I don’t know that everything I measure for corporate clients is Web 2.0 - yet I’m finding the web analytics tools currently available to me are often not up to the job of answering the questions clients really want to know.  Eric Perterson addressed the Web 2.0 tracking issue in his recent interview with E-Consultancy.  Here’s part of the interview with Eric Peterson and any comments I may have are going to be in blue.

"In a nutshell, what are the challenges associated with measuring Web 2.0 traffic?

A lot of what is really important is happening either a) off the ‘website’ proper, such as RSS or b) below the level of the ‘page view’.

The former creates a challenge because, well, it’s hard to measure stuff that is out of your control. The latter because so many of the web analytics applications out there treat the page view as canonical.

Ask yourself: what about AJAX applications allowing multiple user ‘events’ without a page reload? What about podcast ‘listens’? What about people who are tremendously loyal to your content but never visit your web site? What about mash-ups like Google Maps? The list of challenges Web 2.0 is creating for us is long, to be sure.

Right, with content syndication of podcasts and RSS feeds, you don’t get the actual amount of traffic or exposure since much of it is no longer happening on your site.   And while Flash is not, by itself, a Web 2.0 application, I throw the Rich Media tracking issues into the mix with AJAX and Subscriber tracking and call it one big tracking problem, a problem that’s only getting worse as more content is being syndicated, more podcasts downloaded and more AJAX and Flash are being used as part of webpages.

"Do you feel there’s an urgent need for this to be sorted?

Absolutely. Because if, as an industry, we don’t, we’ll be in exactly the same space two years from now that we are today bickering about the definition of a ‘unique visitor’.

Look at the recent complaints big advertisers have expressed about Comscore and Nielsen measurements. Listen to any big site gripe about differences in numbers different systems are reporting.

Then think about the inherent complexity involved in measuring all this stuff that happens off our sites or below our pages that is becoming more and more critical to our businesses? Yeah, this needs to be worked out now, not later. "

A couple of things.  I’d like to see FeedBurner’s tracking integrated into all the major Web Analytics Platforms - that would be a start.  Sure, it’s not perfect but it’s the best tracking available now for Syndication unless you want to create a custom url for every subscriber - and I don’t think you want to go there.

Also, Podcast and VidCast Tracking ought to be a standard part of every analytics package yet I see so few even attempting to do this - am I missing something or do the analytics vendors fail to "get it".    Making it easy to include the Podcast/Vidcasts into the analytics and then track it would be a beginning - even if it’s not the whole answer.

Flash and Ajax tracking is problematic - I’d like it to be easier to attach hooks into Flash without actually getting the programmer involved and right now that’s impossible.  I’d like Web Analytics platforms to read the Flash movie in and keep track of it without me having to do anything and that’s probably a long way off, not withstanding Omniture’s attempt to do it.

What are the implications for online ad buyers?

Well, what if your favourite site to advertise on went all AJAX? What if all the sudden instead of getting 100,000 impressions daily AJAX was handling the interactions and page loads were cut down by 50%? What would that mean to your ability to reach your preferred audience?

I have reported on issues such as the lousy programming of MySpace and how it inflates pageviews.  What about if it was the other way around - what if AJAX cut down the number of pageviews all over the place because it will be used more …that happens to impressions?   It goes down.   AJAX kills Online Advertising?

Clearly, that’s not going to happen - Eric is right to bring it up though - and I’m surprised that I don’t hear more from Web Analytics Vendors on RSS, Rich Media Tracking, Podcast tracking, etc.