Web analytics are finally getting simpler

When he spoke at SES HK, Kaushik denounced most analytics companies as “dump trucks filled with trash” and the cause of many poorly designed websites and SEO strategies.

Avoiding this path has been key to web analytics and measurement firm, Effective Measure’s success, said its CEO, Richard Webb who will also be speaking on this topic today at the I-Com Global Summit in Rome.

Since it was founded in Dubai three years ago, the company has grown to 26 countries and measures an active monthly/device profile base of more than 500 profiles across 3,500 sites in 80 countries.

“From our perspective, we believe that the new big data landscape and measurement is actually simplifying,” said Webb in a phone interview with Campaign Asia-Pacific.

“Comscore offers 27 products; Nielsen has over 20; these have been largely cobbled together through acquisitions over the years. We took advantage of being a late mover and worked to offer a common platform that offered a simplified common dataset,” he said.

Webb believes people need less, not more detail. “Simple is much more elegant than throwing huge quantities of data that actually confuse people. People need less data, in a form that’s easy to digest and use. It’s a consumer-driven market.”

Effective Measure also opted to launch and establish itself in emerging markets where the landscape was simpler and clients weren’t already bogged down by legacy analytical products. Today it’s largely the defacto standard in 21 countries and is particularly dominant in Southeast Asia. Next month, it will officially launch in India.

Pulse research group founder and CEO Bob Chua has also noticed a similar trend. Founded in 2005 in Malaysia, the group now has offices in New York, London and Sydney.

“Clients not only suffer from information overload, they are totally overwhelmed and inundated by data,” observed Chua. “What's key is to measure and correlate the right sort of data that is relevant particular to them, hence the emergence and huge emphasis on big data at the moment.”

Pulse Group responded to this about three years ago when it started to develop dashboards that could be arranged hierarchically based on relevance that would allow clients to spot, predict or simulate outcomes. “We then develop such modules into app's that can easily be accessible in real-time throughout relevant teams or individuals within an organisation or global network,” explained Chua.

The ease-of-use and easy accessibility of these dashboards has made data available to everyone in an organisation, not just an elite handful of analysts, better enabling companies to take act on information at every level, commented Webb.