Today’s almost immeasurable and vast amount of web data makes customer analytics essential to cracking crucial business decisions. An interesting research study, conducted by Unica, depicts various trends on web data usage, its effect to campaigns and marketing offers and top barriers to web data. Four key takeaways from their annual marketing survey are: marketers seeing web data as the chief driver of customer analytics, the former being the most common tool to determine the latter, top barriers include data disparity and corporate culture difference and the gauge of web data effectiveness.

Most respondents see web data as “somewhat” effective with the following figures: “By wide margins, the highest percentages of respondents currently using web data to perform customer analytics (57%) and make decisions about marketing offers and campaigns (65%) say they are doing so “somewhat” effectively. However, only combined respective percentages of 19% and 15% say they are doing so somewhat ineffectively or not effectively at all.”

Business Analytics is a red hot topic at the on-going SAPphire 2011. Why is it so important that even the industry leaders are giving fairly attention to this? Well, in the present day realm, return of investments dictates the success and failure of an organization. And knowing where your customers’ perspective through demographics and behavioral patterns are deemed crucial for repeat business and luring new prospects.  Even SAP’s future, which depends on their social and mobile arms, is actually relying on data and analysis. Another company very interested in the union of web data and customer analytics is ClickFox—it maps customer experience by integrating social media information with customer relationship management.

According to Jeff Kelly’s earlier commentary, understanding customers’ entire life cycle as captured by web data will reveal opportunities to raise level of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Again, the first step to improving something is to start measuring all pertinent components involved. In case of business analytics, many providers are already swarming the industry.