Google announced a new feature for its web analytics product this week that illustrates well the potential in anonymous aggregate data analysis. This siloed product announcement points to an even more exciting future if data portability dreams come true.
Google Analytics Industry Benchmarking will let users opt-in to share and have access to aggregate traffic info for websites in their industry vertical and at other points in their supply chain. (See sample screenshot below.)
The idea is to allow companies to compare their website performance over time and to put their experiences in context with the experiences of other related businesses. If an action you took seemed to have caused a big traffic spike, it would be good to confirm that it was not just an industry-wide traffic increase that actually occurred. Likewise, if traffic growth for your business has a particularly strong correlation with growth in a related businesses sector, then some biz dev time might be warranted there.
Online invoicing service FreshBooks has been doing the same kind of thing for individual contractors for some time ("other consultants in your field are getting their invoices paid on average 2 weeks faster than you are"). Personal finance service Mint compares your spending habits to those of other users, NetWorthIQ uses aggregate financial data for wealth benchmarks and Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog displays aggregate traffic trends for users with similar web browsing interests.
These kinds of data driven value add are enabled in most cases by the network effect of a successful app but also by the world of web services. If recommendation engines are often the result of aggregate information analyzed and pointed at an individual, then industry benchmarks may be the flipside - aggregate information aimed at organizations.
The new Google Analytics Benchmarks are a peek into an exciting future and a further example of how data portability could yield even further innovation. Today a huge business like Google can best scale these kinds of data sets in-house, but imagine a future when secure data portability is a reality.
If users could port their commercial or behavioral data from service to service, then analysis of significant aggregate data could take on forms limited only by an innovator's imagination and ability to persuade users to bring their data to the party. That kind of value add could become the core of any number of services in the future. It's very exciting.
Standards based data portability is clearly not a requirement for startups to be able to quickly scale services based on analysis of anonymous aggregate data, but it would be a game changer by making this kind of innovation much, much easier. For now we'll have to enjoy innovation in the big data silos and imagine the future when this kind of access to data is blown wide open for vendors.
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First, kudos to Google: this is a great feature. It will be interesting to see how quickly the enterprise web analytics players (Omniture, Unica, etc.) respond -- although they'll clearly have more challenges with corporate privacy. Maybe that will be their initial defense: do you really want your data compared against your competitors to be out there in the cloud? Curious to see how long that FUD argument holds up (it's not completely unfounded).
As for data portability, it's a beautiful vision, but one that I suspect is still a ways off. Not for any technical reason. Simply because these silos of data are the source of system lock-in -- and now in the case of Google, a "dominant exchange" for industry benchmarks -- and the vendors behind them will be reluctant to give up their grip.
Clearly it can happen, as the Data Portability Working Group is starting to show progress. But for example, "friends" in a social network are, in my opinion, a relatively low threshold. Everyone was already sharing their friends across multiple social sites, it was just a royal pain in the rear. Even so, it took a game theoretical domino effect for all the big players to get goaded into embracing portability there.
When the stakes are higher, when the data is more complex, and when users have fewer "ad hoc" alternatives, it will be a harder slog to pry the proprietariness out of the system.
But that's what entrepreneurs are for, to help nudge the big guys forward on this.
This sort of data portability on the back-end, combined with semantic web adoption on the front-end, does offer an inspiring vision for the future.
Posted by: Scott Brinker | March 6, 2008 7:31 PMWell, sounds pretty good...:)
Posted by: Hanna | March 7, 2008 3:59 AMBy the way, the German Analytics tool etracker hat this feature in its new software release already implementet:
http://www.etracker.de/?_lng=2
Well done...but Google should try and fix some bugs in their google analytics application.
My firefox(2.0.0.12) crashes in certain cases when using google analytics. Anyone else has noticed this problem?
Posted by: one software developer | March 7, 2008 6:43 AMInteresting idea.
BUT:
- But how does Google determine your vertical?
- How does it pick the sites that you should compare your own site against?
- What if your vertical consists of only a dozen sites, some not worth mentioning, and others not using Google Analytics?
Posted by: Otis Gospodnetic | March 7, 2008 7:04 PMBy the way, the little (ad?) tracker that's below the search form (above, top-right of the page) is kaput. This is what I see:
$url, 'tracking'=>$tracking, 'image'=>$image, 'width'=>$width, 'height'=>$height, 'alt'=>$alt)); } function popBanner(&$banners) { $banner = array_shift($banners); return "\"$banner[alt]\""; } /* no need to change above functions */ ?>
Posted by: Otis Gospodnetic | March 7, 2008 7:07 PMWow. This could be the first case where business will massively start moving from information-competition to true product competition. If everyone has full information the basic economical rules (like ideal competition) could start to apply. This really makes me excited, because business should be all about customers and creativity, not playing hide-and-seek all the time.
Posted by: Marcin Grodzicki | March 12, 2008 6:32 AM