The 2010 Web Analytics Report is now available as a free download from Bienalto.

The report summarises the findings of Bienalto’s annual survey on the attitudes and intentions toward the use of web analytics in organisations across Australia.

This is the third annual market research study to assess the uptake of web analytics by Australian business.

The survey results help us to understand the state of play in the web analytics industry, as well as to see where perceived challenges and issues prohibit or inhibit organisations’ adoption of web analytics.

Watch video message by Hurol Inan on the highlights of the findings

Maturation of the industry continues

Web analytics is a maturing discipline in Australia, with more organisations recognising the strategic importance of the online channel.

The 2008 survey shows that:

• Businesses are investing more heavily in web analytics tools, with the number of organisations investing more than $10,000 only in tools increasing from 36% in 2007 to 44% in 2008
• 62.5% of organisations use Google Analytics, up from 52.9% in 2007
• More organisations trust the data they get from web analytics tools
• More organisations are taking action based on web analytics reports and hence its perception as a strategic function has grown
• Marketing departments are getting more involved with web analytics and in growing proportions taking full responsibility for it.
• Web analytics has been identified as the most important web initiative for 2009 ahead of Search Engine Optimisation.

The main areas of focus for web analytics are on conversion analytics and online campaign analysis.

Some organisations are also pursuing more advanced initiatives such as setting up customer/brand engagement metrics, measuring the lifetime value of online customers, and implementation of analytics-driven targeted marketing initiatives.

Looking to the future

Site optimisation is the primary focus for 2009, which is critical for two reasons. First, a website is never static, and new features should be regularly introduced to grab the customers’ attention. Second, any business that executes online campaigns requires ongoing optimisation – with the pace of change online, what worked last month won’t work today.

Reporting and KPIs remain an ongoing challenge, and it’s clear that many organisations, particularly in the government sector, still struggle in this area. We need to see more thought-leadership around how KPIs and reporting can be used to assess the current level of performance, set direction and prompt actions.

In other areas, 2009 will be a strong year for web analytics as organisations explore more advanced tools and start putting more sophisticated techniques in place, such as user profiling and dynamic content.

Deeper insights

In this year’s survey report, we have segmented the results to see how specific groups (by industry, level of sophistication, etc.) compare to the overall results. Of particular interest is the extent to which they use web analytics tools for business gain.

The three types of segmentation we conducted are:

• Advanced web analytics users
• Government users
• Google Analytics users

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.

Bienalto Consulting has conducted a market research study into the website measurement, reporting and optimisation activities of Australian businesses.

The intention behind the survey is to reveal trends in current analytics practices to understand the extent to which businesses take advantage of readily-to-hand data to improve their business performance online.

Some 89% of the 156 organisations represented in the survey reported active online performance measurement. Two thirds of these organisations reported gains from their Web Analytics activities in areas such as customer insights, site improvements and optimisation, and increased search engine referrals.

Gains were found to be more prevalent and substantial in organisations that regard Web Analytics as a strategic function (38% of the respondents). These organisations typically apply more varied and sophisticated analysis techniques and enjoy full support of management. These two factors result in a heightened ability to attract high quality, well targeted traffic to their websites and deliver results.

Organisations not fully benefiting from Web Analytics are also not as engaged with the web channel as a strategic delivery mechanism. Yet 73% of the respondents have at least one year’s experience in Web Analytics and 69% rate their knowledge as intermediate or advanced.

Despite expertise, it seems that Web Analysts are struggling to show the value of Web Analytics to management, and lack management buy-in and support. This manifests itself as not being able to secure sufficient levels of funds and resources for Web Analytics.