4 x 4 – News from Eric Peterson and more

 

News from Eric Peterson at the Emetrics summit and thoughts on the next maturity level of web analytics

4 thought leaders, all founders of their own business now

So now all 4 Gurus presenting the like-named sessions at emetrics are self-employed consultants finally. Eric Peterson announced a few hours ago, he had incorporated  Webanalyticsdemystified to work vendor agnostic and primarily in web analytics business processes from now on. Congratulations, Eric.

Not only from an U.S. but also from an international perspective I think all of us practitioners owe to Jim, Eric, Bryan and Avinash for taking the industry to the maturity level it is today.
What could be the next necessary steps to take?

4 practitioner gurus
would help to grow the industry thoughts further from an inside perspective. They would be able not only to contribute their experience (20%, of practitioners, Eric’s survey revealed, have more than 5 years experience) but also contribute insight about internal obstacles, the level of understanding and actionability and rate and success of undertaken actions in of web analytic results.

4 European gurus
would help to grow development in a market that can become even larger than the
U.S. They would help to go the next necessary steps from an European perspective, not only to learn from our north-american colleagues and experts, but to develop own market specific knowledge and a network of experts over here. I already have 2 candidates in mind, evenly distributed in gender, one is Dutch and one is Swedish.

4 dimensions of enterprise web analytics success
Avinash
came up with 2 necessary dimensions of web analytics in a 90/10 distribution: people and technology. This will remain true forever, I think, however, mainly for companies taking their first or second step in web analytics.
Eric today expanded to 3 requirements of web analytics success: process, people and technology. I always found technology to be a key for overall success, once you have entered true strategic decision making on web analytics data and the need to segment on all possible, complex questions that pop up after each questions you answered in what I would call an iterative process of advanced web analytics.
Tools delivering on this level again promote the need for completely new analysts, analysts who can understand, develop and drive this huge, iterative process leading to new questions, new answers and after a while to strategic decisions, tools that do not limit the analysts mind inside the possible segments and combinations provided typically.
These new analysts would also need to be able to pull in any new dimension they need from key/value pairs, meta information on the page, and external sources in the organizations or inside prepared sets of data representing outside influences like weather, seasonality or political/social events. Understanding all this types of additional data and its relevance and interpretation is key to the new analyst. The analyst also needs to correlate the new data with every already known dimension without technology obstacles like reimporting, new cubes or even ROLAP limitations.

The definition of Web analytics business processes of course is a key success factor on this level. New Technology, that is able to challenge the current analysts to develop completely new expertise based on the ability to now iteratively develop, test and answer new questions after every answer they had before, grows them to completely new Web Analysts. A solid understanding and vision for understanding and correlating new sets of data and attributes to the current pool of information completes the dimensions needed for the next level of enterprise web analytics success.