What's in a cronut? Let me find out

Reader Ross S. did not join the line for this cronut, illustrating the popularity of different makers of tracking software on 1.3 million websites.

Original by Analytics SEO is here.

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The biggest beef I have with this cronut is the quality of the data. As I read their description of the underlying data, I see several red flags.

The analysis is hobbled by ignoring the competitive landscape in tracking software. Google Analytics carves out a huge share of the market by virtue of offering a richly featured product for free. (They justify this by establishing a gigantic spying operation on unsuspecting users.) However, industry insiders know that Omniture (owned by Adobe) is the heavyweight enterprise solution, with a complete feature set.

In other words, most of the 670,000 "customers" of Google Analytics are tiny websites; in addition, a lot of large websites also maintain Google Analytics in addition to Omniture since the former is free. It would be great if the researcher gives us one of two alternative views of market share: the share of revenues in the tracking software market; and the share of e-commerce revenues represented by the customers of each tracking software vendor. These two views give a fuller picture of the competitive landscape.

You'll notice this is the same game Google is playing in the mobile universe. Android has the most users but Apple makes the bulk of revenues.

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The SEO agency says the chart is "based on 1.3 million e-commerce websites in May 2013". Are there really 1.3 million websites out there selling us stuff? How do they define e-commerce? Is NYTimes.com an e-commerce website, for example? Or facebook.com for that matter?

In the summary, they made a pretty startling claim--that "a large number of websites have no tracking software at all". The only problem is readers can't find out what proportion of websites don't track users. The data in the cronut excluded sites without tracking, which is a big problem.

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Here is the link to the annual Top 500 Retailers report by Internet Retailer magazine. In Sep 2011, they found that 217 out of the top 500 use Omniture, 161 use Google Analytics, and 103 use Coremetrics (now owned by IBM).

Another place to look for corroborating evidence is Google Trends, which measures the popularity of search keywords. The relative order of the major vendors (excluding Google Analytics) does not match well with the data shown by Analytics SEO.

Compared to:

Coremetrics is way down in the list compiled by Analytics SEO.