At Atlas, we have fielded questions from clients for years about how Atlas and web analytics tools, such as Omniture and Webtrends, work together. Web analytic technologies, once tools of the IT department for maintaining websites, are essential for marketing teams to effectively plan and execute their businesses online. Marketers tend to directly manage and optimize website performance, whereas media agencies manage and optimize off-site media campaigns through Atlas.

Are they two disparate sources of data that operate in silos? Can advertisers utilize one source for all their data? The short answer to both questions is no. Let’s take a brief look at what Atlas and web analytics providers each have to offer, and ultimately how they should work together:

Third-party ad servers, like Atlas, focus on the consumer journey to the website by tracking impressions, interactions, and clicks across display and search initiatives that eventually lead to the desired behavior on an advertiser’s website. Atlas operates in the third-party domain, given that most of the data is collected from the various publishers’ websites where advertisers’ media is displayed, and from the advertiser’s website itself. Given the major part Atlas plays in the media planning, buying, and trafficking process, Atlas also enables information about the campaigns to be captured that wouldn’t normally be present in web analytics data. Costing information, view-through conversions, attribution, and behavioral targeting segmentation are just a few of the data points that differentiate Atlas reports uniquely. Any data collected on the advertisers’ website through Atlas Action Tags is used to measure the effectiveness of the off-site activity, but isn’t of particular interest in isolation—that is, any data Atlas collects about on-site activity that can’t be associated with some form of off-site media provides limited information that isn’t actionable.

Web analytics focuses primarily on data and the user’s journey through the website. These technologies operate in the first-party domain, where the data is collected on site, and collects 100 percent of all the interactions consumers have with the website. Capturing so much data enables web analytics tools to report on the performance of the website at a very granular level, and to make website optimization decisions to improve the user experience. Web analytics enables advertisers to see where consumers are coming from and whether the visits are the result of a last interaction with a media campaign. Web analytics vendors, however, have a restricted view of what’s happening outside of the website. Because they operate only in the first-party domain, this is reduced to direct (that is, click-based) traffic, and they can’t see what happens in terms of consumer exposure to media across other website domains, thereby offering a limited view on media performance.

Marketers, who tend to manage the web analytics tools, use web analytics to effectively manage the customer’s journey on the site, while agencies focused on media buying look at Atlas data to better optimize their online media campaigns.

Together, Atlas and web analytics offer complementary data sources to enable an end-to-end view of the customer’s journey from the first piece of media they saw, what led them to a website, and the path taken, all the way to navigating the website to purchase a product. By having this more holistic view, marketers and media agencies can work together in facilitating more intelligent optimization efforts and an increased return on both ad spend and website investments. When implementing such a marketing approach, it is important to assess the effectiveness of the marketing strategy to drive traffic to the website, increase interest, and maximize online business.

As Atlas is an open, scalable platform, there are several different ways to integrate with web analytics data: from deeply rooted integrations with Omniture SiteCatalyst, to a more basic integration of sharing media codes as a common identifier between the two different data sets. The comprehensive solution can then take the form of a complete Atlas+ reporting dashboard that brings all of this data under one roof, providing the insight needed to fine-tune the marketing program and allocate resources where they count. Marketers can then make better decisions based on insightful and clear data, delivering more successful results.