Australian Web Analytics Survey 2007

Summary Results
Bienalto has conducted the second annual market research study to assess the degree to which web analytics is utilised by Australian businesses.

Compared to last year’s survey, more businesses acknowledge that web analytics is a strategic function that empowers decision-making.

This finding concurs with Bienalto’s experience working with large organisations, which are in the process of taking a more formal approach to web analytics across their business. Clearly, there is a growing focus in this area of marketing.

Organisations now perceive web analytics as a vital tool for online marketing and e-business, and use its data to drive actionable recommendations. As companies become more familiar with the benefits of web analytics, we expect to see this trend of increased reliance on web analytics data to continue.

This increased importance can be linked to the growing knowledge of web analytics – organisations now have more experience, and web analytics tools are more universally accepted, not least because of the take up of Google Analytics.

About half of the respondents use Google Analytics, which is a significant rise over the past 12 months. Given the tool was only launched about two years ago, this is an impressive result – although being free to use this service obviously helps.

However, only 25% use Google Analytics exclusively. Many organisations use multiple tools, and Google Analytics is often the second choice. Large organisations use the tool to compare data from their more expensive primary tool or as a temporary solution while they decide on a paid solution. Smaller organisations use Google Analytics as their primary tool.

The industry appears to be going through an exciting phase with new functionality being added to web analytical tools. We believe that the uptake and development of web analytics tools will be influenced by a number of trends within the industry:

• Increasing awareness among practitioners due to functionally rich and free offerings such as Google Analytics
• Integration of functionality with marketing campaign platforms and customer repositories
• Greater integration with Business Intelligence to allow data mining and customer segmentation across online and offline data
• Rich media and interactive Web 2.0 functionality that engages customers beyond reading text

The majority of organisations have been using their primary web analytics tool for more than three years. Organisations and individual analysts therefore have more experience, and are more confident with the information gathered from web tools, with 77% of respondents being satisfied 75% of the time or more. This in an increase of 8 points from 69% in last year’s survey.

The most common web analytical techniques used are site search analytics, campaign analysis and conversion analysis.

This was also the picture in 2006, however proportionally more companies now regularly perform site search analysis, indicating they have realised the importance of this technique.

Surprisingly, given the popularity of campaign analysis and landing page optimisation, AB and Multivariate testing is still not being performed to any great extent.

The survey reflects that practitioners are comfortable and knowledgeable of the tool they are using, but feel that the organisation they work for does not sufficiently apply the findings to improve the site.

Compared to the 2006 survey, more companies now have dedicated Web teams. In particular, the responsibility for web analytics and website performance has to a large extent been moved across from Marketing to the Web team.

In coming years, we expect to see greater involvement from Customer Analytics/Business Intelligence departments within companies, as web analytics moves from reporting to data mining, scoring and aggregation of online and offline data.

More than half of the respondents have a single or multiple part-time employees in their web analytics team. Only 30% of organisations have full-time employee(s) dedicated to web analytics. This suggests that although organisations see value in web analytics, they are yet to consider it worthy enough for full time employees. Another explanation could be that web analytics mostly involves generating reports, which is done on a part-time basis by people who also have other responsibilities.

Over the past 12 months, respondents have seen the largest improvements in the areas of:

• Gains in customer insights
• Increase in search engine referrals
• Improved online customer experience

This illustrates that the practitioners largely have been successful with “softer” goals such as gaining insights and improving customer experience, rather than improvements in conversions.

In 2008, a large percentage of respondents plan to optimise their site through analysis, while many also plan to define KPIs and formalise reporting processes.

It is a positive trend that significantly more organisations seem to take an analytical approach to improvements in the user experience design, rather than being driven by purely qualitative insights.

Download the full report [PDF 300KB]