During the “Orion Panel: All Star Analytics Team” session there was much talk around analytics and the provision of “free” analytics.

In essence the comments were that it is better to get good at free tools first before spending money on paid analytics tools.

From the panel, Brian Clifton from Google mentioned that they specifically provide a free solution as a way to get back to advertisers while it has to drive revenue back to the company.

Overall, the general feeling from everyone on the panel was that providing free tools is a good thing providing it is done transparenly.

The top key learning areas for measuring and tracking is to track more than web related media, we should track other media like mobile and such.

Another issue discussed was around privacy. It is getting harder for Analytics tools to track sites because of increasing security & privacy issues as well as the use of cookies.

In short, all agreed that Analytic tools should track visitor behaviour:

• where do users come from?
• what do they look at?
• what are they doing?
• do they sign up?

However, there seemd to be some disagreement in how various Analytics tools measure clicks and hits and it was unclear really what metrics were tracked correctly.

A few other mentions:
- Social Media – what is considered popular and how do we track it? – does it drive traffic?
- Behaviour, whether positive or negative. How do you track comments and mentions?

The future of Analytics:s

• more aware of conversion rates
• year of testing
• awareness of moving into metrics of measuring whether all my marketing is succesfful via my websites
• more awareness in culture of companies