Roman Zykov answers a few questions about web analytics in Russia.

What’s the biggest challenge for web analytics in Russia?

Web analytics in Russia is in its infancy. So the biggest challenge is to build the web analytics community. This helps to promote the significance of web analytics for RUNET.

How mature do you think the market for web analytics is in Russia?

The market volume of online advertising was 300 million US dollars in 2007 and is expected to be 500 million dollars in 2008. I can’t say that the market is ready for the use of advanced web analytics tools yet. I think the market for web analytics will mature quickly in 2009 due to an increase in competition.

The absence of a Russian web analytics community is a problem. I’m now trying to build one. The Russian web analytics forum was launched in the beginning of January this year.

What are the most popular web analytics vendors in Russia?

There are several popular local vendors of simple web analytics in Russia:

• Spylog.ru (Trend Micro rates that website as potentially unsafe) provides web analytics based on a JavaScript counter. It has several pricing plans that depend on traffic volume and functions.

• Rambler TOP 100, top.Mail.ru—simple JS counters.

• Liveinternet.ru (Trend Micro rates that website as potentially unsafe) is an advanced web analytics tool. Also the Liveinternet team launched its own Liveinternet bar like Alexa.com but without any visible success.

• Google Analytics. The launch of Google Analytics in Russia was the most amazing event of web analytics in 2007. Because GA provides e-commerce reports, fully translated into Russian including help, pathing reports, etc.

The keys to success of the global providers of web analytics (Omniture, WebTrends, etc.) would be: support for Russian characters, the localization of interfaces including help, and the integration of data with the major contextual advertising systems—Yandex.direct and Begun. At least that’s what I think based on my experience of implementing and using Omniture SiteCatalyst in Russia.

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Roman Zykov heads the analytics team of the largest online retailer in Russia, Ozon.ru. They have been using Omniture SiteCatalyst since the end of 2005.

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