My Predictions for 2007

So what is year 2007 going to look like for Web Analytics? Here are my predictions for 2007

1. A Great Career Field– There will be a lot more jobs in this field in 2007. A great year for those who are planning to enter this field or looking to move into better jobs in this field. Most marketing jobs will have web analytics as a requirement. Currently there are 1024 open job on Indeed.com but I expect this number to rise as there will lot more openings than qualified candidates.
2. Lot more new writers – There will a lot more bloggers and writers in this field. Can somebody count how many blogs on Web Analytics are currently? This will help me set the baseline.
3. Web Analytics won’t be standing alone – Marketers will want 360 view of the customers. Integration of various data sources and tools will be expected from web analytics and other supporting tool vendors. Omniture started the trend with Omniture Genesis and this will continue we will see more acquisitions and partnerships similar to Omnitures.
4. Web Analytics will be about taking actions – More and more marketers would like to take actions and not just report the findings. It just won’t be about what happened, it will be about taking action to drive sales, user satisfaction, lead generation etc. Incentives and bonuses will be tied to the online KPIs. Optimization and Behavioral Targeting will become a common term used by marketers.
5. Behavioral Targeting – Only few main behavioral network players will be left and some of the existing ones with poor networks will either go out of business or be sold. See my previous article on why size of network matter. Behavioral Targeting won’t exist in isolation. Web Analytics tool will have to support behavioral targeting and visa versa. Also, on-site behavioral targeting will become very common.

Agree? Disagree? I would love to hear your comments.

Who moved my traffic?

Your site traffic is down, you are running up and down the hallway freaking out. Who moved my traffic, who moved my traffic. Wait before you get all anxious about the traffic. Downturn in your traffic might not be something to freak out.
Below are some of the things to look at to find out why your traffic is down. Some reasons are within you control (stop freaking start working) some out of your control. Some might be very obvious and some might not.

• Seasonal Impact – Do year over year comparison and see how the traffic pattern was last year.
• May be overall traffic is down even for your competitors (do comparison at http://www.alexaholic.com/ )
• Has a new competitor entered the space? How is their traffic?
• Traffic drivers – How was the traffic from these sources?
  Campaigns (Banners, Search, Emails) – Did they ran as normal.
  Email – Did anything change there? Did you send out your regular emails, newsletters?
  Search – Did you change anything here, has search engines changed their algorithm.
  Search – Did you change your site? Meta Tags? Content?
  Affiliates – Has any affiliates changed their site.
• Environmental Factors – How is the weather in the geographical region where you have most visitors from? Nice weather can keep people outdoors, resulting in lower traffic.
• Was there any site outage?
• Have you made change to your web analytics tool configuration? If yes, investigate what those were? Problems in filter could be filtering out a lot of traffic.

This is a work in progress. Feel free to send me other things that you might look for.