X Change Web Analytics Conference 107: David McBride of Comcast on Hybrid Web Analytics Solutions

[Side note – If you missed my presentation on Semphonic’s new Advanced Analytics program, you can check it out here. This is a sales presentation, but I think it’s a very cool program and there’s quite a bit of analytics content in there as well!]

I’ve enjoyed a number of Huddles with David, both as a leader and a participant, and I think his topic this year should be keenly interesting to almost anyone managing an enterprise analytics effort.

If you’re not sure what David means by “hybrid” Web analytics solutions, here is the full huddle description:

Thanks to increasing levels of sophistication in the web analytics space, many practitioners are considering novel, cost-saving alternatives to the standard single-vendor model. In this session, we will focus on the various flavors of “hybrid” solutions, including combing free solutions for entry-level analysis and paid or custom solutions for deep-dive analysis. We will also address concerns many large enterprises face when considering the standard Terms of Service proffered by “free” solutions providers and suggest approaches to dealing with these standard terms. We will discuss strategies for introducing this concept to organizations, both the initial “selling” of the concept and the transition process. Even if you have no plans to deploy a hybrid or home-grown system in the near-term, you will benefit from attending this huddle as it will provide you with strategic, long-term options.

At Comcast, David has to deal with the extraordinary amounts of data that large media and consumer properties these days routinely generate. That volume – along with the relatively low value of each page view tend to make Web analytics seem pretty expensive to this type of company. A very large B2B company may look at the cost of measuring a page view and think it’s tiny relative to the worth of the information. A very large media or consumer company may see things quite differently.

But large media and consumer companies have a genuine stake in sophisticated, visitor-level measurement. With staggering amounts of inventory, ad sales have been turned into a commodity business. Preserving “premium” inventory means selling an audience not a page. And that means dramatically improving the quality of their online visitor-level tracking.

Large consumer sites face similar challenges. The opportunities for targeting, research, and analytics nearly all reside at the individual not the site aggregate level.

So high-volume sites are caught in a pincer between the high-cost (to them) of enterprise measurement solutions and the need to meet both basic reporting and high-end visitor tracking requirements.

Of course, you don’t even have to be a high-volume site to think this way. Web analytics tools – even enterprise class ones – would more accurately be described as Web reporting tools. They often lack many of the most important and fundamental analytic capabilities. Those capabilities have grown, of course, and the new generation of enterprise Web analytics tools provide much better filtering and multi-dimensional analysis than they did only 1 or 2 years ago.

But they still leave a lot of ground uncovered.

On the other hand, free tools have improved significantly – especially against the basic reporting needs of most organizations. So the possibility of a “hybrid” solution is intriguing. By combining a free, high-quality reporting tool with a home-grown or cloud-based high-end analytics solution, it might be possible to cover both ends of the Web analytics spectrum more efficiently than can be done with a single enterprise solution.

I should emphasize the word might, because hybrid solutions carry some obvious risks. With two discrete systems, you will always face significant challenges around reconciliation and use. You will be unable to move the powerful and interesting segmentations you build in your high-end analysis solution into your general reporting. You could find that your high-end solution is, itself, much more difficult and expensive to maintain than an enterprise SaaS solution. You may find that your free solution won’t clear basic legal barriers within your organization.

David’s been on the front-lines exploring exactly this type of approach. And while I wouldn’t say that any enterprise should necessarily be doing a “hybrid” solution, I would say that any serious enterprise should be aware of the possibility and cognizant of the opportunity and the risks. We have quite a few high-powered, high-data attendees at X Change this year who’ve been working along similar lines. So this should be an intriguing chance to hear what they have to say and join the conversation around the potential of the hybrid approach.

You can register for X Change here and see the complete list of Huddles (which is pretty impressive) here.