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Web Analytics in Switzerland

Monday, February 4th, 2008

It is actually difficult to have a good vision of Web Analytics situation in Europe and especially in Switzerland. This is probably because Switzerland is definitely not the most advanced country in web analytics and also because there is little literature about it on the web. Here is a small paper presenting the usage of web analytics in our country through a study of 70 Swiss companies. These companies are representative of the market in terms of size, activities and location.

How it has been conducted?
The study has been made by browsing their web sites and tracking the code of web analytics tools within the source of the web pages. Only the corporate sites —mainly the .com— have been taken into account but when interesting other web sites have been visited. Due to the process used for this investigation, having no “visible” web analytics tool on the site doesn’t mean there is no web analytics solution at all (home made solution or solution with code which can’t be identified) but according to the maturity of the market, we can assume, it is the case.

Here are the results

The repartition by sectors is as following

From Financial sector (Bank & Insurance) to International Organisations including Consumer Goods (Retail, Luxury), IT (Information & Technology), Telecom, Industrial, Basic Materials (Energy, Agribusiness) and Health Care (Chemistry & Pharmaceutical) the major sectors present in Switzerland are considered and representatives of the market.

Who is Using Web Analytics Solution?
First Observation, 41% of considered companies don’t have any web analytics solution in place.

If we look at sector by sector, no surprise to see that 100% of Telecommunications companies use a Web Analytics solution. An interesting fact to notice anyway: one of the major Telco providers in Switzerland (mobile and fix) don’t have WA on their corporate site but only on one of their secondary e-shop website. It seems to indicate that WA is only for marketing purposes for them.
The Industrial sector is also well advanced with more than 70% of implementation when the other sectors are around 50% of usage of metrics tools. Within these last sectors, only 33% of International Organisations and less than 40% in Information - Technology field use a tool.

Which Web Analytics Solutions Are Implemented?

Google Analytics is definitely Number One with 25% of market share. Then you have some major editors: WebTrends with 13%, HBX (Omniture-Visual Sciences) 7%. Xiti is a French editor largely used in France and shares an honest 7% of market at the same level than HBX. Finaly few others solutions like Coremetrics, Doubleclick, SiteStat or Wysistat are present but not significantly. This partition is really representative of the Switzerland (European?) market except maybe for the total absence of Omniture (even if they have gained market share with HBX).

Because some of the tools present in this study provide both ASP and software mode with significant differences (budget, data policies,…) it is interesting to see the repartition of companies using ASP mode versus those having implemented the software internally
Web Analytics Tools in ASP vs Software

6% of the companies using Google Analytics were in fact using Urchin and one of them have implemented both the Urchin tool and the ASP GA version.

WebTrends, HBX and Xiti have all three 20% of software implementation. This choice is often related to the size of the company (mainly worldwide) and a significant number of websites where the tool is implemented and therefore it is more interesting to buy the software licences and manage internally the software than having multitude of ASP licences that could rapidly be expensive on a group level and not always the best situation for data consolidation.

Which Tool for Which Sector?
Google Analytics is leading the market but what about the different sectors?

Telecom companies prefer Webtrends (75%) and HBX (25%), none of them use GA.
On the other hand, the Basic Material sector is dominated by GA with 50% and Webrends with 17%. Financial, Industrial and Consumer Goods are the sectors whith the highest diversity with Xiti (Financial & Consumer Goods) and Sitestat or HBX (Financial & Industrial) having between 15% and 20% of the market.

In conclusion, the Web Analytics in Switzerland can be better, almost half of the market doesn’t use any metrics tool.
If 100% of the Telecom companies have implemented a tool, the Financial and Information - Technology sectors and the International Organisations are far behind, probably due to the nature of their activities.
Even if Google Analytics is number 1, the choice of the tool vary a lot depending of the activity of the company and we can notice the small number of different editors and the total absence of Omniture plus a local particularity: the French tool Xiti.

The questions now are:

how many of these companies are really doing web analytics and not only reporting?
How many companies have put in place a Web Analytics strategy?
How many of them have someone (not necessarily a dedicated team) to analyse their data and if so, how many take actions based on their analysis?

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Web Analytics Comparison

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

I am often asked by colleagues, clients, and blog readers for comparisons between different Web Analytics Products: “What are the differences between Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst,” “How do I know which web analytics product to use?” So I did some research and have compiled a list of resources which compare analytics products. I also grabbed the ‘feature’ page links from various web analytics vendors so that all this data could be accessed in one place. Enjoy:

Analytics Vendor vs. Analytics Vendor

Google Analytics vs. Visistat
http://manojjasra.blogspot.com/2006/08/visistat-vs-google-analytics.html

Google Analytics vs. Omniture’s SiteCatalyst
http://www.bartgibby.com/2006/10/14/omniture-sitecatalyst-vs-google-analytics/

Google Analytics vs. AWStats
http://web.uwaterloo.ca/documentation/AnalyticsvLogReader.php

Google Analytics vs. Performancing Metrics
http://gomeler.com/2006/04/03/google-analytics-vs-performancing-metrics/

Google Analytics vs. WebTrends
http://www.militz.nu/domaner/blog/2007/02/google-analytics-vs-webtrends.html

Google Analytics vs. Mint
http://mhdinteractive.com/imd470/google-analytics-vs-mint/

Google Analytics vs. StatCounter
http://paininthetech.com/free_stats_statcounter_versus_google_analytics

Google Analytics vs. NetTracker
http://www.web-watching.com/?p=24

Google Analytics vs. Urchin
http://www.seotreff.de/blog/2006/01/06/urchin-software-vs-google-analytics/

WebTrends vs. FastStats
http://news.knechtology.com/2003-nov.html

WebTrends vs. ClickTracks
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5118

iWebTrack vs. HitBox vs. WebTrends vs. OneStat vs. IndexTools vs. ClickTracks
http://www.iwebtrack.com/compare.asp