Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

The downsides of decentralization in a large company are that everyone runs their own fiefdoms, multiple tools persist, and everyone ends up learning the same lessons after putting in the same amount of effort, often dealing with the same challenges. In a nutshell, there are no efficiencies of scale.

Recently, data collection has shifted to JavaScript-based solutions and therefore data collection, storage, and processing moved into the cloud (hosted by your application service provider rather than in-house). This has eliminated the need to maintain IT teams for web analytics, except perhaps to implement tags and other required code on web pages

strongly believe that web analytics should be owned by the business function, optimally the function that owns the web strategy. Web analysts need to think, imagine, and move at the pace of the business.

The team implements a standardized web measurement system across the company in partnership with other units, and it also establishes various contracts, selects technology solutions, creates best practices and, most of all, keeps the company on the cutting edge.

day. It will take us some time to figure out the optimal data collection and associated technologies.

Additionally, the centralized team can share best practices and standard dashboards and knowledge and expertise.

Web analytics started its life in the IT organization, primarily because at that time web analytics meant servers, log files, and complex handwritten code to parse the log files and pump out reports.

you cannot collect rock-solid data for mobile analytics, social media analytics, or distributed content analytics, then you have my sympathy.

Centralization is a model where all of the analytics team sits under the auspices of, say, the corporate marketing function and from that perch serves the needs of multiple business teams. Decentralization is a model where each business team has their own analytics team (and perhaps even their own tools) and that team meets all the local needs of b