24 September 2009

Web Analytics Still Not Very Useful - Drowing in Data

I love data. But I love information more, ultimately it is the power that I get from making that information useful as knowledge. I am sure that I am no different from other folks. (OK I know I am a bit special).

It is interesting to see if in the migration from the conventional marketing world to our new data driven digital world of marketing, there are good enough tools and skills to make that happen. Apparently many players think not.

A study published by eMarketer from the original data by Unica shows that there are significant barriers. One would think that the usual bleet would be about the lack of funds. True but that is only ranked 4th behind three others which the article describes thus:

"The biggest challenge for marketers was integrating Web analytics with other marketing solutions, cited by 46% of respondents. Verifying the accuracy of data was a problem for 41% of marketers, while 32% reported trouble with analytics that were not comprehensive and 29% complained of budgets that were too small. "

So are we drowning in data - YUP! We need better information and for sure we need better consistent metrics. It is the latter that I believe becomes more critical in today's environment but so far it is the least understood and consistency is totally absent.

So what do you think?

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