Australia's Ultimate Marketing Technology Almanac Oct 2015 | Page 13

I

f it is not measurable then it’s not
real. That’s the rallying cry from data
driven
marketers
who
have gown accustomed to
a world of endless transparency. And it’s this
view that reinforces the
importance of the role
of web analytics providers, whether they are
measuring the desktop or
increasingly the mobile
web sites.

While Google Analytics is a popular entry point
for web developers, the reality is that the field
is actually actually carved up across a range of
vendors. Forrester for instance has Adobe, IBM,
AT Internet and Webtrends clearly ahead of
Google in its Wave Research on Web Analytics.
Google still makes the leadership group but
mostly due to its ease of use.
For its part Gartner notes that Adobe, IBM
and Webtrends all lead Google in digital analytics revenue. “Adobe Analytics has the leading
market share among enterprises and is particularly popular with marketers. According to a
study by ObservePoint, Adobe Analytics was the
Web analytics system of record for 55 per cent of
the top 100 websites (by traffic). IBM’s solution

followed at 16 per cent, and Google’s was the
primary platform at 11 per cent.”
However, drill a little deeper into the top 1000
sites and the picture starts to change dramatically. According to Gartner, among sites
ranked 500 to 600 in terms of traffic, Google
Analytics share was 80 per cent, and Adobe’s
was 8 per cent.
“Other vendors exist with smaller market
share, particularly among enterprises. These
include lower cost solutions targeting the small
and midsize business (SMB) market, such as
KISSmetrics, Clicky and FoxMetrics, tools with
a focus on SMBs and non-US markets, such as
AT Internet, and open source solutions with
some developer community support, including
Open Web Analytics (OWA) and Piwik.”
It is small wonder that the market for web analytics is busy. It is estimated that nine out of
ten of the the world’s commercial websites run
some form of web analytics, and almost 40 per
cent of those sites are using only the simplest
metrics.

Almanac, while web analytics is one of the
earliest forms of business intelligence online,
and the market exhibits many characteristics of
maturity, beneath the surface innovation continues to bubble over, particularly around the
mobile web, the app economy and increasingly
advanced analytics.
In its ‘Market guide for web analytics’ Gartner
defines web analytics as the market for specialised applications used to understand and
improve the online channels’ user experience,
visitor acquisition and actions.
Segmentation, analytics and performance management, historical storage and integration with
other data sources and processes are all hallmarks of the discipline and the data collected
is used for increasingly sophisticated strategies
including areas like predictive analytics.
Ultimately the goal is to understand what customers
are doing on the web and then provide business
leaders with information they can act upon.
Among the key findings in Gartner’s Market
guide for web analytics:

And for now at least the research suggests that
many (though not now a majority of sites) still care
little for issues such as customer, segmentation,
data warehousing or targeted email.

• Cloud is everything. Literally. On premises
solutions have basically melted away to a
rounding error.

As we noted in the introductory chapter of the

• More insight. Solutions now provide

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