It had been brewing for quite some time as my little Web Analytics unit has been expanding its consulting offers related to Web and Customer Analytics well beyond the Belgian borders, actually all over Europe, in order to help companies reap the benefits of measurement and accountability of the online media.
While WebTrends first landed on my desk, in another lifetime back in 1999, as a business analyst, I felt help would inevitably be needed to get the most out of what Web Analytics coud bring to any business. And so when René asked me to help him set-up OX2, an Interactive Agency, back in 2003, my initial request was to set-up a Web Analytics team as well.
To be honest, a lot of people felt that back then, we were kind of weird, which we totally understood but as the online medium is the most masurable of all channels and following my background as an economist, it really made sense for me to not only have a team to support clients in their online strategy but also prove that what we were saying made sense and added to the bottom line. Accountability through measurement was thus our early mantra as hard data remains undisputable when having to make strategic business decisions.
The early days – as from 2003 – allowed us to patiently build up our Web analytics expertise and team, first with WebTrends and adding gradually European supported solutions such as Google Analytics, Omniture, IndexTools, Unica, amongst others.
We also gradually moved from log file analysis to tagging, from using the reports within the Web Analytics tools to custom made automatised dashboards, which integrates data coming from other sources as well, ranging from campaign information to actual margin related data for ecommerce websites, moving beyond pure turn-over in order to get as close as possible to a companies’ impact on the bottom line.
To make a long story short, we were looking, from our little Belgium, for a pan European partner/acquirer that shared our accountability vision, had been thinking about Dashboards, Balanced Scorecards, Strategy Maps – thank you Kaplan & Norton – in order to reap the full benefits of our favorite channels’ measurability potential.
In a short: data driven strategy.
I’m convinced that LBi shares our vision to build an accountable future and am looking forward, as well as my team, to a fruitful collaboration.
Links:
- Press release: LBi [EN]
- LBi: http://www.lbi.com
- OX2: http://www.ox2.eu
OX2 Web Analytics Blog 