This is been on my mind for a while; in Eric Peterson on 'Free vs Fee' that I just read about on Ian Thomas's Lies, Damned Lies… blog - Eric makes a point that he alluded to at the last Emetrics Summit in San Francisco which I attended:

"…Eric Peterson has published a report which draws on some of the data he got from his web analytics practitioner survey a couple of months back to highlight that organizations who use free tools tend generally to be:

• Small
• Less committed to web analytics
• Less strategic in their user of web analytics
• Newer to web analytics

That's right, small (in terms of spending on Web Analytics) and usually blind to what they're getting into - they want something for nothing and usually end up with nothing - because they're not really invested in the process of Web Analytics and hiring a Web Analyst(s) to maintain and nurture the web analytics process.

Ian Thomas asks if smaller organizations can't afford to invest in Web Analytics because it's too expensive rather than they don't want to make the investment:

"…Eric uses these conclusions to argue that organizations who standardize on free tools are in danger of under-investing in web analytics. The argument sounds alluring - if you're too cheap to invest in web analytics software, you're probably too cheap to invest in all the other things you need to do to make a success of web analytics - but I worry that Eric has his reasoning backwards. For me, use of a free web analytics tool is likely to be a symptom of a lack of ability (or desire) to invest in web analytics, not the other way around. A lack of ability to invest in this area is particularly pronounced in smaller organizations, of course."

Ok, this is how it really is - I'm going to talk about one of my clients, without naming who they are. The client is getting a "free ride" with Google Analytics and actually paying though the nose for it.  It's really their lack of investment in Process and People that is costing them (and they do have the money to spend - they just don't structure their business in a way that it makes sense for them to have Web Analytics Process or people).

I was engaged to guide my client's 4 travel distributor websites to greener pastures in a Faustian deal (that I should not have accepted since it was too vague) by using Web Analytics and SEO; my involvement was actually more tangential to what they were doing on a daily basis - still, the client wanted me to be in the center of all of it - and pay me based on performance with a small down payment. 

Performance was based on increase of travel bookings over the last year's (2006) bookings.

As it stands, last year their sites were being redone (but not the commerce pages - figure that one out)  and there was not that much I really needed to deliver; this year, it's another story - with a great deal of information they say they need they hoped would come from the Analytics - information, unfortunately, that's not forthcoming.   Here's the story why it's not happening for them:

When a business that is in a state of unawareness of Analytics - they just want answers - they know nothing about how to make it happen…in other words, you have a business with no process - just a mess of software that does not work too well and is really hard to track.  Just owning that mess takes a full time headcount, you can't do it well unless you invest on having a specialist on board to manage the analytics.

Probably won't be my client much longer (that's a good thing - it's way more of a headache having clients like this than what it's worth) -they  had WebTrends (old version) and I told them to get ClickTracks Pro last year (I was influenced by Avinash Kaushik on that one - it turns out ClickTracks did work for the client - just not at the very last step of the transaction of a travel booking) and when we installed it we found out it was not as well suited because their commerce pages (shopping cart) was hosted on another site and ClickTracks could not, at that time, track the transaction all the way though to the end point (a booking confirmation page). 

The client, angry that Clicktracks did not work as well as they hoped or expected it to,  blamed me for not knowing Clicktracks limitations upfront, and decided to go with Google Analytics in June (because it's free instead of the 4000 bucks - then - it's now 9,000 for the same thing). 

They asked me if Google Analytics would work and it seemed to be tracking the commerce pages once the JavaScript variables were passed to Google Analytics (IE: step 1 page, step 2 page ….. step 7 page … we accomplished that part well enough).

But.. The free "Google Analytics" ended up not being able to show the ultimate source of the web traffic whereas the "paid" Clicktracks did! (once labels were set up for it - a tedious process, but it worked)

Maybe it's my not knowing how to set up Google Analytics (the fact it's free is actually deceptive, it can be very complicated to set GA up properly for your environment and business - something that is usually overlooked) as well as if I took a course with a channel partner like ROI Revolution (Google Analytics Training from ROI Revolution) but the fact of the matter is traffic that comes into one of the client's site from Travelzoo.com, for example, shows up well enough on the landing page for the promotion on the clients site, but once it goes into the commerce pages, which are in another domain (more like a subdomain) the traffic to the commerce pages (shopping cart) show up as a referral from their main domain - not as the visitors who originally came from TravelZoo.

To be fair, I spent several hours trying every option in Google Analytics, including Traffic Source, Landing Page Navigation, Content Page with a filter on Source, but no matter what I did - I could not get the TravelZoo data to show up as coming from Travelzoo, it only showed up as coming from the clients site.

Did I shout out on the Web Analytics Yahoo Message Board ….no I didn't … took me a while to figure out even how to verbalize what the problem was.. but by that time, I was so fed up with the whole situation, I did not want to or have the time to go further - because what this client really needs is a dedicated half time or full time person, not me.

Client has no idea of Web Analytics (not dumb people though, probably smart enough to be dangerous, if you know what I mean, not aware, or do not have Web Analytics investment as a priority) are pissed because the free tool can't provide the original source of the the visit. 

And perhaps, with the someone dedicated
to the process, Google Analytics could be the right solution - could work - but they don't want to invest in process - they just want answers - answers the analytics does not have.

Sure, we can create a special "TravelZoo Landing page" and put a GA Goal on it - and then try to make sure no one else can get to it except via that path, and then set up the shopping cart stages as part of the Goal process- and then do the same thing for every single advertiser, and for the Paid Google and Yahoo campaign data….. but now we're getting into ALOT OF WORK TO SET UP AND MAINTAIN…almost a full time job. 

I don't have the bandwidth for a client like this - but there are many, many out there like this - people who want to use Google Analytics, because it's free, and then find they're in over their heads - but they don't want to pay for anything because they think everything from Google should be free - and they can do it all themselves.

And that is, what I think, Eric Peterson is talking about ….. just putting UrchinTracker Tags and bunch of Goals does not equate to Web Analytics Process and Methodology.

Ranted long enough - time for bed.