Oleg Tulin

Oleg Tulin | 2009-07-01

What if doing business online is only (small) part of the story -- what if our business is more of bricks-and-mortar? Then it may not be optimal to hire in-house staff to run online channel directly -- instead, it may be optimal to hire some Internet agency to take care of our online presence.

Internet agency is an outsourced pool of competence that businesses can use without incurring too much costs to build their own competence in cases when it is not likely to pay off. Folks from Internet agency are busy reusing their expertise running online marketing for multiple clients at the same time, so they are more efficient in their job than similar underutilized in-house staff and in theory they should cost less for businesses with small online presence. Internet agency specializes in online marketing, SEO, SEM, building and maintaining websites, etc. Sometimes they also provide some solutions from web analytics vendors as well as do web analytics for their customers. In general, since there is a synergy between all these functions and they require specialized expertise, those are better coordinated in a single unit -- agency or in-house department.

Regardless of the fact that Internet agencies may do their job well and provide good outsourcing, there is one point that clients should take care of when building relationships with them. Even if online channel is not a major channel of our business for now, it may still be a strategic resource. We should not allow Internet agency to end up owning that resource. And that may happen very easily, since creating dependency is the easiest way for service provider to secure us as clients. One should take care to ensure that every intangible asset, such as systems, data, registrations, access codes, reports, etc., created by agency for us is really transferred to us, not remain with the agency. The contractual relationships should be built accordingly.

To the full extent this applies to web analytics. Ideally, business is better run its own web analytics independently of that used by Internet agency to operate our online channel. Moreover, it is better to agree with agency to use our web analytics system to measure results. This way we can ensure that results of outsourced activity are monitored by us independently. This is a principal point.

Apart from this major one, there are many other reasons for us to have web analytics system under our full control with full ownership of web analytics data. It is very important that web analytics containing years of valuable insider data, such as business metrics and data collected about visitors and customers, is under our full control, kept inside our organization and not exposed to third party decisions. As an extra bonus, if such system runs on our site, we have technical benefits, from avoiding data losses and accuracy problems (e.g. due to third-party cookies issue) to extra ability to track search engine (and other) bots and web server metrics. Yet add to this higher flexibility in customizing and fine-tuning dedicated web analytics system to exactly meet needs of our online business.

In sum, it is always better that we, not someone else, end up owning our web analytics as well as online business in general.

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This blog is intended to share thoughts with people interested in web analytics, website metrics, analysis of online visitors/customers behaviour, online marketing, online business and (distantly) related matters.

Oleg Tulin, web analytics expert/consultant (olegtulin at gmail.com)

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