Digital Analytics Is Not Dead, It's Changing (Fast)

Old and new issues facing digital analytics

Digital analytics is constantly evolving. While some may choose the catchy title “Analytics is Dead,” which has some truth in it, actually it’s only half-true. Digital analytics undergoes many cycles of rebirth by adapting to an ever-increasingly connected world to help decision-makers make more informed decisions.

Data collection amid increasing regulation

It must be clear by now that the days of the Wild West of data collections are long gone. Data privacy restrictions like LTP, GDPR, CCPA, ad blockers, and others are tightening the leash on what we can collect, increasing by the day.

At best, we are collecting only a portion of the data we used to have a few years ago. This makes justifying money spent on ads increasingly hard. How can you evaluate success when you have no feedback from the market?

Digital analytics was never accurate

Tracking on the web was always a messy business. Cross-device attribution, consent banners, failing JavaScript were always hurdles to having an accurate picture of what’s going on your website.

“It’s 2023 for god’s sake, we have AI can’t we just figure it out?”

Maybe it will, for now we still need to deal with the messiness that comes with trying

But it will not reflect 100% what happens on your website.

Google Analytics is now a part of larger ecosystem

Web analytics was largely enabled by tools like google analytics. The “old” GA (Universal Analytics) was somewhat easy to use which attracted a good chunk of people with no-technical background who could specialize in them.

Most of us started their digital analytics careers by getting hooked-up by the all-powerful Universal analytics, which eventually led to learning about the so called web analytics ecosystem : planning, tracking, and generating insights.

Tools like GTM and GA which again do not require a lot of technical knowledge gave access to even a broader category of new marketers, they even have a name nowadays: technical marketers.

But as is always the case, most good things come to an end. Fields evolve over-time, crossing with other disciplines and becoming even more complex.

This is definitely the case for digital analytics. Analytics tools like GA4 (Google analytics latest version) can’t be exploited to their full potential without relying on Bigquery and some knowledge of SQL.

Does this imply that digital analytics is now useless?

That is farther from the truth: digital analytics are more crucial today, but much of what made it accessible for small/medium organizations back in the day is no longer feasible.

Today, server-side tracking and having a data warehouse are becoming prerequisites for collecting any data worth analyzing. Consequently, businesses will need to invest significantly more effort to maintain the same level of data accessibility.

This news is neither good nor bad; it’s a simple reality. We have no choice. New methods will open more doors for in-depth analysis and compel us to focus on maximizing the potential of our existing data.