History of Web Analytics…What a History!

The web analytics market has undergone such rapid change since 1995, it is amazing!  It is understandable that analytics have changed so much in the past 15 years, especially when you look at how much the internet has changed in that time period.  According to Pew’s Internet & American Life Project, “only about 15% of American adults were using the Internet in 1995, with many online users still getting their news from services like AOL and Prodigy (Shedden, 2010).”  According to the same study, in 2010, 79% of adults in America were using the internet (Shedden, 2010).  The number of internet users in America in 2000 was approximately 95 million, compared to about 245 million in March of 2012 (Internet World, n.d.). 

These statistics are astounding, but explain the growth of web analytics.  Where there is success, someone will figure out a way to capitalize on it, whether through pay per click advertising or search engine optimization service offerings.  I think the biggest shift in the history of web analytics was during the 2004 – 2006 “Becoming Part of a Process Ecosystem (Perley Isaac, 2012)” phase.  During this phase, “a previously technology-centric market was evolving into a process-centric market.  In short, it was becoming more mature (Perley Isaac, 2012).”  This was a key time period in the history of web analytics from a marketing perspective. 

During the time period known as “Stage 3 (Perley Isaac, 2012),” the field of web analytics began to take on more of it’s current role where people don’t simply want to see trackers on homepages showing the number of visitors to the site, instead they started to see the benefit in tracking how customers are finding sites, what is working well on the website and what can be improved, and they started to work on putting this information to use in order to improve practices.

The internet has changed so dramatically over the last 15 years, it’s intriguing to consider what it might look like in another 15 years – in 2027.  It will either become even more of a bustling virtual metropolis than it already is, or it will become a barren ghost town as people start to feel overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information (both legitimate and not so much) available at their fingertips.

References

Internet World Stats.  (n.d.)  Retrieved June 4, 2012, from http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm

Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, West Virginia University (2012). Lesson 2: Basic Web Analytics, Retrieved May 21, 2012, from the WVU eCampus website: https://ecampus.wvu.edu

Shedden, D.  (2010, September 17).  Pew graphic: Internet use 1995 - 2000.  Poynter.  Retrieved June 4, 2012, from http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/transformation-tracker/105713/pew-graphic-internet-use-1995-2010/