Eric T. Peterson took the time to answer a few questions for WebAnalysts.Info.

How has the market, awareness and knowledge of web analytics increased in the States over your your years in the business?

Market awareness and knowledge about web analytics have increased tremendously since I got involved in the industry in 1998. Two critical measures are investment and the hiring of dedicated staff. My best number puts the web analytics market at about $515M in 2007, growing to over $1B in 2011 based on a CAGR estimate of 19% (which is pretty much what I predicted in March 2005) I think that organizational interest in hiring dedicated resources is pretty evident and I will be presenting data at Emetrics in San Francisco that details the value of staffing for analytics.

How has the market, awareness and knowledge of web analytics increased in Europe (as much as you can tell) over your your years in the business?

Harder to say. My recent survey collected a great deal of data from European practitioners and I hope to present this data soon, perhaps in Holland in late May of this year. Anecdotally interest in web analytics in Europe is very high, which is great, because I sell a lot of books to folks overseas (see: Web Analytics Demystified and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators).

How important do you think it is it to know exactly how widespread cookie deletion and blocking is if you focus on actions (quality) rather than page views, visits and visitors (quantity)?

Great question, Lars. There appear to be two schools of thought here, one that says “nothing is perfect so just manage based on trends” and another that says “nothing is perfect, but this is important enough to at least try to resolve the data where possible and then you can more confidently manage based on trends.” I am in the latter camp — I’m just not comfortable shoving my head in the sand on this issue, especially since I know a few companies that have GREAT potential to help resolve the question of “how many of my visitors delete their cookies?”

My friend Gary Angel has written a few really great posts on this subject and I largely agree with him. There are too many metrics and key performance indicators that depend heavily on the notion of a persistent, identified “visitor” and too many business models that depend on generating “accurate” unique visitor counts to not at least try to scope the problem for an individual site. Advertising sites, retail sites, anyone spending money on marketing online, etc. all have some dependence on evaluating visitors over time and knowing how good/not good that data is.

I guess I just disagree with the “data quality sucks, get over it” mentality and prefer to say “data quality sucks, but a responsible analyst will at least have to try and understand how sucky it is so you can explain it to everyone else who has a different expectation about the quality of the data…”

Are you planning on writing any more books?

Not anytime soon given the projects I’m working on right now.

Will you visit Stockholm in September?

Hopefully! I am coming to eDay in Holland on September 13th to give a talk and hope to be able to get to Stockholm, perhaps on September 10th or 11th. If I come, can I count on you to introduce me to all the great Web Analytics Wednesday attendees in your fine city?

Feel free to select a song. I have this thing that I’m doing right now where I claim that all posts have a soundtrack.

Every time I get on a flight to anywhere, for no particular reason, when I get to 10,000 feet I crank up Coldplay’s “Fix You” on my iPod. It’s not so much the lyrics but the emotion that the band manages to build up through the song. I think you can see the same flow in my answers, given that you asked the “cookie monster” question last.

Eric T. Peterson has worked in and with web analytics since 1998 in a variety of roles including practitioner, analyst, and consultant. He has written three books on the subject and founded a few groups including Web Analytics Wednesday, the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo! Groups, and the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group. He runs a job board for WA professionals. Eric is also Vice President, Strategic Services at Visual Sciences.

Eric tells us more about himself:
Aside from web analytics I am largely a dad and really enjoy spending time with my kids. My daughter especially is still young enough to see amazing things in the world but old enough to share that experience with my wife and I. I’m also a huge science ficition buff and am currently working through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. Plus, the motorcycle season is here and so I hope to spend some time riding.

PS: Of course we’ll show you a good time if you make it to Stockholm, Eric. Web analysts from all of Scandinavia will no doubt be here to greet you.

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