Gary Angel's latest post on Me, Me, Me highlights a common problem in Web Analytics - most of the financial data, that's needed to co-relate with the web traffic data, and clickstream data, is silo-ed somewhere else and stored in a way that incompatible with web analytics data.

The problem then becomes - you can't really prove the value of the traffic you got, because in most cases, you can't track the actual traffic that ended up converting - so you have to estimate.

My take, having dealt with this problem for a while, in more than one place, is that the domain of different parts of  site, or brand, fall under different organizations, with different priorities - in other words, the results of why things can't easily be combined, like web traffic, clickstream and conversion/commerce data has to do with the silo-ed nature of the business itself.   In order to solve that problem, ultimately, you probably have find a way to un-silo the business units or get them to communicate much better.

And that's not often that easy…..not easy at all…but it's not impossible either.