Guess, it’s just a better marketing that gets the clients most of the time. Most of our clients don’t even seem to know why they need analytics in the first place and yet go ahead and buy the costliest products from the market!

Cheers,
Akshay

I was thinking to comment here for sometime now and I finally thought of writing a blog entry in my blog to follow up this great discussion. I have taken a mid way between Eric and Avinash.

You can find the entry at:
http://analyticsbhups.blogspot.com/2007/06/on-enterprise-web-analytics-tools.html

Cheers,
Bhupendra

Netminers should never be ruled out of consideration / usage because of an arbitrary definition of “enterprise class”. The only criteria to rule out a vendor is outline at the top of this post. After that buy Netminers because the feature set it offers is what you need and you can exploit to improve your web business.

For each company the feature set they need is different and unique because each company has a unique collection of skills, mindset, culture and technologies at their disposal.

Having spent all my life in companies as a Practitioner (and not a Vendor or Consultant or Guru or Author) my personal experience is that one should make a intelligent and informed choice on the tool you invest in. Most of the time tools get bought based on arbitrary definitions or pontifications of outsiders (me). My advice is: avoid that.

Here’s the process:

Step 1: Learn (educate yourself on web analytics, reports, analysis and reality).

Step 2: Document your own reality based on step one (flaws in your company, skills you are missing, what you really need that’s missing from what you have).

Step 3: Evaluate vendors based on the document in step two (and use the above mentioned criteria for initial cut: that they have been there, that they’ll be there with you, that they can help you if you need help).

Step 4: Buy Netminers ( :) or whatever turns out to be the right tool for you).

Lots of companies jump to step three having skipped step one and two. Others often do step one and two with very expensive solutions which means that they can’t do those steps well because they don’t’ have any money left over for smart people who could have done those steps intelligently.

Did I answer your comment? I might have beaten around the bush, but you can call me out on that! :)

Thanks so much,

Avinash.
PS: Welcome the the blogosphere, true joy and lots of hours reading the latest on Paris Hilton await you!

I’m new to your blog and to the rest of the WA blogosphere. It is wonderful to discover this wealth of information about a topic which has interested me for so long!!

I largely agree with your definition of “Enterprise Class Web Analytics”. Interestingly, however, your definition covers mostly enterprise vendors; not so much the software or technology they develop. In fact, it is only your second point, scalability, which touches upon the technology as such. This is perhaps not surprising given your 10/90 rule: at the end it’s all about people, not technology.

However, while this is all true in some sense, as a representative of a vendor, I feel urged to stress that technology is meant to enable smart people. No matter how experienced or clever the WA staff or consultants in an organization are, these people can never hope to obtain more insight than the technology allows for. For example, if the technology doesn’t track website visitors at the finest granular level, if it doesn’t allow the analyst to cross tabulate variables, filter reports, define custom KPIs or even integrate tracking data with online surveys (i.e. your interesting “Trinity” approach), then, of course, the organization will never be able to move beyond traditional web analytics.

It may be true that many large organizations rush into acquiring what they hope is an “Enterprise Class Web Analytics Solution” without being able to exploit it fully. But this, I think, is the fault of people (also, or perhaps primarily, on the vendor side), not the technology.

Thanks for an interesting post and a great blog! I look forward to come back!