Thalasar Ventures

Web analytics consultancies offer support to clients whichever web analytics tool they have implemented on their website.  The key is they understand the type of problems that their clients are facing and which data is required to solve these business problems.  However, given the costs of consultancy services, clients prefer work to be done quickly.  Cost is a clear barrier to signing for work with a consultancy, especially if the initial investment required is high before any return can be seen.

The paid web analytics tool like SiteCatalyst, WebTrends and Coremetrics offer a lot for your money.  With SiteCatalyst, you can implement over 200 custom variables of different types and configure the tool to link reports in whatever way is best for your business.  This level of customisation is amazing but it also leads to a very complex tool that can make it difficult to quickly extract usable information.  It is difficult to remember all of your options, how they interact, what are the best ways to get information out of the web analytics tool to answer the business questions that are being asked.  In order to answer these questions effectively, you need to be using the web analytics tool on a regular basis, learning the particular set-up.  While this is the job of a full time employee or the task that is set for a web analytics contractor, it can be a challenge for a consultant with a high daily rate who is tasked with a get in, get answers, give recommendations on actions to improve business performance and get out approach.

With that in mind, it can be easier for a web analytics consultant to work with clients who use Google Analytics.  Google Analytics is a simpler web analytics tool in a lot of ways, it only allows five custom variables, events are less used and page names commonly default to the website URL structure.  However it does offer some powerful features which in the hands of an experienced and creative web analyst, more than make up for the lack of custom implementation.  With features like Advanced Segmentation and Filters, it is possible to quickly come to grips with the data and extract out relevant insights and intelligence.  Business questions can be answered and recommendations made for actions the organisation can take to improve business performance.

Beyond this, Google Analytics is also great for web analytics consultant to work with as the configuration is not that technical.  The options are not that many, create multiple profiles, strip out URL parameters, define internal search, create goals & funnels and create filters.  But with these few elements, amazing things can be done.  Without changing a single line of code, a non-technical web analyst can transform near unusable web analytics data into something that can highlight the key weak points of a website, account for both micro and macro conversion actions and detail what content visitors are most interested in.

The lack of complexity and standardisation of reports within Google Analytics reduces the amount of time a web analytics consultant needs to spend on learning the set-up for a new client.  They can use the available features to quickly get to the data they need, spending time on extracting insights from the data and identifying opportunities for actions that the client can take that will lead to an improvement in their business performance.  The initial investment required for web analytics consultancy is greatly reduced allowing organisations to dip their toes in and evaluate the potential return from investing in consultancy with minimal risk.  This benefits both them and the web analytics consultancy that has picked up the new business.

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