Beyond the many challenges of developing a website from start to finish, companies that choose to develop their website in-house also face challenges when it comes to the marketing aspect of their sites. These challenges may stem from budget limitations, lack of knowledge and in-house expertise, difficulties of dealing with and optimizing for different platforms, and tackling the complex world of web analytics.
A recent survey by Think with Google uncovered many analytics challenges faced by online marketers. Specifically, 61% of marketing decision makers struggled to access or integrate the data they needed in 2016.
Apparently, tackling analytics for your website is a challenge even for seasoned marketers, let alone smaller companies with less marketing resources. Companies that cannot afford pricey web analytics product suites might look into building an in-house solution, but that would require a great amount of expertise.
Your company might already be using some sort of clickstream web analytics tool to provide a deeper understanding of how users behave on your website. You might also be familiar with web analytics dashboards, or customer experience, session recording, heatmap, and BI tools. For the enterprise, integrating big data into a data warehouse (for example, a MySQL-Redshift integration) to allow deep yet careful data analysis is also becoming a common practice.
With the growing hype around big data and the need to measure and track everything on your site, a web analytics solution is a must for small and large businesses alike. Web development teams and marketers are experiencing a knowledge gap between their traditional skill sets and the new complexities of web analytics.
This was one of the motivations behind an ambitious project by CoolaData — makers of a big data behavioral analytics platform, commonly used for mobile and app analytics. The team at CoolaData took on a project to make the available content about web analytics and BI for digital marketing more accessible. They built the Web Analytics & BI Wiki – the first knowledge hub that collects all the relevant information on the subject and organizes it in a meaningful structure:
The wiki started with an intensive research project – the first stage was building a tree of over 200 sub-topics around web analytics and BI, including web analytics concepts and metrics, specialized analytics such as mobile or SEO analytics, BI for digital marketing, and web analytics & BI technologies.
The CoolaData team collected over 100,000 web pages that cover these subjects, hand-picked the most relevant ones for each category, and divided them into “content types” such as How To, Case Studies, Real Life Examples, Vendor Information, Product Comparisons, and so on.
The wiki is still is growing with over 100 content pages, and new category pages are added regularly.
We’re quite sure this new community resource can save a lot of time and help many mobile and digital agencies become much more familiar with web/mobile analytics, BI, and big data.