When e-commerce was hatched back in the '90s, it would have lived for a while without Web analytics, but not for long. It would have died a cruel death in its nest, hungrily watching as bigger, more traditional channels ate up all the nurturing dollars brought to the nest by its parent company - except for one mutation that made e-commerce grow and thrive like a refined version of an old species. That one mutation was its amazing ability to be measured with far greater granularity than its bigger, more traditional channel siblings.
That ability to be measured has allowed e-commerce to gobble marketing dollars it never would have earned otherwise. It has helped e-commerce grow into a five-hundred pound canary that not only delivers low-cost, low-friction sales to organisations, but also squawks and chatters constantly about what it is selling to whom, and how shoppers are buying.
The metaphor goes further: Web analytics is, in fact, a significant mutation in the genome of e-commerce. It's like the mutation that gave certain savannah-dwelling hominids bigger brains and looser hips. It not only enabled them to stand up and see farther, but also let them recognize patterns better than their squatting, tree-bound relatives. Web analytics gives e-commerce both the vision and the facility for pattern recognition vital to advanced evolution.
