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Judah Phillips recently wrote a blog post over at Web Analytics Demystified - Web Analytics Integration: Holy Grail or White Whale. In it, he describes the transition he's seen in the industry over the past few years around integrating web analytics data with data from other sources. In addition, he shares his thoughts on some of the potential integration points.
I wholeheartedly agree that there is much potential in this area. Web analytics data is powerful on its own - but combine it with data from other sources, and it becomes even more so.
Integrating data from any two sources can be difficult. Years ago, my project team was tasked with implementing a customer-facing feature that involved making certain data warehouse data available to the customer. If you're familiar with data warehouses, you'll recognize that this opposite from how a data warehouse is typically used. (If you're not familiar, you can find more information on wikipedia, but the basic idea is that the site data is the data used in for day-to-day operations, often customer-facing. The data warehouse takes the site data then reformats it, aggregates it, etc. to enable internal operations, often reporting). My project team was very familiar with accessing and using site data - and our data warehouse counterparts were very familiar with accommodating the new site tables. Yet, pulling data warehouse data back into the site data was new to both teams, and involved new processes and relationships.
I wholeheartedly agree that there is much potential in this area. Web analytics data is powerful on its own - but combine it with data from other sources, and it becomes even more so.
Integrating data from any two sources can be difficult. Years ago, my project team was tasked with implementing a customer-facing feature that involved making certain data warehouse data available to the customer. If you're familiar with data warehouses, you'll recognize that this opposite from how a data warehouse is typically used. (If you're not familiar, you can find more information on wikipedia, but the basic idea is that the site data is the data used in for day-to-day operations, often customer-facing. The data warehouse takes the site data then reformats it, aggregates it, etc. to enable internal operations, often reporting). My project team was very familiar with accessing and using site data - and our data warehouse counterparts were very familiar with accommodating the new site tables. Yet, pulling data warehouse data back into the site data was new to both teams, and involved new processes and relationships.
If integrating data stored in similar technologies with similar data maintained by teams with a close relationship can be difficult, then integrating data from disparate data sets can be even more difficult. Web analytics data is often captured, stored, and reported on differently than other data. Given this, it often takes focus and resolve to spend the effort to make this possible.
But, the payoff can be tremendous. More recently I was on a project team tasked with building out a system to collect click-stream data. Even before the Proof of Concept was initiated, one of the key requirements was that the resulting system be able to integrate with some of the existing data stores. And that proved to be a prescient requirement. Even before work on that capability was completed, we were discovering analyses that would benefit from combining the click-stream data with data from other data sets.
In summary, I agree with the author that integrating web analytics data with other data can be very powerful and I am glad to hear that he has noticed a shift in the attitudes and availability of features around this!
But, the payoff can be tremendous. More recently I was on a project team tasked with building out a system to collect click-stream data. Even before the Proof of Concept was initiated, one of the key requirements was that the resulting system be able to integrate with some of the existing data stores. And that proved to be a prescient requirement. Even before work on that capability was completed, we were discovering analyses that would benefit from combining the click-stream data with data from other data sets.
In summary, I agree with the author that integrating web analytics data with other data can be very powerful and I am glad to hear that he has noticed a shift in the attitudes and availability of features around this!
