It was easier than we thought. It took us not much more time than we'd planned. The developers put in a universal tag. We enabled a spreadsheet. We served cookies (at least that's what I heard). The test data came in. We clicked some buttons in the analytics tool and got dashboards. When the site launched, the early word was that we had increased our visitors.

Last week, I attended the OmmaMedia Analytics conference in New York. Typically this event draws lots of ad-tention from ad people on M-ad-ison Avenue and this year was no exception.

In the past this conference only served to point up the gulf between web analytics (or more broadly, digital analytics) and what the Madmenandwomen think is important to know about their hugely expensive on line activities. There was (in years past) talk about how “analytics is hard” and “not really that useful” and how Comscore is the equivalent of all things knowable under the noonday sun. It seemed as if the big media agencies saw measurement of those huge spending campaigns as the merest piffle. Or that the on line space was SO COMPLICATED that no analytic effort could hope to tell a story from which a client might get any use.