Forrester web analytics forecast: WASP data

Forrester just released the "US Web Analytics Forecast, 2008 to 2014". John Lovett, Forrester analyst, predicts the US web analytics market will reach $1B by 2014, with a steady and amazing growth of 17% per year!

Collaborating with Forrester

I had the chance to collaborate with John Lovett & Forrester by providing WASP market data:

Data from the Web Analytics Solution Profiler (WASP), a service that detects analytics solutions installed on Web sites, projects that market penetration for Web analytics is roughly 58%. WASP also estimates that 78% of total market share is currently held by free vendor solutions. Further, among sites that have installations of fee-based Web analytics tools, 37% also have free tracking products installed, thereby duplicating their measurement efforts.

Data referenced in the Forrester document was based on a sample of 210,820 sites analyzed over a one-month time period between February 2009 and March 2009.

I you are a vendor seeking market share information or competitive data, an agency looking for business development opportunities or a market analyst, contact me to tap into the unique and valuable WASP market data.

My take

I got my hands on an advanced copy of the research and my feeling was simply "wow!" I can already hear people complaining "yeah, right... I knew that", the difference here is the level of detail, the trust and confidence you can put in this 10 pages document. The abstract says "the promise of web analytics needs an adjustment" and goes on to detail the specific points justifying such a statement.

• "The future success of web analytics is dependent upon experts who translate raw data into insight". If only a fraction of professional services are delivered by vendors, the market for experienced consultants will continue to be in high demand.
  
• "Data becomes the addictive drug because it can demonstrate success, predict outcomes, and establish business cases for new endeavors.". Web analytics is not a matter of ROI, it's a matter of accountability.
• "The importance of integration is accentuated": during initial client meetings there is always a point of integrating everything... they quickly hit a roadblock because their web analytics maturity is simply not there.
  
• "Optimization technology will be the next frontier": I would rather say "automation & optimization". We should always aim to automate tasks and transfer our knowledge into intelligent systems that will free us to work on the next challenges.

Being an independent consultant, I particularly like the statement that "professional services will be delivered from non-vendors providers".

Online Customer Engagement Report 2009

For a third year, the Online Customer Engagement Report conducted by e-consultancy and sponsored by cScape Customer Engagement Unit is now available as a free download.

My take

I'm honored to be a contributor to this report. You can read my comments and those of other experts in the field: Alex Smith, Andy Beal, Backy Carroll, Ian Jindal, Jim Sterne, Martha Russell, Matthew Bailey and Peter Mortensen.

What strikes me is the growing gap between those who have defined a strategy and are taking control of it in-house, and those who are just seeking help from external agencies. While the first have established long term goals and will pursue the strategy despite the economic downturn, the later are much more likely to ditch their plan and focus on the very short term. Guess who will get the advantage!

Highlights

The third annual Online Customer Engagement Report is based on a survey of 1,300 respondents carried out in September and October 2008.

While the importance of customer engagement is widely acknowledged, fewer than half of organizations (45%) have defined a customer engagement strategy. Many are still unsure about how to implement a coherent and practical plan of attack. Only about half of respondents (51%) said that the deteriorating economic climate had resulted in a greater focus on customer engagement.

The essence of customer engagement is seen as being about creating relationships which result in value both for customers and for organizations. Asked about their organization's interest in online customer engagement, 38% of respondents said that it was about "increasing long-term customer value" while 34% said that it was about "increasing value delivered to the customer".

Get more highlights from the report.

WASP Market Research: behind the scene of the Top 500 Retail Sites study

In my previous post, I shared my PowerPoint presentation from the recent eMetrics Industry Insight in Washington. This time, I want to highlight how the WASP Market Research feature was used to conduct this study.



You can download the input file here.
You can get the raw CSV results here.

Analysis

WASP expects a list of URLs as input, the WASP Market Research feature automatically takes care of resolving the company names to their corresponding URLs. Once the analysis is complete, you can use the built-in data browser or export to CSV. In this case, using Excel sorting, filtering, Pivot tables, it's easy to spot:

• The type of tools found on those sites
• Which vendors are the most popular
• Which tools are the most popular
• What is the level of "double tagging" between various tools
• "Affinities" between various products such as Voice of Customer, Behavioral Targetting, Multivariate Testing, etc.
• Possible relation between the type of tool and the financial results (this data would have to come from a different source)
• etc.
  

Additional information

WASP Market Research is a service included in the Professional licence of WASP, currently available to vendors, agencies and market analysts. I'm also offering confidential/custom market research data as part of my consulting practice. Contact me or visit WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com for more information.

WASP Market Research: Top 500 Online Retail Sites

My contribution to last week eMetrics Industry Insight was a short 10 minutes presentation based on WASP Market Research feature. I shared the results of two analysis I've done:

1. The web analytics tools used on a random sample of 120,000 websites visited by web analysts
2. An analysis of the Top 500 Internet Retail Sites in the US.

WASP - Web Analytics Solution Profiler Market Research

If you don't see the presentation below, you can get view it on SlideShare.

eMetrics Industry Insight (Washington D.C., 081020)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

I have just done minor edits to comment some slides and the design was slightly altered by Slideshare.

The shakedown

Remember that was two days before the announcement of Google Analytics new features.

In my presentation, notice the strong shares of Google Analytics. On slide 10, it's even more interesting to note how often Google Analytics is along with another tool. If I'm Omniture or Coremetrics and I see a growing overlap with GA I would get worried. If I'm one of the 120 other players and Google Analytics is always there... I'm scared like a kid in a haunted house at Halloween!

If you look at the retail sites, 78% of them are already engaged in web analytics. I'm afraid the 22% who aren't will get hit much harder by the economical meldown (slide #8).

The brighter side

On the brighter side, slide #5 indicates "39% of unknown or none", a minor 1% improvement over the presentation I did at the previous eMetrics San Francisco in May (although not significant).

Slide #6 shows the concept of "multiplicity" proposed by Avinash Kaushik isn't quite there yet and there are lots of opportunities for market growth.

The shear reality of the economy

Based on numerous conversations I had at eMetrics, be it with market analysts, vendors or web analysts at companies or consulting agencies, I think we can expect the following:

• Vendors will see a major slowdown. Companies who are already engaged in web analytics probably won't deploy new solutions for a while. They will do with what they have. Those who aren't and really want to get in will jump on Google Analytics.
• Consulting agencies will see a slowdown and change in type of service they provide. Often overloaded, some slowdown might be welcome (but not too much!)... agencies will be solicited for shorter, narrower mandates.
• Web analysts at mature companies. If you are lucky enough to work for a company with a somewhat mature analytical culture, the long term objectives remain and budget shouldn't be slashed radically because the benefits are already proven. As we like to say, it's even more important to do web analytics when the economy goes crazy...
• Web analysts at early stage. If you haven't demonstrated good ROI and are still strugling with implementation, internal politics and such... good luck!
• Education and conferences... if your budget for education & conferences is not already slashed to nearly zero... expect it to be pretty soon!

What's your take? Any comments about the presentation or my views of the market are welcome!

Seeking a Top 1000 site list for study

As you might know, I'm not only tutoring for the Web Analytics Award of Achievement at UBC and working on WASP, I'm also very interested in research & education. As part of my involvement with Laval University eBusiness MBA program (Quebec city, in French), I would like to conduct a research on something that have never been done before.

What is the true value of web analytics?

The goal of the study is to find out and quantify how much of an impact web analytics might have on the bottom line, and predict expected ROI. Some possible questions:

• Are top performers using more sophisticated web analytics tools?
• Are companies with a more mature analytical culture more profitable?
• Are they achieving significantly higher online conversion rates?

Seeking Top 1,000 online sites

I need your help!

I'm looking for a "Top 1000" list of some kind (top online retail sites, top UK sites, etc.) ranked by traffic, or better, by benefits or conversion rates, with available public information. If I can get more then 1000 sites it would be even better since I want to create a predictive model out of this data.

I'm thinking of Compete, Comscore,  maybe Bill Gassman from Gartner or John Lovett from Forrester/JupiterResearch have such a list? Of course... I simply can't afford to pay for that data... But I would be delighted to work and share my results with whoever can get me this list! :)

Web Analytics on European automotive sites

Michael Notté, a Web Analytics Specialist working at Toyota Motor Europe, just published "Automotive & Web Analytics in Europe – what are they using?, a quick study he did with WASP.

His results are similar to private studies I've done for other vertical markets, where Google Analytics is leading the pack, then a slew of other tools. But it also shows a large proportion of those sites don't appear to be using any web analytics solution, something very surprising for such a competitive industry where optimization and behavioral targeting are key.

Click on the image to read Michael's full post.

Note: in his comments, Michael notes WASP isn't detecting correctly eMetrics from Sophus3. This is fixed in the upcoming release.

WASP Market Research: what are the top resellers using?

Update: this post has been updated on 2008-09-22 based on new information about eBay.

For some time now, the good folks at GrokDotCom, the Futurenow blog, have been publishing monthly stats and their opinion about the Top 10 Retailers by Conversion rate. Let's use WASP Market Research feature to check what are the top performers using when it comes to web analytics.

Top US Retailers Web Analytics usage

US eCommerce Site	Tool
1. ProFlowers	Omniture SiteCatalyst
2. 1800flowers.com	Coremetrics Google Analytics
3. QVC	Coremetrics
4. Blair.com	Coremetrics
5. L.L. Bean	Omniture SiteCatalyst
6. Lane Bryant Catalog	Omniture SiteCatalyst
7. Roamans	Omniture SiteCatalyst
8. The Sportsman's Guide	None
9. Office Depot	Coremetrics
10. eBay	Omniture SiteCatalyst*

In the US, Coremetrics and Omniture SiteCatalyst are pretty much head to head. However, while SiteCatalyst is often more widely used then Coremetrics in other verticals, the fact they are so strong in retail might be a good indication of features specifically well geared for this market. Based on my personal experience with both products and independent evaluations, Coremetrics is often cited as "being strong in retail".

eBay has been using Omniture for a while - you have to be in the measured sample to see that they are.  It is roughly 1 in 100 that are sampled into the analytics grouping.

Top Canadian Retails Web Analytics usage

Canadian eCommerce Site	Tool
1. eBay	Omniture SiteCatalyst*
2. Apple Inc.	Omniture SiteCatalyst
3. Amazon	None
4. Shopzilla.com	None
5. Best Buy	Omniture SiteCatalyst Google Analytics
6. American Greetings Properties	Omniture SiteCatalyst
7. Wal-Mart	Omniture SiteCatalyst Google Analytics
8. Sears.ca	Omniture SiteCatalyst Google Analytics
9. Bell.ca	Omniture SiteCatalyst
10. CanadianTire.ca	Omniture SiteCatalyst

At first glance, I'm surprised by this ranking. While some of those entries are clearly Canadian, what is Shopzilla.com doing in there? To my knowledge, it is not even a retailer site per say, but a comparison engine. Sales are not conducted there since users are redirected to Shopzilla partners. Furthermore, Shopzilla isn't even a site specifically doing business in Canada!

The other surprising things are the absence of Coremetrics and the number of sites using both SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics. While it seems Amazon might not be using any of the popular web analytics tools, the fact of the matter is that they are using proprietary solutions (unless someone can confirm otherwise).

My take

Looking at ten sites in two regions is interesting, revealing some some interesting information. If I was responsible for a retail site this would give me some good cues. However, for more in depth analysis, vendors and market analysts can use WASP to analyze tens of thousands of sites at once.