Where next for web analytics tags?

Two stories in the web analytics space over the past couple of months have been running in parellel but strangely there paths haven't; the increasingly complex use of custom analytics javascript tags and the aquisition of analytics vendors.

Lets look at the first issue, "tag management", often analytics analysts are asked to measure something simply because of  poor back end reporting in another legacy system or because the business thinks it needs to know every granular detail of what a visitor is doing on their website.

If this sounds familiar then resist as much as possible, not only will it be a headache to implement but the business will then be expecting exact numbers, something analytics was never meant for, which will either lead to a lack of confidence in the numbers or some serious education required. Whenever custom tags are needed  ask yourself (and the business area asking for them), will data really ever get used? What value is it really going to add? Can the question the business wants answered be done through any existing analytics reports? With these in mind then at least any additional custom tags on a page will only get added which truely add value. 


Managing additional custom tags is not easy and in a whitepaper "When more is not better: Page Tags", one well known brand is said to have 28 different tags on their purchase transaction page, it's most likely that only a portion of these are analytics tags as its common to place any number of these tags on pages as well:

1) Adserving solutions 
2) Site optimization solutions, for example MVT tools
3) Affiliate marketing solutions
4) Search marketing solutions


....and that's without considering that a percentage of companies sometimes run two analytics tools! A solution suggested by Observepoint is to install a Chief Data Officer (obviously using their tools), but that doesn't get to the root of the problem, how as analysts we don't become weighed down by implementing tagging and add value in the area of providing actionable insight. 

Now onto the second topic, analytic's vendors, there has been constant movement in this area recently, with them being bought up by larger companies whose intentions are never quite convincing (well for me anyway): Omniture by Adobe, Coremetrics by IBM and the rumoured MS looking at Webtrends. At the Omniture summit this year I saw a demo of CS5 and how it was going to make it so easy for developers to put analytic's tags in flash but I still struggle with the fundamental fact that flash developers and analytic's just don't mix. 


So trying to be a little more radical I kept thinking there must be a better way, without the need for lots of custom tags to be able to implement analytic's tags without buckets of code, without having to ask developers nicely to embed our tags in their nice creative work (flash or otherwise). The options are either do away with javascript based analytic's altogether in place of log file analysis but this has its own issues, or host the custom tags outside of the page itself through a tagging framework, companies like Sitetagger and Tagman offer this type of service, but it still requires maintenance of the tags even if off page. 


No I want something radical! What options do we have for when the page is built, tags to be intelligently created by the system that builds the pages? Maybe based on the known attributes about the page that are already known by the system, not just elements of a page in the case of where the Adobe acquisition of Omniture is currently at.


What about the core system that constructs the page...the Content Management System? or ECRM? 


Brian Clifton suggests that "Ultimately, I do not feel an IT company, such as IBM, are best placed to move the web analytics industry to the next level", rather analytics should live in marketing, but marketeers are not interested in the tagging implementation, they just want to understand what customers are doing or not as may be the case.

I'd love to know what your thoughts are on this, should we just accept that the future is cumbersome, complicated tagging implementations or be looking further ahead?