The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

Site-Side Analytics

The audience measurement companies, like comScore and NetRatings, provide valuable insight for marketers on where to find their target audience, the size of the audience, and the audience’s online behaviors. The campaign measurement companies, like DoubleClick and Atlas, give marketers a real-time view into how their online advertising is performing, based on clicks and responses. The third piece in a marketer’s online measurement toolkit should be a site-side analytics platform, offering a comprehensive view of not just how his or her advertising performs post-click, but also search and affiliate marketing, organic search performance, and the myriad ways consumers find a site.

The types of analytics these companies offer tend to be extremely sophisticated, and overlap among advertising, marketing, merchandising, and editorial departments, as they provide intelligence across a broader swatch of initiatives than just advertising. There has been little consolidation activity in this sector and there are still many competing companies and technologies, such as Coremetrics, Google Analytics, WebTrends, and WebSideStory.

Marketers have a wide selection of analytics vendors to choose from; however, the differences between them tend to be slight. As Forrester Research noted in its June 2004 report “Selecting a Site Analytics Product”: “The wide array of Web analytics choices presents a challenge for buyers. Web analytics products are often nearly impossible to tell ...