Web Analytics-no tags or logs

As with any new technology, there is a lag while the users catch up to the vendor hype and start to drive towards making it actually useful. Web Analytics is no exception. Most of our users started with analyzing web logs. As their traffic grew, so did the number of servers and the number and size of the web logs. When it takes you more than a night to process a day’s traffic, something has to give. Some went to tagging solutions which at least gave them cleaner data that was already organized by visitor. But, whether they used a hosted service or managed their own data, the actual information was not much better than from web logs. Adding standard tags to a site is fairly painless, but try picking out interesting data like order numbers, catalogue numbers, campaign tracking ids, error codes in the HTML, etc. Now you are into the realm of custom tagging and that gets hard, fast. It also becomes a maintenance nightmare on sites that are constantly changing.

But the marketing department is figuring out what analytics can do for them and are starting to drive the conversation. I love it when that happens. Its great to see a technology really get used and appreciated! Top of the list, is that they want more specific information. IT departments that are already overworked and underpaid (they say!) are feeling the strain and baulking at a whole new level of effort to support custom tagging.

Our larger users have solved this problem with passive data capture that can monitor all the traffic, filter and clean it and sessionize it by visitor in real-time and pick out the data they need with simple rules. Of course, the marketing guys still want their favorite analytics package so they get to choose because passive capture can just emulate a tag server log and feed the reporting package of their choice.

The really interesting evolution that we are seeing is that there are all sorts of other applications that web data can be used for. Take fraud detection for example. Most of the techniques already exist and are used by banks etc. but they are after the fact. To catch the problem sooner involves alterations to their content and application servers – alterations that will need to be changed often. This is a big deal because a bug in a fraud detection application could break their site, which is their money generator. With passive data capture, they can get the data they need and build systems externally that cannot compromise the web site itself. We are seeing this more and more as a huge advantage as more uses are found for web data.

For more information on Passive Data Capture, Packet Sniffing for Web Analytics see www.metronomelabs.com