Bizreport.com Yesterday released an article indicating that there has been a substantial increase in the percentage of budget that companies are investing in web analytics. Not only has their overall budget for web analytics increased, but they are now also spending more money on manpower to monitor analytics and cutting down on the budget for web analytics software.

Research carried out by Econsultancy/Lynchpin via survey-based research, revealed that companies are now only spending less than 30% of their budget on web analytics software, which is 8% less than last year. The financial cut on web analytics software expenditure seems to now be going towards investing more in people with web analytics tracking skills that are able to expertly utilize this software and manipulate it in order to get the desired results and reports. When it comes to finding the right person to run your web analytics, one also needs to decide whether to hire someone in-house to take care of web analytics or whether hiring an SEO Consultant would be a better idea.

What tools are people using?

The study showed that 87% of companies use Google analytics for their web analytics requirements, and why not? Google is by far the dominant market shareholder and their analytics tool is more than capable of providing in depth reports upon which important business and brand strategy decisions can be based upon. What is interesting is that of the 87% of people using Google Analytics, 57% of companies choose to use it alongside other paid for web analytics tools. One of the major downfalls of Google Analytics is its ability to track flash scripts, Ajax and other on-page technologies. Heatmap or click tracking software is also a popular choice of paid for web analytics software that can provide detailed reports that Google simply cannot.

So what does this mean?

Basically, it’s all good and well investing in software, setting up a Google web analytics account and tracking your progress, but unless you actually have skilled employees who are able to correctly use and abuse the web analytics software, then you’re really just wasting your time and money. There is so much useful information that can be extracted from web analytics, all of which can be used to make enormously effective business decisions; but if you are simply sing web analytics tools to just see how much traffic your web site is receiving each month then you’re really not benefiting from the resources at your fingertips.

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