In the Web analytics industry, there has been an ongoing debate for some time over whether analytics is easy, hard, complex, or both hard and complex. Certain thought leaders advocate for each categorization. My take on it is "it depends" on the tools you are using, the site you are analyzing, your company's requirements, your team's skill set, and the processes you define for analytics.

Looking at your data is just as important as reading your data. Not all of us can see the obvious by just looking at numbers, even if we don't consider ourselves "visual" people. I've learned this quite extensively in my current job when presenting data findings to a combination of both finance and product teams. Some people are "table" folks and others are "chart" folks. Regardless, the combination of the two data presentation methods jogs the brain and forces you to see the data in new ways and patterns. Here are three reasons why you need to visualize your data....

That was how one former colleague expressed his frustration when a new employer framed all the company's goals in terms of new customer orders. A predictable consequence followed: managers dug out every kind of discount packaging ever hatched by the JV sales team in pursuit of scoring orders; and lo and behold, new customers came and ordered -- almost as quickly as profit margins fell. It's easy for most of us in online advertising to chuckle at a story of one-metric management, given that as a group we have more performance data than any other group outside of the Federal …

Ahhhhh -- social media. Addictive. Fun. Downright social! But how valuable is it? How do you tell? There are dozens of reckoning tools online to tally up any and all countable social media elements. Most of them are interesting and some actually useful. Rather than drill down into specifics, let's take a bird's-eye view of the types of measurements that might prove useful to the marketing professional.

The appetite for brand valuation data is so strong that multiple respectable agencies now publish annual rankings of the world's most valuable brands -- including Interbrand, Millward Brown, and Brand Finance. But there's a slight problem. The valuations of the same brand differ wildly across the three rankings. Not by the odd 20%, but by as much as a factor of 4.

Back in the Paleolithic Era of the Internet -- the '90s -- for some reason we all decided that the Internet was like print: comprised of pages, consumed in page views (and provided by publishers.) McLuhan said that the content of any new medium is the last medium, and of course we know now that the Internet cannot be pigeonholed into any analog analogue. I can read magazines or the paper online; I can watch TV, listen to the radio, rent a movie. But today I want to focus on video. One year ago, at the ARF's Audience Measurement 3.0 …

Looking to add to your summertime reading list? I recommend the new report from Harvard Business School professors John Deighton and John Quelch and Hamilton Consultants, "Economic Value of the Advertising-Supported Internet Ecosystem." The report was created for the IAB to explain the online advertising sector to public policy makers, and literally calculates how much the Internet is worth to the U.S. economy. As well-structured and comprehensive as this report is, I can't help but conclude that it overlooks another valuable contribution the Internet has made to the economy: behavioral data as a source of consumer insight that can radically …

2010 holds the promise to be a banner year for marketers. Customers and prospects alike are reevaluating their definition of value and actively seeking new business relationships. What's different? In a word, just about everything....

Competing on analytics sounds like a good thing, but is your organization actually living it? This past week at the OMMA Metrics and Measurement conference in San Francisco, we heard several agencies talk about how analytics aren't just a piece of the business, but are the key drivers in helping their clients kick the s#$t out of their competitors. Knowing how to successfully arbitrage and optimize the trigger points of the entire funnel through the use of technology and ingenuity takes not just smart minds but incredible discipline and stamina.

Most organizations I speak with are on their third or fourth Web analytics tool by now. The funny part is that some are switching from tool A to tool B, while others are switching from tool B to tool A. Are they all so bad? Yes, they are -- and here are the reasons.