Why the right web analytics platform is (even more) business critical
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Forrester just recently published The Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q4 2017. In it we rank the leading web analytics platform providers including Adobe, AT Internet, Cooladata, Google, IBM, Mixpanel, and Webtrekk.
You may ask, "Why should I care?" After all, when it comes to understanding customers on digital touchpoints, most businesses have extended their intelligence capabilities beyond browser analytics to now include app, social, media, ads, and much more, including even IoT. Digital intelligence (DI) practices have certainly continued to evolve over the past two decades.
The fact is that web analytics technology and approaches have continued to modernize in step with the customer digital engagement and digital transformation journeys that firms are undergoing. In this latest research comparing the leading web analytics enterprise vendors, we found that:
- Modern web analytics technologies now form the core of the digital intelligence stack. Today's digital practitioners are using their web analytics systems for a lot more, including: To aid behavioral targeting and personalization; manage their digital data; integrate it with testing; understand app engagement; and for cross-channel attribution.
- Web analytics remains the single most dominant digital intelligence technique. Almost three-quarters of respondents in Forrester's Q2 2017 Global Digital Intelligence Platforms Forrester Wave Customer Reference Online Survey used web analytics from their DI platform providers. Web analytics adoption is significantly greater than the next three dominant digital intelligence techniques which were: application analytics (48 percent), interaction analytics (43 percent) and cross-channel attribution (41 percent).
- Web engagement is still critical to business success. Since the late 90s, there has been a significant shift of digital customer engagement beyond the browser and email (e.g. to mobile apps, social, kiosks, and IoT). Yet the clear majority of active internet users still interact via browsers, which remains the most important digital channel for consumers to make online purchases.
As you race to digitally transform your business you should indeed build out, measure, and optimize customer engagement in the new channels such as app and IoT. Don't forget that web pages are still an important part of customer engagement and modern web analytics is still critical to the practice of customer insights.
--By James McCormick, Principal Analyst
Read how insights-driven businesses can optimize digital intelligence in our latest research here. [subscription required]
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