While at the Social Media Breakfast NYC #4 this morning (Social Media Breakfast NYC 4 at the Roger Smith Hotel. Sponsored by Crimson Hexagon) where I sat right next to Bryan Pearson (who is speaking at the beginning) – a thought crossed my mind about how Web Analytics is changing, morphing, quickly, into something else.

My mind flashed back to the Tealium post I did a few weeks ago (see Tealium Social Media Tracking – More Information) and a post in Web Analytics World where Which Clicks Lead to Phone Calls? Take Your Analytics a Step Further… as two examples of a hybrid approach to analytics that, I believe, is where the field is heading, at least, in part.

Both Tealium and New Call Solutions™  require additional JavaScript tags that collect information that is normally considered “offline” and could not be easily co-related with Site Analytics till recently; both solutions are inexpensive relative to what they offer.

Tealium, as you may recall, tracks social media traffic for a specific campaign that visitors may have been exposed to and exports the information into Google Analytics (and any analytics, for an additional fee).    New Call Solutions uses a few phone numbers and can track if individuals exposed to specific ads, call up an advertised business, later.

When you consider if  web metrics are telling you the truth?, an article in iMediaConnection, by Brandt Dainow that

“… some of the things we have wanted to measure could not be measured
with web technology as it was in the 1990s, and we designed web metrics
around these limitations. Technology has moved on, but metrics haven’t.”

“..in other cases, we cannot measure important phenomena because they are
not represented directly by the things we can measure — movements of
the mouse and clicks. To get around this, we have inferred these
phenomena from others that we can measure. “

Social Media Traffic and Phone calls from customers who were exposed to an ad, were always tough to measure, but now what we used to call Web Analytics, has begun changing into something else – and I’m not sure what to call it.