Multi-Channel Analytics

It's the final days of 2007 as I write this and it'll be the first days of 2008 when you read this. I spent the last month or so of 2007 talking with clients about their plans for the 2008 (see Client Concerns for 2008 for some examples).

One thing that's come out clear and simple is that for many clients web analytics is...umm...dead. If not dead at least not the be-all and end-all that it once was.

I'm not surprised. I first wrote about this in Whether now, Web Analytics or "Sunday afternoon musings while looking over fields, farms and ocean". I even mentioned in that 11 Nov 07 post that I'd be writing something here in AllBusiness about it. I waited a few months so I could get a better understanding of what's happening. It all finally gelled when I was talking to a NYC based client and was pretty much clarified when one of NextStage's developers, a fellow we call Stonewall, brought The Economist's Many ways to skin a cat article to my attention.

I realized that fewer and fewer (and in the past year, exactly two) clients are coming to NextStage and asking us to help them improve their web performance. More and more clients are coming to us and asking us to help their marketing. One of the two clients mentioned above, when I asked for their print, radio, tv, etc., material quickly understood that marketing and sales don't occur only on the web, they occur cross-channel and that prospects are touched multi-channel.

I'm not the first one to write multi-channel is important. I think I'm the first one to write that web analytics is a subset of multi-channel analytics and multi-channel will dominate. The allure of web analytics was that it was directly measurable...kind of. I'm still not convinced that what people are measuring directly equates to what people will do (predictability is what it's all about as far as NextStage is concerned).

Is multi-channel directly measurable? Yes, of course it is. You just have to know what to measure. The great fear of marketing finally becoming accountable will be realized (one of our clients said "NextStage turns marketing into a science." I love that quote) and it is remarkably easy to do once you're willing to change what you're measuring and your method of measurement.

Just as the 20th century's advances in physics changed what we measured, how we measured it and ultimately changed our world from an energy to an information economy, so will the next set of changes move us to what's been promised for a while, an economy of the mind.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

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• New Communications Forum 2008 22-25 April 08 in Sonoma Valley, CA

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