Google released a beta for Urchin 5′s upgrade (long overdue) and I’m looking for information about it.

Granted, I have them implemented on very small websites. I do know of one client that had such tremendous amount of traffic, that he couldn’t run logfile analysis at all.

It was like turning on a kitchen faucet and having it explode with the force of a fire hydrant. It would have required serious hardware investments to make that happen, so they used their own page/event tagging methods to just focus specifically on areas they needed.

It would be great to see benchmark tests done on these things, if anyone knows of any attempts, do tell.

Ernesto

I too am surprised that Nielsen//Netratings and Hitwise have not made more out of the tools they acquired – Red Sheriff and Hit Dynamics respectively. Closing the loop with on-site and off-site metrics is something marketers have been crying out for such a long time.

Can you shed some more light on your experience. Was it a lack of interest, vision or expertise that led to the lack of development?

Brian

I agree and would go further – web analytics cannot achieve everything. I often find that survey data or usability testing could provide as good a starting point as web analytics data.

I’ve had the vision of aggregator tools ever since joining Nielsen//NetRatings in 2004. I thought (and probably still do to a certain degree) that as the proprietor of so many different online research tools, Nielsen would be in pole position to develop an aggregator tool.

Sadly, the company failed to make the most out of the opportunity and has suffered both in the web analytics and competitive analysis markets (at least they are recouping on the latter).

I like Omniture’s strategy of developing/acquiring analytics, survey, BT, and multivariate testing platforms.

But with the online marketing evolving at such speed I’m not sure any company would be willing to invest in developing an aggregator tool that might, in part, become obsolete very quickly.

Actually, I can think of one company that might. That little start up you work for… What was their name again?

Thanks,
Michael
AEP Convert

You make an excellent point. However I don’t think any one web analytics tool can achieve everything. The metrics that impact the performance of a commercial web site not only includes visitor data, but also your web server performance (uptime, download speed), as well as off-site factors such as search rankings (paid and non-paid), online reputation (buzz), off-line marketing campaigns etc. Apart from these metrics for your own web site, you also need to consider competitor activity.

So from a marketers perspective, web analytics is currently just one piece of the jigsaw. Ultimately, what I think will happen is that aggregator tools will start to appear that bring all the disparate data into one place. That way, marketers will be able to overlay a print ad campaign with web visitor activity for example.

I am looking forward to that day…

A little late into the discussion but here, nonetheless.

Interesting post – not your common Web Analytics 2.0 topic.

Can the hybrid approach really justify itself? Is it not possible for tagging solutions to overcome some of the tracking issues?

For example, Nedstat already measures search bots activity and reports on it separately.
Nielsen//NetRatings track bandwidth, albeit they should update their categorisation.

There are other tools than can measure bandwidth (unless, of course, you’d like to segment visitor traffic based on bandwidth – interesting idea).

Not ruling it out but, as you mentioned, I think the cost and resource requirements make it too prohibitive at this point in time.

Thanks,

Michael Feiner
AEP Convert