Evolution of Web Analytics in the world of AI - Emergence of Trust

I have been in the web analytics space for a really really long time (from 2005 actually!). Since then I have witnessed some of the most remarkable changes in the world of online commerce and its corresponding implications to Web Analytics and Marketing Analytics. I started at a time when there were NO "Mobile Phones" in the device type reports on Google Analytics, to a time when their numbers were so insignificant that they were ignored for most reporting purposes, to now where we have separate Data Streams for Mobile and Web to separate the dominance of Mobile over Web. Now no reports would now be complete without highlighting the impact of Mobiles. This is just one of the many examples that highlights how Web Analytics has had to transform in the last 2 decades since I first pointed my web browser to Site Catalyst (Adobe Analytics now). Along with the advancements in technology, our online user behaviour too has changed. We are now on the verge of yet another major revolution, Artificial Intelligence has take the world by storm changing everything it touches, forcing us to have a relook at our Business plans, Digital Infrastructure and Web Analytical frame works once again. Last time the changes were mostly technical with the emergence of Mobile Phones, this time it's behavioural!

The 3 phases of Web Analytics

The Click Era - In the olden days when Online commerce was still new, web analytics was introduced to primarily track Clicks. These were still early days for online users and most of our online activity was limited to Clicking (remember those disgusting old popup ads asking you to Click?). The KPIs in this Click Era was dominated by metrics like Clicks, Page Views, Visits and Visitors. The main business objective then was to get as much traffic onto the website as possible and hope for the best. Conversion was a derivative that was only calculated but not optimised for.

The Conversion Era - By 2007 our online world was changing fast. Smart Phones had made an entry into the market enabling customers to be online all the time. We were now looking at meaningful actions to drive more value for our time invested in our online activities. The old age Click mentality was gone. Business models too adapted to this change by discarding the old Click based KPIs to measure performance that was more Conversion based (or Events according to GA). The Conversion Era had landed! This resulted in optimising our websites, applications and online marketing campaigns for conversion and introducing new KPIs that enabled us to maximise this. New KPIs like, Completion Rate, Scroll depth, Signups, Lead submissions, Number of Shares, Time on Website / App, Upgrades / Orders placed, etc were introduced to measure the ability of a website or marketing campaign to convert. This is where we currently are, but I believe the end is near for this conversion based era, and I see us moving out very soon.

The Trust Era - OpenAI was founded in 2015 to develop a "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, and it launched its first LLM ChatGPT in 2020. The rest as we know is a fast evolving story that has transformed the way we seek, consume and generate information on the web. We are now asking these tools (via prompts) for solutions. And in return we get customised ready made answers. We are not searching or doing tasks anymore, instead we are just asking! The main driver for this kind of online behaviour is in the technology's ability to convince us that the given output is right and accept it as valid. This is TRUST and a lot of effort is going into building this trust into AI. And only those companies that are able to gain this trust from their customers by incorporating AI the right way will survive. And once again we are in need to relook at our online business models and KPIs to identify and promote factors that influence building this Trust. But unlike the Click and Conversion based KPIs that could be measured, Trust unfortunately can't be measured. We need to identify user actions that indicates Trust and equate them to corresponding metrics that can be measured online.

Building this new framework requires careful thought and specific action. I will try to dive into this in my next article where I shall build a generic game plan that any organisation big or small can use for successfully measuring the Businesses ability to build consumer trust using AI, because going forward it's only on TRUST, we CLICK!

If you want to stay updated on what the model is and how to navigate these untested waters, then please do signup for Mind & Machine. I will try to break down the big uncertainties surrounding this fast unfurling technology into simple questions and provide tangible answers to build up your Thought Leadership on AI!

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