A bunch of the smartest web analytics bloggers took part in the New Years tradition of making predictions, and someone on the WebAnalytics Yahoo Group took the time to compile links to all of them. Since I hadn’t quite got around to making mine yet, I’ll comment on those I found the most interesting:

• Mr Kaushik says “2007 will be a banner year for Web Analytics education (books, blogs, seminars, conferences).”
  There is no doubt that more and more people will wake up to the need to understand web analytics, so there will be more books, blogs, and conferences. But I don’t think the real crazy-go-nuts boom will hit until ‘08 or ’09. By then emetrics will be nearly as large as SES was in ‘06. (I hope Jim Sterne is ready).

• Avinash also says that “Pay Per Click (sometimes called SEM) analytics will continue to be important but cede mind-share and control to Search Engine Optimization analytics.” How I wish this were true (and said so just the other day). But the $$ and the development effort is all over the paid search world, and I expect both the explosion of paid search reporting and bid management tools to continue and only a relative trickle of better SEO tracking to emerge.

• Lastly AK suggests “More Analysts and Web Decision Makers will realize the futility of torturing click-stream data and embrace qualitative measurement options”. Some will but not enough. As long as the analytics tools present menu after nested menu full of reports, the majority of users (especially new ones) will look at these reports and think they’re supposed to be able to learn something from them.

• Mr Peterson thinks “Smart people will stop freaking out about how "Web 2.0" is going to be measured and will begin to develop rational and reasonable models for tracking emerging Internet technologies and business models.” Again I agree there will be some progress, but I don’t think the ‘freaking out’ will even slow down, nor will the pace of web 2.0 changes which keep putting pressure on both tools and analysts, and I predict that the ‘How to track web2’ sessions at emetrics ‘07 and ’08 will be standing-room-only.

• Eric also mentions that “those with the right tools to identify click fraud may not particularly like what they find.” The ability to document a significant amount of click-fraud across a wide range of PPC campaigns has the potential to be the most important story of 2007. If there is a ‘web 2.0 bubble’ nothing would deflate it as fast as this. I’m just not sure yet if the nature of this fraud (which I do instinctively believe is very significant) lends itself to being detected given the limitations of the infrastructure on which the whole system rides.

• Mr Angel thinks “agencies will finally emerge as a significant factor in the web analytics space... and there are going to be lots who will screw it up pretty royally.” He’s very right on both of these counts.

• Gary also provides which I think is the most interesting of all the predictions with “The pendulum will swing back – at least a little way – from ASP solutions to internal solutions for web analytics.” I don’t know about that but find it very intriguing.

• The GA Experts say that “Microsoft will release ‘DeepSoft’ or whatever they rename Deepmetrix, and it’s likely to be free.” And like everything MS has done in this space for the last three years, it will have absolutely no impact on anything.

• GA also says “web analytics terminology will simplify and become more business orientated and less technical.” I really don’t think this will happen – jargon doesn’t go away as adoption increases – or we wouldn’t have RSS, trackbacks, SERP reports, CPC or ROAS. The old guys don’t want to give it up and the newbies want to join the club.

UPDATE: I added my own predictions.