DSCF3968 smallAndy Beal of the Marketing Pilgrim has tagged me for a new blog tagging meme that has just started. Andy was sweet enough to play when I tagged him for the personally tag game so it is only fair that we play along for his game!

The 2007 Predictions tag game was started by Mashable. I think it is more dangerous than the personal blog tag game because in this one you actually have to come up with something intelligent (and one's “performance” can be measured at the end of time!).

It took me six minutes to write this and I am sure it will have turned out to be a career limiting move! My 2007 predictions for our beloved Web Analytics universe:

  1. 2007 will be a banner year for Web Analytics education (books, blogs, seminars, conferences) and Web Analyst salary improvements (of course I have to say that!).

  2. We will see increasing sophistication of and availability of “free” web analytics tools in the market (welcome Microsoft Gatineau). This will be good for current vendors: more people to sell to and move up-market. This will be bad for current vendors: will have to create more obvious differentiators, than just number of reports.

  3. Pay Per Click (sometimes called SEM) analytics will continue to be important but cede mind-share and control to Search Engine Optimization analytics (which is in a rather sorry state in all current web analytics tools).

  4. WebTrends MarketingLab and Omniture’s Discover will release updated versions of their “data warehouses” that will be closer to (and hence more integrateable) standard business intelligence data warehouses (allowing us to do deeper and richer end-to-end analytics with other data in our companies).
    [Important: I have no knowledge of either company’s product road-map.]

  5. More Analysts and Web Decision Makers will realize the futility of torturing clickstream data to get into the heads of their visitors and embrace qualitative measurement options (surveys, testing, usability and so on). No totally radical changes but steady progress towards the Trinity mindset.


    One Bonus:

  6. More website business owners will realize there is this thing called Social Networks and panic when they can’t be measured. Rest assured, targeted solutions will follow in 2007.

In turn I’ll tag our esteemed world leader Mr. Peterson to offer up his top secret list of 2007 web analytics predictions (I am positive it will be super!).

Do you agree with the list above? Is it achievable? Is it too conservative? What trend does it ignore? Please share your own predictions via the comments field.

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