Digital Analytics: The Great Reset

We are caught in a battle of the giants where we have no say.

These days, the talk of the town in digital analytics is all about GA4, GDPR compliance, the growing frustration with poor product management and lack of transparency from Google, not to mention claims that competing vendors are so much better…

The digital analytics industry is facing The Great Reset.

A long time ago, I said, “In my opinion, web analytics is being sort of ‘hijacked’ by marketing.” (Feb 22, 2008)

I also said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to imply that web analytics is ‘marketing optimization’ (as in the title of the eMetrics conference)” (at the time it was called the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, nowadays it is the Marketing Analytics Summit). This mentality explains, at least in part, why we ended up with two tracks in our field: those who do Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), and those who tinker with marketing metrics.

At the time, very few people in the digital analytics field had any real training in data or computer science. I remember attending conferences and feeling like an outlier.

Why is this important? Because those who had a real data and IT background were educated to care about data privacy and were geared for process optimization — and yes, marketing IS a process too! Instead, IT was publicly despised. Heck! In 1987, I was working with…