1. STATE OF THE ANALYTICS UNION

• The world of data warehousing and business intelligence (BI).
• Worked with massive amounts of enterprise data; multiterabytes; and sophisticated extract, transform, and load (ETL) middle layers—all fronted by complex business intelligence tools from companies such as MicroStrategy, Business Objects, and SAS.
• Although the whole operation was quite sophisticated and cool, the data set wasn’t really that complex. Sure, we scored customer names and addresses, products purchased, and calls made, along with company metadata and prices. But not much data was involved.
• As a result, we made lots of great decisions for the company as we valiantly went to battle for insights.
• With that context, you’ll appreciate why I was ecstatic about the world of web analytics. Data, glorious data all around! Depth and breadth and length. Consider this:
• Yahoo! Web Analytics is a 100 per cent free tool. It has approximately 110 standard reports, each with anywhere from 3 to 6 metrics each.
• That number of 110 excludes the ability to create custom reports covering even more metrics than God really intended humanity to have.
• That’s the paradox of data: a lack of it means you cannot make complete decisions, but even with a lot of data, you still get an infinitesimally small number of insights.
• For the Web, the paradox of data is a lesson in humility: yes, there is a lot of data, but there are fundamental barriers to making intelligent decisions.
• the realization felt like such a letdown, especially for someone who had spent the prior seven years on the quest for more data.

2. State of the Industry

• one of the biggest changes in recent years was the introduction of a free robust web analytics tool, Google Analytics. Web analytics had been mostly the purview of the rich (translation: big companies that could afford to pay).
• Sure, a few free weblog–based solutions existed, but they were hard to implement and needed a good deal of IT caring and feeding, presenting a high barrier to entry for most businesses.
• Google Analytics’ biggest impact was to create a massive data democracy.
• Anyone could quickly add a few lines of JavaScript code to the footer file on their website and possess an easy-to-use reporting tool.
• The number of people focusing on web analytics in the world went from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands very quickly, and it’s still growing.
• This process was only accelerated by Yahoo!’s acquisition of IndexTools in mid- 2008. Yahoo! took a commercial enterprise web analytics tool, cleverly rebranded it as Yahoo! Web Analytics, and released it into the wild for free (at this time only to Yahoo! customers).
• Other free tools also arrived, including small innovators such as Crazy Egg, free open sources tools such as Piwik and Open Web Analytics, or niche tools such as MochiBot to track your Flash files.
• Some very affordable tools also entered the market, such as the very pretty and focused Mint, which costs just $30 and uses your weblogs to report data.
• The Behavior element of the strategy has not been neglected either.
• Inexpensive online tools allow you to do card sorts (an expensive option offline) to get rapid customer input into redesigns on your websites’ information architecture (IA).Then there is the adorable world of competitive intelligence. It did not have an official place in the Trinity strategy (though it was covered in Web Analytics: An Hour A Day) because of the limited (and expensive) options in the market at that time.
• We have had a massive explosion in this area in the past two years with tools that can transform your business, such as Compete, Google’s Ad Planner and Insights for Search, Quantcast...and I am just scratching the surface.