Interview with Oliver Schiffers.

Do you think there are any differences if you compare the German market for web analytics with other European markets?

When looking at the past 6 years I have been involved in the market here, it seems to me that the web analytics market and the methods are way more dominated by IT experts rather than Online Marketing experts over here. Also the fragmented process of online advertising involving media planners, interactive agencies and publishers has had an impact on end-to-end reporting on campaign success.

Which German business do you think is the most advanced when it comes to web analytics?

I don’t think that the vertical of a business defines how advanced it might be in web analytics. It is more a matter of size and history. Older businesses, and in online terms today that could mean older than 4-5 years, or bigger business tend to think of web analytics more from a controlling or reporting perspective and are fighting with traditional BI and data warehouse methods and suites. Online behavior for them is just another dataset for their ETL.

Clearly businesses that do not have these history or in-house experts are moving faster towards the available web analytics tools and a lot has happened in these businesses in the last 2 years.

Is there any particular website you’d love to analyze and optimize based on insights?

I find it particularly interesting to look at sites that have a mixed set of site goals, including registrations, engagement, multiple non-shopping conversions and content effectiveness. Of course this mixture is the hardest possible for the tools, tags and the analysts as well.

Working on different conversion events and multiple KPIs for content effectiveness, defining valuable segments of users by multiple criteria is a hugely interesting part of analysis and also has a huge opportunity for optimizations. A good example for a site of this range would be Deutsche Bahn or a larger NPO site with a lot of engagement, registration, community and fundraising goals. Clearly I think optimization potential would be huge here.

Who are you?

I studied comparative literature and linguistics but didn’t finish because I founded what you would call an interactive agency now in the mid-nineties. My first involvement in web analytics and personalization was back then. Became a Presales Consultant and then Senior Web Analytics Consultant working with NetGenesis, WebTrends and Google Analytics. Now involved in projects at a big marketing firm in Germany regarding behavioral data, targeting and personalization technology and methodology as well as web analytics.

Soundtrack: Manic Street Preachers - The Everlasting

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