Engage-Digital

Has the price of insight just got cheaper?When Google Analytics was launched in November 2005, a world of opportunity was opened up to owners of websites of all sizes, that’s because Google made it free. Microsoft followed suit in 2007 with Gatineau and now Yahoo! has bought IndexTools and announced that it too will be available for free.

Both Google Analytics and Microsoft Gatineau are good products and in the right hands they can yield considerable dividends but IndexTools is in another league.

Google’s early experience showed that a free tool whilst immensely popular can, at times, be hard to manage from the supplier perspective due to high demand. Google do not offer full support, and queries can only be submitted online.

Both Google and Microsoft offer free products as added value to their respective Adwords and AdCentre suites however, whilst the Google and MS products offer some differentiation between one another both broadly compete at the same level.

By Yahoo! making it available for free, IndexTools arguably becomes the best free web analytics product available and any site owner or manager looking to improve the level of insight from web analytics should consider this option. Additionally, now such a high quality product has become available for nothing the 20/80 rule in web analytics (spend 20% of your budget on the analytics tool and 80% on the talent) may shift further still towards the talent.

However, anybody wishing to sign up for an IndexTools account must go through a partner reseller and in doing so there will be certain restrictions; to begin with it looks like there will (sensibly) be a limit on the availability of new accounts, additionally there is a monthly cap on the volume of page views per account. It also seems logical that the resellers could take the load in offering support and this would be good as long as the support is of a higher comparable standard to Google’s and matches the quality of the IndexTools product. Of course there may also be a fee attached to this; certainly there is an opportunity to collect a consultancy fee.

As a free product with a more advanced feature set IndexTools’ Enterprise level package will appeal to mid-sized organisations looking to take a step up and larger organisations looking to save money, something that may resonate in the current economic climate. However, the extent of the restrictions and the current limitations on accounts mean that there may still be a bit of a wait before we see an enterprise level tool having an impact on the cost of web analytics at the top end of the market.

This is an article I wrote for issue 176 of .net magazine in the UK.

I used to be Head of Online Planning and Buying at a London based media buying agency. I was there for 3 years between 1999 and 2002. In my first year our nascent online media planning and buying department experienced a 1000% growth in billings and some growing pains. Of course overall spend was much lower then than it is now as online media was also in its infancy relatively speaking.

Then in 2001 things slowed dramatically. At the time, growth in online media had been fed by new internet start ups with lots of VC capital looking to advertise to help grow their businesses and drive inexorably towards IPO! Additionally it was driven by a growth in interest from mainstream advertisers looking to dip a toe in and check the temperature.

Advertising is often considered a bellwether of economic decline as it’s one of the first things to be cut from budgets as belts tighten and when the slow down came in 2001 billings pretty much flat lined in our corner of the online media world, but other channels fared worse.

Part of the reason why online advertising may have fared better is due to much greater levels of accountability compared with other forms of advertising. Now consider the level of accountability we have with web analytics.

Back then in the early “naughties” web analytics was barely a twinkle in a webmaster’s eye, now it is proudly sitting at the boardroom table.

Not only can web analytics bring even greater accountability to on and offline advertising (if set up correctly) but it also completely opens up the level of business accountability for the website itself. It can be used to drive growth and cut costs through improved efficiencies across the whole spectrum of online communication.

If we are truly staring down the barrel of worsening economic conditions, especially looking forward into 2009 then arguably the worst thing any organisation could do would be to cut its web analytics budget.

Back in January I was working with a client that operates in an industry that is itself suffering but the saving grace for this particular client was their new website which had proved a great success in the face of a generally poorer trading climate.

If economic conditions deteriorate web analytics and the insight that it provides should be safeguarded and pored over with even greater intensity in the same way that normal business reporting and results are.