Web analytics company Webtrends has forecast what it sees as the five key trends in the web analytics industry for 2010.
As organisations have increasingly adopted digital marketing, optimisation and real-time analytics, it is believed that 2010 will see the foundation being laid for greater consumption and utilisation of data which will result in incomparable insight into their business operations.
It is also predicted that much of the focus in analytics will be devoted to integration and segmentation with specific advancement within the social and mobile industries.
The five predictions are as follows:
- Multivariate testing and site optimisation will cross the chasm and become an imperative for online businesses and marketing departments of any reasonable size. Next generation solutions will leverage proven approaches, ease of use and expert services to enable this transition.
- 2010 will be the year that integration of online with other enterprise data will take off. Consumers are demanding that companies they engage with take into account their cross-channel behaviour during interaction and as we go into 2010, if consumers are not receiving this tailored, informed interaction, they will find a new company to buy from.
- Interactive marketing will continue to gain adoption in 2010, as we’ll see email marketing, web analytics, and traditional campaign management vendors race to become the owners of the ‘hub’ for interactive marketing, along with optimisation and analytics.
- 2010 will define the principals for social marketing and lay the foundation for the next decade of marketing. As people recognise that media is still media, and that social is about behaviour, the social behaviour theory will emerge. Social search will heat up among top search players, thus the nature of SEO will give way to SSO and enterprise social platforms will hit a tipping point.
- Mobile applications continued to grow throughout 2009 and will explode in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, Apple will continue to grow as their exclusivity with AT&T expires next year and Android will accelerate exponentially as more droid phones will be brought into the market and developers will surge at the openness of the platform. This will give way to application analytics that will be generate significant buzz within the web analytics industry.
