Nearly 70% of organisations are planning to increase their spending on web analytics this year, according to a new international study by the Web Analytics Association (WAA).
The budget increases, the Industry Outlook survey suggests, will mainly be ploughed into training.
Around three quarters of respondents said they were planning to invest in consulting and staffing to help better use of their existing analytics tools, although that's something they might find pretty expensive considering the skills shortage that's affecting the sector.
They also revealed demand for improved integration with other applications – nearly half said they would invest in add-on tools this year to funnel stats from other sources, such as behavioural targeting and search ads, into their web analytics solutions.
That's why it can surely only be a matter of time before Google launches an API for its popular free analytics tool.
The WAA said the survey’s 500+ respondents came from a wide range of job functions in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.
In the UK, analytics spending is also increasing pretty rapidly - it grew by around 25% last year to £70m, according to our recently published Buyer’s Guide.
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Interview: Jim Sterne, president of the Web Analytics Association
Reader comments (1)
10:21AM on 18th January 2008
A free tool that provides an API is not very free because the developers who use this API have a cost.
A measurement tool should not give developers make all the measurement themselves. This is a hidden cost of Google Analytics, and there is a risk of getting wrong data if you rely on developers to do analytics (these are two different jobs).
At Alenty, we have developed an ajax measurement tool that does not have an API, because the tool does all the mesurement work.
See a demo here: http://www.alenty.com/xwiki/bin/view/Tools/Audience20?language=en
(the comments and the comment filtering are 100% ajax and don't call any measurement API).
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