What Your Website Doesn't Know

“Are you fishing where the fish are?”

That’s what we’ve been asking around our company lately, because, despite the fact that we invented traditional website analytics, it’s over. Dead. Kaput. Most of what analytics companies help you measure and improve – brand interactions, tipping points, influence points, decision points, retention points, acquisitions, and so on – happens off your website and in an increasingly decentralized model.

Your Web experience today is fragmented. It’s not just about your website.

The Splinternet. A huge chunk of your interactions with customers occur away from your website and across multiple channels. The proportion might be more or less for you, but in terms of digital marketing, are you fishing where the fish are?

Customer-centric and insight-driven action. With all these channels, you need to be relevant to get value out of any customer interaction or you risk them forever ignoring you like the kid in school with the permanent cowlick. How? Leveraging and automating insight about those people to speak only to their needs.

Social marketing. Digital has connected humanity on a scale only scratched back when CompuServe gave us more news about the 1989 San Francisco earthquake than our beloved television. Embracing this roller coaster of new platforms and interconnectedness is less about one particular social network, channel, or device. So social marketing means using the social/viral nature of digital in an extremely relelvant way across various media with integrated campaigns to drive engagement and influence perceptions.

This is no short-term fad; you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Marketing is young, and digital marketing is even younger. Many industry “best practices” are barely 18 months old. Despite that, “Web analytics” providers will barely recognize the world in the next few years. Remember “hit counters”? Soon pageviews will give us similar nostalgia.

Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, talking about mobile analytics, sees the future of a decentralized Web experience:

“Imagine having the ability to directly compare your mobile applications across multiple platforms and technologies, to compare mobile web and mobile application initiatives, and to compare your mobile efforts to your fixed web efforts…If you’re like the majority of our clients today, you certainly would…”

What will we do in this new world?

• Find relevant commonalities in segments of customers who like us on Facebook, open our e-mails, but still can’t pull the trigger.
• Look across our channels to see that, while our new coupon app seemed a good idea and had some early success, it doesn’t bring customers back as well as our “haul” video aggregator. (And what’s up with those videos, anyway?)

Just as we ushered in website analytics, our completely open platform will be the engine driving the innovation again.

Why talk about this now? Today, we purchased Transpond and announced the availability of an apps platform. This lets you – yes, you personally, because no programming is required – create and measure social marketing apps, native to the Facebook, iPhone, and Android platforms. And (if you choose), tie that activity together and put in concert with behavior on all of your other digital touch points, including the website (we haven’t left it off the map).

And we have more on the horizon. Adobe chewed up Omniture; IBM snapped up Coremetrics. They will try to squeeze the last bit of value out of the old Internet. We’re not looking to get hitched, thanks. We have a lot of living to do.

This decentralized Web experience will be a huge change. Hell, it’s here today. The first groups that can remold their people, processes, and technologies to produce relevant, customer centric, cross channel marketing, then measure and improve it quickly, will be visionaries, pioneers, and ultimately the leaders of tomorrow.