WebProNews

My good friend, and web analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik once wrote:

Cancel the contract with your favorite expensive analytics vendor and take that $50k or $100k or $200k and: 1) Hire a smart analyst for between $50k to whatever maybe your areas great salary 2) Put the rest of the money in your pocket.

That piece of advice has always stuck with with me, and according to new data from Econsultancy and Lynchpin, it appears it’s resonating with many companies. In the Online Measurement and Strategy Report (aff) we learn that:

There has been a marked shift from spending on technology to spending on internal staff, with companies now spending more on human resources than on software and licences. The proportion of spending on internal staff has increased from 36% to 42% of total web analytics spend while spending on technology has decreased from 45% to 38%.

So, where are they getting the extra money for internal staff?

23% of companies now use Google Analytics exclusively–compared to only 14% a year ago–while 57% of respondents are using Google Analytics in conjunction with another tool.

It certainly appears as if companies are finally realizing that all those pretty charts are useless if there’s no one to interpret them!

PS. Another quick tidbit. The proportion of companies looking at reputation monitoring or social media metrics has doubled from 21% to 40% in the past year. Huzzah for reputation monitoring!

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