Kemelor Phil Kemelor

Excel output is not data export

22-May-2007

Tags: Web Analytics, Marketplace at Large

In researching the Web Analytics Report, I found vendors frequently using terms that -- while not completely untrue -- didn't exactly tell the whole story about a product's functionality. One of my favorite vendor phrases is "data export." To be sure, data integration matters to enterprises who want to move web analytics data into another database, such as a corporate data warehouse or the database of a partner application (e.g., e-mail marketing). Many web analytics vendors offer proper APIs for such integration. However, other vendors tout the availability of web analytics data in Excel format as "data export."

This is misleading. Excel is a reporting and presentation format. For that matter, so are CSV, XML, and PDF files. When customers look for data export, they almost always want to see data going from one system to another with no manual intervention beyond implementing the API. Output to Excel doesn't cut it here. So if integrating analytics data is important to you, be sure to investigate relevant APIs, and the level of effort required to implement and test them successfully.

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