Why The Right Web Analytics Platform Is (Even More) Business Critical

Forrester just recently published The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q4 2017. In it we rank the leading web analytics platform provides including Adobe, AT Internet, Cooladata, Google, IBM, Mixpanel, and Webtrekk.

“Why should I care?”, you may ask.  After all when it comes to understanding customers on digital touchpoints most businesses have extended their intelligence capablities beyond browser analytics to now include app, social, media, ads, and much more including even IoT. Digital intelligence practices have certainly continued to evolve over the past 2 decades.

The fact is that web analytics tech and approaches have continued to modernize in step with the customer digital engagement and digital transformation journeys that firms are undergoing. In this latest research comparing the leading web analytics enterprise vendors we report that:

• Modern web analytics technologies now form the core of the digital intelligence stack. Today’s digital practitioners are using their web analytics systems for a lot more including: to aid behavioral targeting & personalization; manage their digital data; integrate it with testing; understand app engagement; and for cross-channel attribution (see Figure 1).
• Web analytics remains the single-most dominate digital intelligence technique. Almost three-quarters of respondents in Forrester’s Q2 2017 Global Digital Intelligence Platforms Forrester Wave™ Customer Reference Online Survey used web analytics from their DI platform providers. Web analytics adoption is significantly greater than the next three dominant digital intelligence techniques which were: application analytics (48%), interaction analytics (43%), and cross-channel attribution (41%).
• Web engagement is still critical to business success. Since the late 90’s, there has been significant shift of digital customer engagement beyond the browser & email (e.g. to mobile apps, social, kiosks and IoT). Yet the clear majority of active internet users still interact via browsers, which remains the most important digital channel for consumers to make online purchases.

Figure 1: Proportion of enterprises using their web analytics platform to deliver other digital intelligence capabilities

So as you race to digitally transform your business you should indeed build out, measure, and optimize customer engagement in the new channels such as app and IoT. But don’t forget that web pages are still an important part of customer engagement and modern web analytics is still critical to the practice of customer insights.

Thank you for reading; please feel free to send me your thoughts by responding directly to this blog or via twitter: @JFMcCormick