Last evening, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) Atlanta chapter held an excellent event at Google’s Atlanta headquarters (while also teleconferencing in the SEMPO chapters from New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles). The panel featured Enrique Munoz Torres (Google), Evan LaPointe (Search Discovery), and Matt Crenshaw (Discovery Communications) with moderator Kevin Geraghty (360i). Conversation (and Tweeting) covered a thorough analysis of Google Analytics Premium by Torres along with applications and implications discussed by LaPointe and Crenshaw.

Many questions across the four cities covered the use of Google Analytics Premium for enterprises (especially to justify its cost). As Google launches its Premium product, the need for meaningful analysis that can be presented and easily digested by business executives is larger than ever. The web analytics space is growing fairly rapidly as organizations are realizing the value they can leverage from the behavior of site users. The data that organizations are able to receive is deeper and more valuable than ever due to the vast amount of analytics innovation that has occurred (especially in the past three years). This innovation increases the responsibility of web analysts within agencies and organizations to take their data diving and turn it into a tangible plan that can be acted upon and translated into business results.

Participants seemed to agree that web analytics is evolving toward a more mature state, with Crenshaw even postulating that the “data person” of today will go the way of the “web person” who existed back in the early 2000s. In the future, demand will grow for web analysts to go beyond charts and graphs. Instead, they must be prepared to explain how analytics information leads to specific business actions. Google, as usual, appears to be pushing us into this future.