While Circling Around The Sun

2007 was indeed an amazing year for Web Analytics and for me as well. After several years at Bell Business Solutions, where I developed the Web Analytics offering, I decided to go free lance in April. Wow! What a great decision it was! I have been extremely busy since then, and I have enjoyed every single day of work (“day of work” meaning evenings and weekends as well!). I also got to work on projects outside Canada, which I couldn’t do at Bell. Anyway, the choice of becoming an independent consultant was definitely a good one.

I also decided blogging again, after a first stint in June 2004. At that time, there were no Web Analytics blogs to speak of, and not so much interest yet in the field. After a few posts, I realized blogging was a lot of work, and that nobody was reading it. Boy, has the WA blogosphere changed since then!! People like Avinash Kaushik and Eric T. Peterson have now thousands of readers, which tells us a lot about how important Web Analytics has become in only the last three years.

I started this blog, together with The Big Integration, which concentrates on data integration. That blog will grow much more in 2008 with more and more of my time devoted to those questions. Hopefully, the Forum will finally take off. I launched another blog in French, Web Analytique & Optimisation, which discusses more basic Web Analytics stuff for a market that is still a little behind compared to the US and UK. Finally, I started what I think is the first Web Analytics blog in Japanese, WebKaiseki no Kiso. Here too I address basic questions (hence the name of the blog), because the market is also emerging in Japan, and also because my written Japanese sucks! I must confess that the exercise is great, though.

You can imagine how four blogs keep me busy, and, true, I neglect them too much. I also don’t believe in writing too often, and many blogs I subscribe to should probably reconsider their frequency. More and more I delete posts without really reading them. More than once a day is just too much I think.

This being said, what can you expect to find in Analytics Notes in 2008? I will keep on writing about analytics and marketing culture. I will also let you know the results of my various researches, especially mobile marketing in general and mobile analytics in particular. I am currently studying what the Japanese have written about mobile marketing in the last years. Why? Well, first because they have been at it for the last 10 years, second because there is already a large body of work, and third because it’s time to be a little less culture-centric!

As for the field, several people have written their predictions for 2008, so I won’t add to that. By far, Rich Page offers the most interesting ones, if not the most far fetched. That would be kinda weird if Google bought Omniture. I think it would kill the Web Analytics field as we know it.

I certainly hope that we will see much less of the vendor debate (well, that will probably be the case with Omniture’s position now), and way more of Web Analytics execution in everyday web site management. We definitely need to talk more about how analytics is changing how people manage web sites in a positive way. Let us not lose sight of the ultimate reason we do it: to become better Internet marketers. That’s it! The rest is boring charts, and engine size fights.

On a final note, Feedburner tells me that on a good day, there are more than 150 of you subscribing to this blog. I know it does not seem a lot compared to many other blogs, but let me tell you that it does mean a lot to me.

I want to thank you all for that, and I certainly hope you have found most of my posts worth spending some of your precious time.