way that people are actually recommending the skills! I'm astounded and hope this means I'll never struggle to find work again!

Suggesting that people with analytic competency struggle to "speak business" is down right insulting. I suspect Jim is playing on the rather archaic stereotype of the speccy techie analyst that do indeed still exist - probably all too often - but for every non-"business speaking" techie, I'll show you a non-"tech speaking" bullshitting business speaker which could do a company just as much damage. Unfortunately quality is not the preserve of any particular domain of business.

"Like I said, the data is data, the behavior is behavior - and the tools are just tools. Web analytics is patient zero, infecting the corporation with a proper analytical culture....."

I have always found it amazing how those people who classify themselves as in the Web business are so amazingly confident in their own abilities and so dismissive of those in the rest of business. Admittedly, at lot of new online businesses have been created in the past few years, some with new and unique business models. A lot of new people are being introduced to web analytics but to suggest web analytics is to infect the larger organisations with the principles of analytics is ridiculous, snobbish and reflective of the superiority complex the channel has had since the late 90's.

When you consider the current money spent on campaign optimistation, fraud detection, credit risk scoring, direct marketing, market analysis, market research, usability, call centre analytics, data warehouse, operational optimisation etc. it's a little brave to suggest that these web analyst souls are going to be treading on new ground, exploring the great unknown in terms of how you go about doing things in an analytic manner.

Its a good job Jim goes on to point out that data is in deed, data, and that behaviour is indeed behaviour otherwise I might have been more scathing. This is something that many "web analysts" have long overlooked. The majority of web analytics has all been done before in other channels however these web analysts have been too snobbish to appreciate it.

When you consider that most web analytics tools have in the past had a very limited drill down capability, little data import or export functions, little ability to tie information to other channels and on the whole little flexibility on what they record, its remarkable they've got where they are.

There are, no doubt, areas where web analytics differ to other channels, but to be honest these are mainly in the areas of data collection and the speed at which it is possible to turn around analytics into action - however, sadly, action is still often far from the minds of the majority of users in this area - and this is mostly because the analysts themselves are busy with the other parts of their roles and the tools they use do not lend themselves to much more than reporting.

And this is where other channels can still lend web analytics a hand. The number of applications out there, utilising analytics and business rules in an offline environment is huge - and web vendors can still learn an awful amount if they open their eyes and adjust their product plans.

"If you’re a web analyst and are offered a chance to do SAS / SPSS / Business Objects / etc. training, I would jump on it."

As for jumping on courses I would say this. If your organisation has the foresight to invest in your skills in any way, you should take it.

I would not limit it to SAS, SPSS and Business Objects. Much as I love the analyst world, and amongst it are some very talented people, going on a course will teach you little more than the ability to punch buttons, write code or both - and if you do something like a SAS course you'll be writing a lot more code than you thought!

If you want to learn coding, I'd pick your language carefully based on your organisation and your goals and learn that, rather than thinking knowing a bit of SAS syntax is going to make you analytic genius. (At least with SPSS the tools have a greater emphasis on usability and the novice can get past the "button pushing" stage and into analytics quicker). Simply put, spending time with individuals who have experience in these tools in your organisation is always going to be a lot better than simply going on a course.

Personally, I'd much rather have someone in my team who is a whiz in the Microsoft office products (namely Excel and Access) or perhaps an SQL coder. Someone who has the familiarity with regular business reporting and their data structures, linking data together and capable of understanding the impact of analytics/figures on an organization would always be my preference - so consider that the next time you have courses to chose from.

Remember. The web is usually only one channel or touchpoint of your business - in the long run the key is going to be pulling these channels together and any skills that will help that should be encouraged.

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...

What's happening at Visual Sciences?

I guess I should state for the record before we go any further together, I'm currently an Omniture man so I'm just going to state what facts I can and then speculate wildly.

Visual Sciences has just announced a poorer than expected set of earnings. Not terrible by any mark except perhaps by those that really do matter in the city.

Is the a down turn in Web Analytics or something specific to Visual Sciences? I suspect it is the latter, suffering in an ever more competitive market. There is the interesting comment that there "has been approached by a number of strategic buyers"

Who would this be then? I don't suppose it would be another vendor in exactly the same space but would expect a vendor who is trying to complement their offline offering.

Google of course has its free web analytics tool, so one would expect Microsoft to naturally be interested but I would be extremely surprised if they got involved despite any rumours (doesn't every tech firm have a rumour about Microsoft wanting to buy them?)

However I could see someone in the other areas such as Oracle, SAS (who currently partner with Speedtrap, a very cool piece of UK web analytics technology), IBM, Business Objects having a sniff. As the online channel becomes more and more important the lack of ability to collect, report, support and deliver applications on the online channel is becoming a glaring hole in the portfolio of these companies despite most claiming to already have 360 view of customers and various ways to interact with a customer in their value lifetime.

I dont know Visual Sciences intimately but do believe they have some cool technology. I've always been a believer their products dont represent a paradigm shift, in particular the Visual Sciences product is really spit and polish on an old OLAP web reporting paradigm but punters do like that kind of thing, flashy graphics etc. so its always likely to sell - to repeat a point, its a technology that many are envious of and I can only hope for their sake that any integration in the future would go a lot better than that of others in history of on/offline mergers, particularly in the analytics space.

End Searcher Optimisation? Are we being Short Changed by Search Engines?

A recent post on clickz by a gent named Bryan Eisenberg wrote an article call End Searcher Optimization (ESO).

Its focus, in my opinion, is simply on the thought that we are going to have different kinds of results from search engines and therefore will have to start marketing to different segments in different ways, rather than "just" optimimising the text content. I find that somewhat suprising as I would hope anyone spending a moderate amount on search ppc are already considering how they target the keywords.

Bryan goes on to comment about how one part of the population might prefer an executive summary whereas another might prefer more detailed analysis. Not only that, but it we consider in advance the different kinds of content they might like we can arrange our marketing strategy accordingly.

I dont think thats really very shocking is it?

Also, note how Bryan approaches the thorny problem of what segments / personas actually exist for a company, in his own words
"we went through all the content we'd planned for each of the personas and decided which piece of content had to be delivered as an article, a blog post, an image, a video"

For a man professing analytics, "went through" doesnt sound very "analytic" does it?

However, aside from drawing attention to Bryan's weakness in segment creation - and I appreciate customer segmentation is still an area very much driven by the fluffier side of marketing - I think we have been getting a rough deal from search in this area for ages, and I think only now that keywords are really beginning to rocket in prices will we begin to question their real value.

Think about it. When was the last time you went to your advertising agency and placed your various banners randomly across the web and then had to monitor the results yourself to work out whats best and what segments you might have?

Dont you normally highlight to your agency "we'd like to target 3 particular groups with the following three campaigns of content, please place them on suitable sites". Regardless of whether the ad agency does a good job or not, they offer the hope of targeting the content for you, they take their expertise of the network they possess and hope to apply those things to give you a good quality customer. The key point there being that you pay them for their expertise in their domain.

What do search engines do for you? They let you try individual keywords and then let you do the hard work of determining how well they perform. If they provide more ways your content can reach the customer through pictures and video then great but you've still got the overhead of trying to figure out what works and what doesnt.

Now, let see what the search engines do know that they dont tell you.

• When a customer comes to you they dont tell you what the person has previously searched for either in the same visit/day/month etc.
• They dont tell you what type of site they've previously delivered that customer to

Think about those two.

Knowing the first will give you an idea of what are the current intentions of the customer.
How important could that be? Are they shopping around? Are they refining their search? are they ready to buy?

Knowing the second will give you an idea of what kind of customer segment they belong to.
Imagine that, a web equivalent to a Mosaic segment. Imagine if you had Mosaic-like segments that you could apply to the keywords and indicate what kinds of people used what kind of words, giving you an immediate feel for the value of the traffic.

Then, if you imagine that rather than PPC, the search engines move to a Pay-Per-Purchase model that records whether customers buy after purchasing.

Add that to the previous points and you have a picture of a customer, you have intentions, customer segment and even likelihood to buy. You find yourself looking at keyword value with some depth of customer value behind them.

So many web analysts are beginning to try and do this with there own site, i.e. what multiple media are the customers seeing, what purchases have they already made, what keywords have worked for them but they are limited as they only know what happens on their site.

So, my call is for search engines to start releasing more information about the customers that they serve and delivery to their paying customers - currently they (google mainly of course) have it too easy as we dont question the value they bring or have high expectations of service.