Agreed. Having enjoyed explosive growth, online marketers have remained focused on acquisition type analytics mostly. I am not even sure that “visitors” have taken place among the top two slots for attention. It seems to me that we have talked more about 1. campaigns and 2. content, and then visitors were only third place.

Another obstacle/misconception that I have heard from direct marketers about web data is that the – quantity – of it causes sheer performance problems. It would definitely be advised to only look at meaningful business events in order to reduce the data volume. But what is meaningful and what is not depends on the question. Therefore, I think the best will be to have a web data mart at the ready where one can grab just the meaningful subset of data for each question. But I admit I am biased towards that kind of solution.

Thank you for the post.
Akin

One of the reasons offline folks tend to look down on web data may simply be technical; if they don’t have access to or can’t get the data into their warehouses they can’t trust it.

Another reason had to do with the perceived “quality” of web data. If you look at web data at a granular level, it is indeed quite “dirty” when compared with offline data. This is because offline data is typically made up of mostly significant events, whereas online data often contains a lot of insignificant events that have to be filtered out.

Some of these events are only insignificant if you consider the offline equivalent of “viewed envelope”, “opened letter”, “read letter”, “grabbed pen”, “started filling out BRC”, “abandoned BRC”, “threw out mail package” as insignificant. Most offline analysts probably don’t yet understand how powerful access to this kind of data can be, and how online copy / offer / script testing can drive offline direct mail success.

The eMetrics Summit is chock full of presentations demonstrating the use of online data to predict and model offline events. Some of the more striking examples I can remember are Ford using configurator data to forecast the demand for auto colors and options and manufacturing to that data, Scandanavian Airlines using onsite search data for load balancing and scheduling particular destinations, and the NY Times using visit patterns to forecast how many papers to print.

These examples may lean more towards operations, but if the online-offline behavioral link is strong enough to be used in operations when “real money” is at stake, these same links could clearly be used for Marketing purposes – if the CMO wants to use the data, that is.

Pretty soon, there will be no excuse as the WA and BI platforms merge.

The first is campaign planning and design (including testing), the second is campaign execution, and the third is campaign (and more broadly, marketing) reporting.

What I hear you saying is that web analytics is moving more into the mainstream of #3 — marketing reporting.

To me, marketers are missing a huge opportunity to incorporate web analytics into #1 — namely using web behavior data to drive propensity and cadence models.

Why does this void persist? Your comment contrasting “high level web analysts” with others gets at one aspect of the problem — skills. But on the other side of the coin, in my experience, I continue to see many firms whose database marketing teams look down on web data. I think they simply don’t understand how to incorporate the data (and with possibility that the web analysts in those firms aren’t “high level”, then the gap doesn’t get filled.

Thanks for letting me have my $.02

The classic example of this at DC was the NY Times using web activity to PREDICT how many copies of the newspaper to print. Print too many, there is waste cost. Print too few, there is opportunity cost, both current (revenue) and future (customer dissonance). Get it right day after day, and you’re talking about some real money.

That’s BI in the web analytics shop.

This is the Uber-Post for many of us, those tired of analyzing “traffic”. It will be quite fascinating to see where the WA field is going. I, for one, have started to eat the BI pie, and find it pretty tasty!