Are you having any luck trying to get people to stop using the term “web analytics”?

Not really! The term “web analytics” is fairly engrained in most organisations. It’s a shame as it positions an industry around the data as opposed to what can be done with the data. But I hold out hope as a few years ago in the offline world companies had Market Research departments but now they have Consumer Insight teams.

What is the number one difference between Europe and North America when it comes to adoption of e-business insights (yeah, I’m a good boy)?

I think the main difference is probably one of scale. It’s possibly easier in the US to put together the business case for investment, not necessarily in the tools themselves but in the resources needed to support the tools, drive value from the tools and some of the additional technologies and processes such as multivariate testing, behavioural targeting, data integration services and so on.

I think another difference is where Europe is on the adoption curve relative to the US. This ties in to the first point as well. My impression is that US companies have in general moved beyond the position of putting in their performance tracking systems and are now primarily focussed on process optimisation. In general terms what we see in Europe is that many companies are still putting in place the core systems so that they can “count the things that count” and “get the right numbers right”. That isn’t to say that there aren’t companies out there doing smart things with their data, there are. However, there are far more organisations looking to get to the stage where they can measure their businesses properly.

You’re a strong advocate of looking at both quantitative and qualitative data. Have organizations become better at combining insights from different sources such as clickstream data, surveys, competitive intelligence, usability studies, focus groups, CRM systems etc.?

Yes I am. I don’t believe you can track and optimise your online business processes just by knowing what page was looked at and when it was looked at. You also have to know who was looking at it and why they were looking at it, what they thought about it, what they did or didn’t do as a result of looking at it and so on.

I think that still too often organisations have their data in silos and don’t extract the benefit from the type of data integration you describe. The situation is getting better though as more of the tools make it easy to integrate data from different data sources. However, though there may be the ability technically to integrate data organisations still will need people who can understand, interpret and drive insights from the various data sources.

What is your number one advice to companies wanting to stay ahead of the game in 2007?

Recruit! If you haven’t already got one, recruit someone to drive value from the investments you have already made in technology and data and to ensure that you continue to get a return on those investments in the future.

Neil Mason is the co-founder of Applied Insights. He started his career at ACNielsen and moved to the client side when he became Chief Knowledge Officer, and later Chief Marketing Officer, for QXL. For them he implemented a customer data warehouse and a web analytics solution across twelve European markets. Neil has a BA in Engineering from Cambridge University, and an MBA and a Postgraduate Diploma in Business and Economic Forecasting.

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