MM: You know, Bob, this might be a good time just to do a quick sidebar on web analytics. Where it’s been; where it is now; and, where it’s going to be. Who are the firms that are the innovation leaders?

BK: Well, I’m not qualified to speak to whom the innovation leaders are but I can certainly offer my perspective of where web analytics is today. The market leaders include Coremetrics, Omniture, Unica and WebTrends. These companies have somewhat similar offerings if you’re just looking a core data collection, analysis and reporting for web traffic but each has unique strengths that largely go beyond this core functionality.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the great strides Google continues to make in web analytics. Their solution continues to mature and as far as I know they continue to offer significant functionality for free.

Historically web analytics was an IT tool for reporting on baseline site statistics – numbers of visitors, numbers of pages viewed, data usage volumes, etc. Today marketing tends to be the primary consumer of web analytic data and they’re more interested in campaign reporting, keyword and affiliate leads, content consumption and click-path analysis, and conversion funnel reporting.

But web analytics is no longer a stand-alone solution. Rather, and as previously mentioned, this is one of many data sets used to assess the success of attracting and effectively serving web visitors.