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Introduction
The measurability of digital media has been heralded as one of its greatest benefits compared with other media since the mid-1990s when internet marketing, as it was known then, first started to be deployed. Many marketers realized that the capability to measure interactions of website visitors through log files provided previously unknown levels of insight into the effectiveness of marketing communications. In 1994, the first commercial web analytics vendor, I/PRO Corp, was launched, and since then Clifton1 has catalogued the many web analytics tools that have been developed, including some that are still widely used today, such as WebTrends (1995), Omniture (2002) and Google Analytics (2005).
Levels of adoption of analysis techniques in web analytics
Despite web analytics services being well established, it seems that web analytics technology is still not used as widely to positively impact marketing as might be expected. The adoption levels of the tools by companies are high, but the usage of them remains surprisingly low. A survey of 700 client-side and agency digital marketers carried out in July and August 2011 by Econsultancy-RedEye2 showed the usage of analysis methods across the main areas of web analytics applied to conversion rate optimization (CRO) (Figure 1 - See PDF,).
It is clear from Figure 1 - See PDF, that the majority of companies surveyed are not using fundamental web analytics approaches such as customer journey analysis and segmentation. This is the case despite the majority of users of these techniques surveyed in the report rating them as highly valuable or quite valuable.
The Econsultancy-RedEye2 report also reviewed how companies using web analytics rated their practices (Figure 2 - See PDF,). The majority of companies surveyed felt they needed to improve their analytics activities across the practices surveyed, such as identifying key performance indicators (KPIs), funnel analysis, mining internal search data, and integrating user testing and analytics.
Barriers to effective use of web analytics
We have seen that many core web analytics techniques are not used as widely as might be expected given the level of adoption of the tools. What then are the barriers that may be preventing this? The Econsultancy-RedEye2 report gives some evidence of this through evaluating the barriers to CRO, one of the...