Hurol Inan of Bienalto

You gotta love the work of Hurol Inan, the first Master of Multichannel Marketing that I would like to pay homage to.

Hurol is Australia’s guru for web analytics and online marketing.

He is the author of Measuring the Success of Your Website and Search Analytics – A Guide to Analyzing and Optimizing Website Search Engines. He is also the managing director of the online marketing consultancy, Bienalto with HQ in Sydney.

And what a master Hurol Inan is in his field.

A little known fact in the US is that Hurol’s book on web analytics was the first ever to be published on the subject, namely in Dec 2001. That is to say it came out even before the famous Jim Sterne’s Web Metrics which appeared mid 2002. (As web analysts know, of course, Jim Sterne went on to become the US guru for eMetrics marketing optimization.)

What blows me away however is how Hurol wrote about web analytics already in 2001.

Back then, my own understanding of great web analytics peaked at the discovery of the conversion rate metric. (How lame, looking back today.) Yet Hurol’s perspective was:

1. Top-down starting from a business frame work and working down to detail from there
2. Customer-centric rather than click centric already in 2001 !!!
3. Unified, including online-offline integration

Even though the book is seven years old by now, much of its advice is still visionary. Here are two of my favored quotes from Part I – A Customer-centric Framework:

“You can […] use this real-time information – about how products and services are selling – to test the market with new products. You can prelaunch a new line of products on your website and then use web analysis to see how customers respond.”

“Customer and sales data collected from the web can be integrated with information from the organization’s other customer-interaction points. This unified, cross-channel view of customers can be used to deliver more personalized services to the customer, whether it be at the call centre, through direct mail, or via the website itself.”

I swear – I am still presenting these two great points at conferences today.