Around the similar time last year, we talked about how businesses were finally investing Intemperately in the tools, people, and processes needed when operating data-driven organizations.
This year, an eConsultancy report assumption the UK web analytics technology and services sector alone to be valuae more than £100 million annually. If we assume this number can be applied relative to GDP, that would put the web analytics technology and services sector well over $4 billion globally.
But as with whatever thing web analytics linked, rarely focusing on the numbers are not as significant as the trend! The trend for total expend on internal staff, third party agencies and total vendor revenues appears to have raised by 12 percent year over year, surely in the realm of “significant.”
These were the lead trends and stories of 2011
Offline & Online Data Integration
What good is online intelligence without offline context? The integration of online and offline information was a concentrate for many organizations in 2011 because without this linkup, it’s difficult to realize the online contribution of marketing, channel of preference for task-level customer and prospect interaction, and customer gratification across channels. Without making this link, it is nearly impossible to improve online experience for lifetime value.
Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics varieties with focus on business needs. Many agencies and vendors began diversifying their service portfolios to provide to varied business and social media goals in 2011.
The industry gained a little clarity this year when many vendors began clearly categorizing their social media analytics into several use cases such as:
• Supervising and trend analysis.
• Opinion analysis and reputation management.
• Workflow management.
• Integrated social insights.
• Analysis of big data.
Even this sub-sector of analytics is far from mature, many large-scale companies are pickings major steps to bridge the gap between social media analytics and cross-channel product offerings. Seem for important moves in this area for 2012.
Omniture SiteCatalyst Launches
Adobe declared the launch of Omniture SiteCatalyst 15 at the Omniture Summit in March this year. For those of us fortunate enough to be in attendance, it felt as if we were strapped into a fighter jet and just engaged afterburners. Adobe has finished a good job integrating Omniture into their product portfolio, and the wow-factor for their demonstration was nothing short of amazing.
I’ve always had a healthy love-hate relationship with Omniture, so fortunately for them the hype associated with V15 was warranted! Few of my favorite features contain real-time segmentation, a latest bounce rate metric, ad-hoc unique visitor counts, and a new processing rules feature that makes server-side implementation tweaks very easy.
Salesforce.com Buys Radian6
Salesforce.com purchased Radian6 for $326 million and brought cloud computing to a whole fresh level. What I wish most about this deal is how naturally this acquisition can be folded into Salesforce’s CRM product.
‘Super Cookies’
Unluckily it is not all good news this year, as many companies (most notably Kissmetrics) were the recipients of some serious bad press and legal action for use of so-called “Super cookies” in July. These Flash-based cookies were damned for a number of privacy worries containing cross-domain and cross-client visitor identification and re-spawning traditional cookies after being cleared from user browsers.
Mobile Analytics
This year marked the dawn of mobile analytics, particularly after Apple rewrote their third-party tracking policies towards the end of 2010. As the mobile market upholds to mature with raised Insistence from the nearly limitless supply of new Android handsets and OS’s, look for mobile analytics to take a larger share of attention in 2012.
Google Analytics Existent-Time
Google Analytics Existent-time introduced in the fall of this year, enabling millions of website owners across the worldwide see user interacting as it happens, which is an exciting prospect for many. Although this characteristic set has been around for a while from vendors such as Woopra, it’s remarkable that Google would offer such a robust feature at no cost.
Google Encrypts Search Data
Almost immediately after any positive sentiment had tapered off from the introduction of existent-time analytics, Google must have distinct to test the waters with a carefully-measured negative declaration that they would be removing search query parameters for users of their secure (SSL) search results. The information’s didn’t go over too well amongst the online marketing community, and to this day the analytics community is yet relatively sore on the subject, so don’t bring it up with your web analyst at the holiday party.
Google Chrome Surpassed Mozilla Firefox
More good news for Google surfaced in November when Google Chrome exceeded Mozilla Firefox in worldwide browser share for the first time in history. Although it is too soon to tell what the effect will be on the analytics industry, one thing is certain: ensure your quality assurance and browser compatibility testing includes all three browser minorities.
Here’s to a secure and happy holidays and prosperous New Year!
