Thoughts on web analytics 2011

I just wrote down my thoughts on web analytics, hope it's ok I post some excerpts here.

The last couple of weeks I needed to update my knowledge regarding web analytics (WA from now on).

I’ve been reading too much about WA and at some point it really bored me as some experts tend to make it more than it is. We are talking WA, not rocket science. I think some of the leading figures out there only make it hard to understand WA, so that they can be seen as gurus or the only solution to interpret simple data.


...Quantitative data, such as age, gender and location is more or less standard information you obtain from your visitors on a website nowadays, and it’s easy to interpret. But what happens after? For example, when purchasing a new computer, how does the customer “feel”? It’s hard to get an answer on those open questions when only looking at quantitative data, although it can contain extremely valuable information.


...Can we get more out of the data than we already do? Digital eavesdropping combined with data mining has been around for some years now, but it is still a shady business. It’s on the verge of becoming a criminal act if you ask me. It’s all about how to specify individuals from mass collected data, so that you can reach or uncover a target audience more precisely.


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