Complete Web Monitoring

A Holistic View

What’s most obvious from today’s monitoring industry is that siloed perspectives will not last. Vendors are rushing to broaden their feature offerings, either by building all the components themselves, acquiring other companies, or using creative mashup approaches to integrate their reports into entrenched solutions, such as Google Analytics. As Figure 18-3 shows, the distinctions of analytics, WIA, EUEM, and VOC are fuzzy at best, with many firms offering strong products in several segments.

Figure 18-3. Examples of blended product functionality as the monitoring industry consolidates and vendors merge

Analytics companies are positioning themselves as the anchors of all this analysis. They are the cornerstones of monitoring strategies because they are the tool that sees the payoff. Whether it’s an improvement in performance, positive visitor sentiment, a better page design, or a groundswell of community support, everything that happens online has an outcome that ties back to the organization’s goals, and the analytics tool is where those outcomes are defined.

Web analytics tools, however, are really a subset of the broader category of BI. For larger enterprises, it’s likely that a central BI repository will include not only the online outcomes tracked by analytics platforms, but also call center traffic and retail transactions. In other words, the analytics giants of ...