SubscribeEvent Report: The State of Web Analytics Industry in China
Tonight I went to the Web Analytics Wednesday, a regular event organized by Florian Pihs and sponsored by Web Analytics Demystified. Today’s event featured a panel discussion about the state of the web analytics in China, the panelist included Yong Wu, a Chinese Web Analytics entrepreneur, Laker Chan, CEO of SinoTech Search, Karen Ho, Digital Planning Director of OMD and Yang Zhou, Google Analytics Account Manager.
All the panelist agreed that the web analytics industry in China is still in its very early stage. Yong Wu thought that by percentage of revenue of Webtrends in China and in US, and the difference of price the clients would like to pay in two countries, we can know how early the industry is here in China. I have another example to share with you on current state of the market. In early this year, I helped a company to do some online campaign. We planned to buy ads on a niche vertical website, which ranks the first in Google and Baidu’s organic search result, but the website even don’t know how many traffic it has!
But they all believe that the industry is in very high growth. Karen Ho use the example of Häagen-Dazs to show that the situation has been improving a lot if compared with several years ago.
Why the market is so immature in China? Yang Zhou from Google Analytics team thinks that the website will pay more attention on ROI of online campaign when competition becomes more and more fierce. She said there was a small travel-related site in Hainan Province. Several years ago, no matter whatever the website did on online campaign, it can have very good ROI, so it didn’t care about web analytics. But recently, when the effects of online campaign become worse, ROI and web analytics become important, so it started to use Google Analytics.
Karen Ho added that in practice, ad agencies help to provide many analytics data to advertisers on ROI of the campaign. However, the data is not the most important factor to decide the online budgets, even if the ROI for a site is not good, they may still will put ads there. That’s also one of the reason why web analytics hasn’t gained enough attention in China.
By my experience, online startups, esp. ecommerce startups, have started to realize the importance of web analytics, but they just don’t have the knowledge and expertise in analyzing the data from those tracking tools. Web analytics service providers, such as Google Analytics, should have more workshops to help those startups to know more about how to using the tools better and how to benefit from the tools. Laker Chen believed that the market needs some system integrator, which should be business need oriented, and can integrate various products and services on the market to provide solutions to address the problems of the publishers/advertisers, because they don’t care about the tools, they care about the results and problem solving.
If you are interested in the development of web analytics sector in China and would like to know people in the industry, you should attend this monthly event.
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3 Responses to “Event Report: The State of Web Analytics Industry in China”
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Thanks tangos for joining our event. I am even more grateful about the write up since now i dont need to do it myself
it was great to have so many knowledgeable people on the panel and in the audience. I am looking forward to welcoming you and your readers to our next event on october 8th where paul denlinger will speak about his efforts to establish the IAB in china.
State of the Web Analytics Industry in China Panel - Review…
I usually write the event summaries myself, but since today is my lucky day, Tangos Chan of China Web 2.0 Review fame bet me to the punch. Take a look at his review and let me know what you think. A simple take away for me is that Avinash’s 90/10 rule…
It’s really a very good recap and summary. Here is my humble opinion on why China lags behind US or Europe in this industry. China’s business revenue from online channel is still a tiny share of overall revenue. As long as the channel becomes a prominent one, web analytics will get lots of attention, I am sure. Let’s wait for the day.