Adam Greco, the BI-director of Salesforce covered an interesting topic today: How can I handle product returns as a part of my e.g. marketing efficiency within Omniture: Tracking Product Returns with Omniture.
While the idea is compelling at first, I think pushing a lot of external business data (such as returns) back into a Web Analytics tool isn’t the right approach.
Doesn’t it make much more sense to extract the web analytics data needed (such as channel, conversion, etc.) and pull it into my other Business intelligence tools?
Otherwise I’m feeding mountains of data into a web analytics tool, that is
a) not part of my secure internal IT environment
b) making me more dependant on the web analytics vendor month by month
I realize that it feels nice for web marketers and analysts to do also deeper business calculations on the web analytics tool – but I don’t consider pushing back all sorts of business data into WA tools the right solution.
