The other day I wrote up a review of "Web Analytics is Dead" podcast by Avinash Kaushik and published by Internetmarketingvoodoo.com .

I have listed to the Avinash’s podcast twice and will probably recommend it to my metrics group at IBM because it’s really, really good.   Intuit, where Avinash Kaushik runs the 6 person Web Analytics group (and is their chief Analytics scientist) has embarked on a three pronged approach of :

1) Measuring ClickStream Data using ClickTracks

2) Using Survey Data to access Customer Satisfaction

3) Use Behavioral data (what pages tend to be visited when someone is a satisfied customer, etc, stuff like that).

Intuit’s data collection is entirely anonymous and by architecting their product line with data collection in mind, they are able to tie together the survey, clickstream and behavioral data.

Avinash’s main point in the Podcast was that traditional Web Analytics is dead - most web businesses are becoming mainstream now and expectations are to make money on the web, not just have a web business.  Web Analytics is involved with counting visits,pageviews, cookies, clickstream analysis - and while these are valuable and important - what people now most want is INSIGHT.  Here’s a quote from the transcript of the Podcast:

Eric Peterson wrote about this Podcast that:

He can take online transactions and tie them back to customer survey data via clickstream, essentially creating visitor segments of "satisfied customers"

When asked about vendors, Avinash points out that it’s not the package you use, it’s whether you have in house expertise available to take advantage of whatever package you select. He comments that if he only had $100,000, he’d spend $10,000 on software and $90,000 on someone to analyze the data.

Here’s some more excerpts from the Podcast Transcript.

"I think that as the Internet is growing up and as companies are beginning to spend more and more money on advertising and acquisition and getting more and more revenue, I think we are all beginning to wake-up and focus on figuring out why or why not are we are making money on the Web. And that is all the hype is about. I think we have had a free ride for a number of years so to speak. All companies were doing web because web was “cool.” Well, the Web is getting beyond “cool,” and becoming a normal business and there is a lot of accountability on all fronts and hence, there is a lot of focus on this term, web analytics."

Avinash belives it’s more important to have good people, the right people to work on answering the right questions than to have the most advanced analytics programs.  He’s very strong on the importance of having great people to work with - this is far more important than any web analytics.    

Overall, Avinash’s views are consistant with the Measuring Success sessions at SESNY06 I attended a couple of weeks ago ( part 1, part 2, part 3)- with the multi-channel layering approach of disparte data.  Avinash Kaushik did the data merge in-house - but I suspect the new Visual Sciences analytics platform might be lauching a single platform to merge all your disparte data (I got that impression from Eric Peterson - but he did not actually say that to me…..call it a hunch of mine).

If I’m onto something …… and Visual Sciences really has created a platform that will merge your Survey, Clickstream and behavioral data in a seemless way …. they will have accomplished something that’s never been done by a single package - and solely needed.

Getting back to Avinash Kaushik, I found the Podcast very helpful in understand how web analytics is set up in another large corporation.  Certainly every business is different, every website different, but it’s interesting how much importance Avinash put on having the right people-I found that very reassuring.