A benefit to being self employed is I can return to sharing my ideas and thoughts with the world. While thinking through where to start, I had a glance back at my blog posts from five years ago and at presentations over the past two decades.
I am not sure if it is a positive or not but I feel I could reuse decks from as long ago as my first ever talks in 2008. Add some images so it is not just bullet points but the basic messages on how to get value from Digital Analytics are still broadly the same.
But it’s been nearly 20 years, surely the Digital Analytics world has moved on in that time? Even just the past year or two with what feels like the explosion of AI solutions that claim to perform all the work of a Digital Analyst, that must be a massive change?
Yes and no (yes, the consultant’s answer of It Depends).
Google Analytics was available back then but only a free version with limited features. Since then, the tools have become massively more powerful and widely used by marketers, product managers, etc. We lost some but there are again many options available including Piano, Amplitude, Piwik and Snowplow. People went beyond the UI of Digital Analytics tools to accessing data via Data Warehouses, BI tools, using SQL, Python, etc.
So much change.
People are more aware of data governance, best practices with UTMs, we have Data Layers, Google Tag Manager, Server side tracking, data enrichment. The data is of better quality and quantity now. Oh yes, GDPR, cookie consent policies, losing X% of your data.
Surely that means a lot of change.
Knowledge levels are higher, the books were published, Digital Analytics courses were made available online.. There are even some new (un)conferences where knowledge could be shared and learnt (you’re welcome).
So why, after all this time, the power of all the new technology, the vast quantity of knowledge available at your fingertips, does it kinda feel like nothing has changed for most companies.
A story I often tell in talks on Ecommerce is that the business questions are the same now as they were a thousand years ago for the guy sitting by the side of the road with their goods laid out on a rug. Who are my customers, am I in the right location, is my pricing right, etc.
We may have improved/fixed the technology, the data quality (not everyone has but everyone can now), the knowledge around data and getting answers from it. But I question if we are better at asking the right questions, at communicating the results found and in the interpretation and use of these answers to drive action.
I was listing these as challenges in my first talks and, for most companies, nothing seems to have changed. It is these areas I am most fascinated by and will be focusing on going forward.
Pausing here for now but what do you think? Do you agree that while we may have more answers, something is still missing when it comes to the questions being asked and the use of those answers?
This post was originally published on LinkedIn on 20th May 2026. View the original post and discussion here.
