We don't really ask that much of our web analytics software. Just tell us what's happening on our websites and what we should do about it. Count what people do, tally it up, create pretty little tables and graphs for us, and then offer a suggestion or two about how things could turn out better tomorrow. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently it is. For some reason to use website analytics software is to be frustrated, confused, and more than a bit unhappy your choice of web analytics software. In fact, website analytics packages are like airlines - the one you use the most is almost certainly the one you hate the most. Unless of course the memories of the one you tried before that haven’t completely faded…

There are plenty of reasons for this. Blame to go all around. So let’s start assigning some:

1. Welcome to my delusion. The web analytics vendors make claims and create impressions that would make a weight-loss marketer proud. Visit their sites, download their whitepapers, get chatted-up at the trade show booths, and you could somehow get the idea that installing any of these packages is going to nearly magically solve your online business problems.
   
   
2. Help is not a specific request. Analytics buyers and even users, in my experience, have a vague and simplistic notion of what they want, generally along the lines of the completely unrealistic requests I used to start this post. They are complicit in the way vendors market and even prioritize features because they ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at all the right times in the demo and walk away believing that they really want/need lists of the most popular pages and the ability to see what percentage of their visitors came from Google.
   
   
3. There is no ‘Brain Surgery for Dummies’. Measuring and understanding the interaction between web pages, site visitors, marketing activities, and the economic attributes of a business is massively complex stuff. Vendors who pretend it’s going to be easy or users who expect it to be are setting themselves up for failure and disappointment.
   
   
4. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Realizing that web analytics isn’t going to be fast or easy allows us to begin accepting that it’s going to be slow and hard. We can consider the phases that a real-world adoption will require and stop to ponder a conceptual framework for what it is we’re really trying to accomplish, while at the same time enjoying the new and broader perspective that our analytics software is just one tool we’ll use along the way. In other words, knowing that this is a tough process which is going to require significant time and energy, we’d be wise to figure out what we really want and exactly how we’re going to get it.
   
   
5. Geez, this is a crappy hammer. Analytics software starts with data and tries to produce information. They pride themselves on the reports they can give you and the formatting and delivery methods and triggers. Marketers need actionable insights and/or understanding and these are rarely provided by reports no matter how well formatted. I believe this is what’s underneath all the dissatisfaction with web analytics software – they’re starting with this relatively modest pile of clickstream data and trying to stretch it and shape it as many ways as they can and we’re thinking about the complexities of software and business systems as well as human behavior and asking questions which they can’t begin to answer.

So to summarize: vendors lie about what they can do, users really don’t know what they want, this is much more complicated than most of us can imagine or are willing to admit, it’s going to be a long hard process to really get anything useful, and no matter how you look at it the current crop of analytics software really kind-of sucks.

/// Lots of thoughts to expand on here, and I hope to in the comments or over the coming days. And yes it's a little tongue-in-cheek vendors, we don't really hate you. But we sure could love you more. :-)

{This post inspired by Robin's report from SES about retailers and their thoughts on analytics software}