Nick Sharp, the VP and general manager for EMEA at WebTrends, recently wrote a piece for mycustomer.com titled "Web Analytics is dead!". The gist of the article is that web marketers should not look at web analytics data in a vacuum, but rather, use it to drive marketing campaigns and solutions. No disagreement with the premise, and as I wrote in the Web Analytics Report, vendors continue to set up partner integration networks that enable web analytics to be the "brains behind emarketing."

There's a few things I find interesting in reading the article. One is the use of the term "Marketing Performance Management" (MPM). What is MPM exactly? According to Sharp, it's "...a consistent metrics framework for all online marketing channels so marketers have one source of data and can target segments of customers with relevant marketing messages." He concludes by writing, "Naturally it requires a leap of faith for marketers to put their trust in technology to manage a task most organisations have carried out manually in the past. But....organisations will soon discover that if they want to stay ahead of the competition and engage with consumers effectively, MPM is the only way to improve their online marketing performance."

Sounds great. If a vendor comes calling with this silver bullet, your management may indeed line up to buy in. Omniture,Visual Sciences, Fireclick Coremetrics, Unica and SageMetrics all stress the same objective.

As I wrote in an ealier post, web analytics vendors primarily target marketers, who typically see the business value more clearly than IT. However, as analytics moves into the realm of integration with other technologies and marketing solutions, it is even more critical for marketers to work with IT teams to understand the back-end integration issues required to make that silver bullet even close to a reality.

So I'll suggest that internet marketers reach out to their IT counterparts and vice versa, to establish communication through designated points of contact and cross-functional project teams, as well as establish mechanisms to evaluate how marketing partner solutions integrate with web analytics tools. This will ensure that solutions are evaluated, tested, and implemented with a focus on due diligence, security, and administration requirements and that appropriate maintenance and support processes are put in place after the implementation. MPM makes for a fancy new acronym, but real integration is never a walk in the park...