I was having dinner with Gary Angel yesterday and would have asked him about the just announced partnership of Semphonic and WebAnalyticsDemystified - but I did not know about it till tonight - now. In the SEMphonic partnership and the kinds of problems you want to have … post Eric T. Peterson announces the partnership - which is a sure bet.
"…Under the terms of the partnership, clients can engage Peterson and his firm to develop a web analytics strategy and then seamlessly engage Semphonic to execute on that vision; while clients currently working with Semphonic can engage Web Analytics Demystified to help build better processes to support their web analytics efforts. For clients, this means a range of services from customized training in real-world analytics to the actual hands-on analysis of data by world-class experts. "
SemPhonic does not actually run Paid Campaigns - they do pure Analytics - teaching companies how to get the meaning behind the data; once companies come to WebAnalyticsDemystified to get the "map" of what to do next, Semphonic can take over and implement.
I don't say any of this is easy…it's not..but implementation is probably the hardest part. It's one thing to come up with strategy and another to actually fulfill it - often things don't go smoothly and you have to make adjustments and workarounds.
In my own experience - there's not enough people, positioned correctly, in corporations to implement Analytics as well as it could be. For all the talk about Web Analytics - it's often incorporated after everything else is planned - and often too late. Companies don't tend to listen that much to the Web Analysts they have.
On the other hand, when a company goes to an outside vendor, like Semphonic - they are often ready to listen - and that's the leverage that an analytics vendor, from the outside can have, that in-house web analytics often lack (along with the specific expertise needed to carry out the mission).
It's another sign the Web Analytics Industry is maturing, with businesses ready to listen to what the data says, platforms and tools in place mature enough to handle most of the data , along with the right people and processes in place to execute on all of this - that's my take on it.
