Analytics Expert Blog

Web Analytics Demystified announced yesterday that former Forrester Analyst, John Lovett, is joining the team. I had the chance to catch up with Web Analytics Demystified founder, Eric Peterson, to ask him a few questions about what this new move means.

First, congrats on attracting top talent like John Lovett.

Thanks Justin. Given that John could have gone more or less anywhere he wanted within the sector after working for a great brand like Forrester I am honored that he’d choose Web Analytics Demystified. During our conversations, and you can read this in his “Hello World” blog post on our site, it became clear to me that John recognized the value that Aurelie and I have built at Web Analytics Demystified and that there were great synergies between our collective view of how this market should and will evolve.

What does access to John mean for your clients? New capabilities, more bandwidth, both, more?

Great question. First off, all existing Web Analytics Demystified retainer clients now have access to both John and Aurelie’s expertise. My view is that our primary differentiator is our depth of experience, especially regarding the truly strategic use of this technology, and clearly giving clients access to John and Aurelie’s expertise will create immediate and tangible value.

Longer term, having John on the team does allow Web Analytics Demystified to be more places at once here in the U.S. I have had to turn down way too many great speaking and consulting opportunities simply because I have a family and am somewhat protective about my time. John has a young family as well, but between the three of us you will see a much larger presence at public events around the world starting in 2010.

What is in store the near term future of Web Analytics Demystified? 5 year outlook? More growth, big plans, more?

Our goals are very simple: To work with the best technology firms and end-user businesses working to power true competitive differentiation through the use of digitally collected data. When I quit my job at Visual Sciences it was because I saw a huge opportunity to provide strategic guidance to the best companies in the world. It turns out I under-estimated the opportunity pretty significantly and so by adding Rock Stars like John and Aurelie Web Analytics Demystified is able to better execute against the opportunity that exists today, much less the one that I believe will emerge in 2010 and beyond.

There is a trend of analyst firm talent going to work for consulting firms like yours. Gartner just acquired AMR. You’ve been through the Jupiter acquisition. Is the analyst business model in trouble?

No. Companies like Forrester and Gartner are stronger than ever in my opinion, primarily because when belts are tight every manager wants as much validation about their investments as possible. I love working in compliment with the analyst firms because our business is the next logical step after you get their advice. Bill Gassman is a great resource for our entire community, as is Suresh Vittal, Megan Burns, and I don’t doubt whoever Forrester gets to replace John.

Top tech blogs like Read Write Web and GigaOm are now offering reports much like traditional analyst firms. Does WAD have any plans to provide such reports?

None that I’m prepared to discuss.

Coming back to analytics, what does your team see as the major trends for this industry over the next 5 years?

Well, I don’t know if you read it but I just published a white paper with SAS called “The Coming Revolution in Web Analytics“. In the paper I speculate that over the next handful of years our industry is going to have to become more comfortable with the “analytics” portion of our name and start to leverage more powerful analytics applications that don’t just help users visualize data but actually model, forecast, and predict future outcomes.

Not to beat a dead horse but for the most part what Webtrends and your competitors provide today are tools for data visualization and reporting, not true analysis. You can learn a lot from using your tools, especially when an experienced operator is at the helm, but as soon as we start to ask questions about “what if” and the statistical validity of some of the data we’re using we either A) end up working in Excel or B) end up stuck.

And don’t get me wrong, I recognize that business intelligence as it currently exists in many companies is a broken process. But my impression of the market is that if we don’t get senior management’s attention pretty quickly we’re going to be relegated to the sidelines (especially the for fee solutions like Webtrends in light of Google and Yahoo’s continued efforts to improve their applications.)

On this point an outsider to our community recently said “hey, you guys all suck” (he of course used like 80,000 words to say that, but I digress.) I don’t think we suck — I think that web analytics and the vendors, consultants, and especially practitioners are totally awesome, wonderful, and amazing people — but we clearly need to do more to demonstrate the value that the use of web analytics (sic) tools provide within the Enterprise.

Did I mention that if you’re stuck figuring out how to make this all happen you can give John Lovett at Web Analytics Demystified a call? LOL! Thanks for the great questions Justin.

Our Congrats to John!

John Lovett is a well respected analyst, especially by us. He is a change agent for web analytics, testing and optimization technologies. He joins Web Analytics Demystified as a newly minted partner. You can read about his excitement joining the team in his inaugural post Let the Wild Rumpus Start.