Challenges for Web Analytics Vendors Avinash Kaushik wrote an interesting blog post setting out what he thought the most important challenges to the web analytics vendors will be in the near future. For me they are:

1. Pagecentricity - the web page is dead how do we measure rich internet applications. Although I read recently that Omniture and Coremetrics seemed to started to address this issue already.

2. Web Analytics is not enough - vendors need to find a way of meaningfully integrating survey data into the analysis easily and cheaply.

3 ASP is not enough - there is demand out there to be able to merge javascript page tagging with log file analysis or allowing business to pay a one off software license rather than paying ASP.

4. Privacy - not on the radar for a lot of the vendors but there is a vocal chunk of people who are rightly or wrongly worried about their privacy and new and innovative ways to stay anonymous on the web. We should all be using first party cookies but we could even loose these and javascript tags . Maybe not tomorrow but surely in the near future. When that happens what do we do? Are we putting serious thought to alternative, and safe, ways to collect data?  ¶ 10:06 AM