Web Optimization Blog

Michael Wexler has just posted an article on his blog - What Web Analytics is Missing - that should be required reading for any one and everyone who is involved with site management and web analytics.  Finally somebody has the courage to come out and say that web analytics has warts and lots of them.  As I was reading it, I found myself thinking “this is the Bill Cosby of web analytics”.

And I agree with most everything Michael said, except on one point - “Understand My Site”.  For years, certain people in the web analytics community - I’m not naming names, you know who you are - have turned a blind eye to the “understand your site” concept.  It was as if they really believed that if you study your traffic data long enough and hard enough, all will be revealed, and that the underlying site structural elements were irrelevant in the big scheme of things.

Michael is spot on with the notion that understanding the site is an essential part of a broader picture.  The mere fact that understanding the site is in his post is a tacit recognition of how important it is, if people want to have any hope of making sense of their web analytics data.

However, it is not a path the web analytics companies should go down, unless they want to commit vendor suicide.

Site structures are increasingly complex, growing larger and more dynamic every day.  Understanding site structures is a much more complex undertaking than implementing web analytics. WA vendors that think they can knock up some site structure code and add it to their tool set in a couple of months will be sadly mistaken.  While they become increasing distracted from their core business and invest increasingly more development resources and dollars trying to solve ever more complex site structure issues, their competitors will be picking off their customers one by one.

I agree that WA vendors should focus on addressing all the warts inherent in their core business -  if Michael’s assessment is correct, that should keep them busy for quite a while.  They should leave site structural analysis to the people that have it as their core. And they should seek out those people and find ways to partner so that the companies buying their services reap the benefits.  The smart money is on the vendors that have already figured that out.

Only somebody from inside the web analytics community could hold up a mirror the way Michael has - let’s hope people are listening.