The standards referred to in the Measuring Search Marketing Campaigns session were concerned with being able to compare metrics from one vendor with another. For example vendors define conversions, unique visitors, bounce rates etc. in different ways. That makes it hard to compare one tool with another. However, I agree with you that the discussion should move on from this – is it relevant to compare the values from different vendors?

Am I right in saying that you want analytics to help standardise client web sites, so that mysite.co.uk and mysite.it are built in a very similar way enabling KPIs to be compared?

Regardless of vendor, any properly configured tool can do this. The onus is really on the client to be open to change as that is the inevitable consequence of aligning regional web sites. To achieve this a key/senior person from the client side is required to drive this and that is often the most difficult thing to find.

The Google Analytics approach is to make the product accessible to webmasters (i.e. easy to install) and make actionable information discoverable (i.e. enable senior management to understand if the data trend is good for their business or not). I am not saying we are fully there yet, but the new GA design is a big push in that direction. If GA can truly achieve that ambition, then web analytics will be driven from the top down and that will get country managers to align their web sites for KPI comparison.

I would be interested in your thoughts. Have you used the latest version of GA?

This is clearly and interestingly where the obstacles (hence also opportunities) are and many of the presenters solution to this was measuring individual KPI and data per country. I think we need to move beyond that and identify both overall KPIs and local KPIs, but make sure they are measured in the same way and on the same tools so that we can compare them. Otherwise it will be hard to set budgets and focus on certain markets for international marketers. Standardized methods will be hard and as long as clients and their websites are different we will have new variations of KPIs and for this I don’t think we can have standards. However standards on data and aggregating data would be very helpful for marketers and interesting because it will force the analytics providers to differentiate in other ways.

Milan was a great show though and I was happy to see that it is growing rapidly. Would be interested to hear more about what you think about standards in the field of Analytics.