Appetite for online performance benchmarking from marketers has always been strong, as it has been for offline activities. Whilst benchmark data is available from the likes of comScore, Compete, Alexa and a whole host of niche research firms, Google arguably has the richest, deepest data resource in Google Analytics (66% market share in 2010 according to Econsultancy).
The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has offered advice regarding the interpretation of the European Commission’s ePrivacy Directive in relation to cookie tracking and made suggestions for how websites might attempt to gain the explicit permission of users to be tracked. Whilst we wait for the ICO to cement their thoughts, and essentially the rules of the road for cookie tracking, they have granted the industry what is affectively a 12 month amnesty.
The European Commission set a deadline of May 25th, 2011 for EU member states to ‘notify’ their adherence to the directive. Since the deadline, a 12 month extension has been given in the UK. So, what does this mean for businesses in other member states and in the long-term?
I have a lot of conversations with companies about how they use web analytics to improve their bottom line, and almost across the board it seems that there’s one key takeout: to paraphrase Lord Leverhulme on advertising, “Half of the money you spend on web analytics is wasted; the trouble is that you don’t know [...]