Analytics APIs Will Be Our Bridge to Intelligence

Eric Peterson has a kick
ass post titled “The Coming
Bifurcation in Web Analytics Tools.” 

In it he defines the
bifurcation issue: 

“I
believe that we are about to see an increasing number of companies in the
coming year drop their paid vendor’s “basic solution” in favor of Google
Analytics and, at the same time, seriously consider adding their vendor’s
high-end offering.”

Though he does not
highlight it, he also mentions what I believe will eventually bridge this
predicted bifurcation. That is, the ability to leverage the Analytics API to
create more robust and relevant tool sets, not only for workflow and insights,
but most importantly for action. He does mention ShufflePoint as an example of
a company building off the Google Analytics API and while being a killer
workflow add-on it barely scratches the surface of what can be done via an
analytics API.

So, I firmly believe that
the bifurcation Eric writes about will be temporary. In addition to cost, the API
is GA's big competitive advantage in the enterprise.  Google is
positioned well and experienced for this future. Over the next few years
third parties insanely focused on adding value to
"numbers" will create added layers of data
intelligence to the core analytics data much the same way bid management and
MVT companies added actionable intelligence to the core Search data over the
last 5 years.

Though I
understand their protectionist mindset, I've been disappointed that Omniture
has held back API access to their customers through tokens and the like (though
I believe they recently have opened up higher degrees of access to their Genesis
partners). I think at some point over the next 12-24 months and as a direct
result of Eric’s prediction coming true, they will have no choice but to fully
open their API. This will really usher in the next wave of
analytics and add serious value to an already insanely valuable
medium.