Web Analytics has evolved into a copy and paste exercise. Go to any of the popular, free analytics services and the implementation instructions might read:

“Paste the analytics tracking code into each of your website pages and tracking begins immediately.”

Fundamentally, this statement is correct: copy this code, and analytics will start. Yet, the copy and paste mentality does little in the way of offering deeper analysis that can so often be critical to business decisions, both tactical and strategic.

By no means is this a slight on the free analytics services. Most are easy to implement, provide accurate data, and integrate well with popular online advertising tools. Rather, it’s indicative of how they have positioned their tools to be so customer friendly even the most techno-unsavvy individual can implement a very powerful toolset.

However, setting the course to discover critical stories through analysis is difficult, time consuming, and challenging to manage. Cut and paste analytics is no longer applicable, and pure-play “specialist” type skills can be too siloed to drive real discovery. Instead, design teams, development teams, network teams, usability teams - all the specialists in their own disciplines - need to be sitting at the same table speaking the same language - striving towards the same goal, but guided by a common understanding of technologies.

Clearly most companies want to align their resources in such a way, but many do not. Utilizing resources in this way can ultimately create a seemingly immovable monolith of people, projects, and processes - the very things that have been flagged as a significant drain on corporate resources. In many cases this is enough of a deterrent to implementing truly meaningful marketing intelligence initiatives.

For example (using a model of efficiency):

A company decides it wants to implement a new navigation bar on their website. Its daily traffic has been increasing significantly to nearly 1 million pageviews per day and they want to provide a “better” experience for their users. The designers hand off the new design to the coders, and the new navigation bar is implemented quickly. All told, the new navigation structure adds approximately 10K in additional data for all the elements needed to make the navigation work. It’s a sleek, low-maintenance site update process and it gets the job done without the need for meetings, special budgets, or the involvement of a lot of people or teams.

In that example the end goal was accomplished - the implementation of a new navigation bar in a quick, simple, and efficient manner.

But moving beyond efficiencies into meaningful intelligence puts the analysis monolith directly in the path of where most companies need to go. Yet even for the simplest endeavors it must be tackled with a vengeance in order to reveal deeper insight. In the case of a new navigation bar, meaningful marketing intelligence can help raise issues that may otherwise go unnoticed:

• Are those pageviews from people or robots?
• Does syndicated data such as RSS feeds count against those pageviews?
• How many people actually make use of the navigation?
• How many pageviews were generated by standard web browsers? Mobile/WAP browser?
• Are pageviews impacted by proxy servers (such as AOL) that may be altering the actual amount of traffic to the site?
• Are static page elements caching themselves inside the visitor’s browsers, or reloading every time?
• Can advanced styling technologies be implemented to deliver more compact file sizes?

And so, with this type of intelligence that comes from both a broad understanding and specific knowledge of disciplines involved in marketing intelligence strategies, the simple exercise of updating a site’s navigation becomes much more meaningful:

An organization decides it wants to implement a new navigation bar on their website. The daily traffic has been increasing, and is now at the level of 1 million pageviews per day (this data from the analytics team). Only a small percentage of the traffic is from robots and automated scrapers, so there are actually people looking at the site. And, while use of syndicated content has risen, those individuals have a different navigation structure, both for RSS feeds and mobile site access. There’s very little traffic being proxied through services like AOL or MSN, so more people are actually touching the site on a regular basis instead of fetching the content from a proxy server.

The design teams come up with an elegant solution that scores great marks in usability testing, taking its cues from data gathered on how users are interacting with the various page elements. The development team sees that a great majority of site visitors are using next-gen browsers which enables the use of more advanced styling techniques, reducing load times and filesizes, and ultimately giving the designers what they want in terms of an interactive experience. In addition, cache-controls were set on navigation content, since the navigation items rarely changed from day to day, meaning that site visitors would only download the navigation when an element had changed, versus downloading it every time from the webserver.

Based on the intelligence gathered, the new navigation filesize is variable (6-8K vs. 10K), depending on what browser type or access method is being used. It seems like a minute amount of data in today’s broadband-enabled world, but the small increase has big implications. Even though the additional data is less than 1% of what could fit on a regular 3 1/2″ floppy disk, a 10K increase in data size means almost 3.5 extra terabytes of data that’s being sent to site visitors over the course of a year (that’s approximately 150,000 trees made in to paper and printed). That’s a significant increase for something so small as a navigation menu. The server team understands this and calculates the impact on network congestion and hardware failure rates, and ultimately recommends adding an additional server to handle the increased load and maintain scalability and redundancy.

The small change of reworking a navigation bar has evolved into something much more complex. More people are involved, implementation timeframes have been longer, and costs are potentially higher than the original scenario, both in terms of capital assets and people costs. Yet, a deeper approach to implementing a new navigation bar potentially means bigger savings in the long run and a more strategic alignment of resources that ultimately will prove beneficial. If this were an e-commerce site and the site was down for an hour due to hardware failure, or congested due to traffic issues, how much revenue would be lost then?

Meaningful marketing intelligence is technologically complex and cannot happen within a silo. Though specific knowledge and expertise in technology disciplines is critical, integration through a broad understanding of technologies, disciplines and crafts - and how they all work together in the digital experience - is vital to successful, meaningful analytics intelligence.