Real time, online
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The latest website analysis tools can be a powerful business asset, but they must form part of a wider corporate strategy to improve customer insight, says Information Age's editor Kenny MacIver.
Almost exactly six years ago, Information Age ran a cover story on what was then known as “customer analytics”. It was all about how some companies were getting spectacular results by analysing how their online customers and visitors behave. At the time, the technology of web analytics was still young and, for those of us seeing for the first time how website visitors could be tracked so closely, it was quite spectacular.
The article was equally spectacular in its optimism. A procession of suppliers talked about how their customers paid for their investment within weeks of installing their software. Some of those customers openly boasted of their success. It was the year 2000, and all very “dot-com”. Today, almost all of those suppliers have disappeared.
In researching this month’s article on web analytics, we could not help but recognise some similarities. The customers and their suppliers are optimistic, the products are powerful, and the business case for buying them now seems undeniable. There is a resurgent exuberance across the sector.
This exuberance is only partially justified. It is true that there are many more skilled people focused on web analytics, and that these people are clear about their business objectives. It is true that the data is now being used by business people, rather than just technical people, to inform business decisions. And it is true that some customers are getting impressive, even spectacular results.
But there are also significant challenges that users of analytics systems have yet to overcome. Linking offline data with online data, for example, is possible, but this usually involves a time lag that can affect business agility; integrating data with other systems, such as CRM, is not yet easy; Internet traffic data is both voluminous and imprecise. Issues of identification and privacy are dogging progress.
In almost every issue of Information Age, we speak of the power of real time, integrated systems. Web analytics has become an extraordinarily powerful technology, but no one should think that it can be plugged in, turned on, and will then give a 360 degree view of the customer. Today, and for some time to come, it is only a part, albeit a big part, of the customer relationship management story.
