Too much information , particularly for companies that don’t have a firm grasp on their goals and KPIs.

The internet for marketing people is very new, it started for technical and and with time it evolved. Marketing now aware of this new medium and trying to engage and understand how to use the data behind the human behaviors online.

Blogs about Analytics rarely site examples of something they optimized.

Hmmm…

2 – Web analytics is still new. We still have to proof we can have value. Data discrepancies is still (wrongly) a show stopper sometime.

Solution? We, as web analytics practitioner, must educate decision makers. Show the VALUE of doing this.

I think the biggest issue that that most companies see their web site as a “static” entity like a house, not as a dynamic entity as it should be.

This means in terms of budgeting time and money, most companies are not including in their budgets something along the lines of “make changes to web site based on analysis of web analytics”.

Most marketers are over-loaded as it is, and it’s simpler for them to just run another campaign then trying to make changes to the site.

Even if the data is collected, correctly analyzed, and deemed actionable and valuable, it may not be cost effective to allocate resources to a channel that only brings in 3% of total revenue. Consider the effort it takes for a multi-million dollar corporation to change a Title Tag…hours of meetings about why to do it, when to do it, can IT do it in-house or does the hosting company have to do it or does the Creative Agency have to do it, does Legal have to review it, does Creative have to review it, does Marketing have to review it, is it ‘on brand’, is the change just to the Corporate site, to the Investor site, to micro-sites, to local sites or all of the above, is a work order required, what is the turnaround time, does this take priority over product and inventory updates; and these are just the discussions before a work order request is even submitted. Now factor in salaries, agency fees, service fees, tracking tool expenses…all this time and money to improve organic rank by 3 positions? It’s just easier to re-run last year’s commercial. Besides, Online’s budget is being cut next Quarter…again.

Marketers need a good tool, but they also need to have a reliable partner that helps them get the most out of the tool they’re using.

Along comes the digital channel, and Marketers are now responsible for many more quantitative objectives through this inherently more reportable medium. This is a huge shift that needs to be accounted for (i.e. How many traditional marketers operated under a direct performance related quota? How many digital marketers efforts are measured in conversion and or sales?)

Again, this is just my opinion, but I would attribute the monitor vs. react ratio that you highlight Bryan to be a trickle down from the more traditional fit of this role in the old enterprise. With the digital channel moving closer to the center of every modern marketers universe, I think your numbers reflect a shift in the role of Marketing in an organization, than on the tools/technology used to support the role.

I treat web analytics as a very technical thing, maybe because I was schooled as an engineer, and most don’t treat it as such. In engineering you’re taught to plan, test, prototype, create, and gather end user feedback. In web analytics, we’re taught to review the data, make some tweaks and hope it moves the needle in the direction we want. Imagine what Windows would be like if the results from the battery of testing before release was not acted upon?! Web analytics are essentially the test results to our web site being used by our visitors.

Change that, make sure the interactive marketing department is a full P&L in its own right, and reward marketers on their profit optimization tactics, and I can garantee you everybody will be measuring like crazy.

I would also contend that many sites consider these tasks to be pretty low on the priority list, even if that notion is a mistake.