The Business Intelligence Blog

CRM Buyer has a series on breakthrughs in analytics world. A good read. Part 1 and Part 2.

While BI is about quickly obtaining enterprise information, Web analytics encompasses the collection, analysis and reporting of information about user activity on company Web sites. This process of analyzing the behavior of Internet visitors involves the study of the impact of a Web site on its users.

Distinctions between the two should be disappearing fairly quickly, according to Gary Angel, president and CTO of Semphonic, a tool-independent Web and search engine marketing analytics consultancy.

“I think it’s clear that there’s an increasing merger between traditional BI and Web analytics,” wrote Angel on his SemAngel blog. “This is true both in terms of data integration and tools. That’s certainly going to accelerate, and I see no reason why, in three years, the two disciplines will be separate in any meaningful sense. In addition, I think we’ll start to see much more ‘data-driven’ analysis within Web analytics.”

In 2006, IDC estimated the size of the 2005 Web analytics market at US$318 million and projected it to more than double in the ensuing five years. JupiterResearch put the size of the Web analytics market at $463 million in 2006. Today, the market is above $500 million.

This growth has occurred because the Web has become a part of the marketing mix model and is proving its value, according to Jim Sterne, president of the Web Analytics Association (WAA).

“Today, Web analytics tools can do their magic from afar,” Sterne told TechNewsWorld. “Ten years ago, we weren’t thinking about selling Software as a Service. Today’s tools are also much more capable of capturing the growing quantity of data and segmenting visitors to ensure the best possible response to a click. Further, 21st century tools are becoming more integrated with other marketing systems like e-mail, direct mail, telemarketing and in-store sales.”

E-commerce companies often use Web analytics software to measure such concrete details as how many people visited their site, how many of those visitors were unique visitors, how they came to the site (i.e., if they followed a link to get to the site or came there directly), what keywords they searched with on the site’s search engine, how long they stayed on a given page or on the entire site, what links they clicked on and when they left the site. Web analytic software can also be used to monitor whether or not a site’s pages are working properly.

With this information, Web site administrators can determine which areas of the site are popular and which areas of the site do not get traffic. They can then use this data to streamline a site to create a better user experience.