The History of Web and Social Analytics (Through 2011)

We love infographics… and if you haven’t noticed, we now have a category just for the Infographics. We love infographics so much that we’ve started to develop and design our own infographics and some for our partners and clients. This one was created for our client, Webtrends, and provides a social media and web analytics history.

Here is a history of web and social media analytics in chronological order:

• 1990: The web emerges with CERN, introducing HTTP, HTML, server software, and web servers.
• 1991: Webtrends is born, beginning online user behavior analysis beyond hit counter tracking.
• 1992: The World Wide Web (WWW) goes public in America.
• 1993: JavaScript language is born, becoming the standard for web browser interactive processing.
• 1995: JavaScript adoption by IE and Netscape solidifies its use for data collection.
• 1996: Launch of WebSide Story, Omniture, Nedstat, and Unica, along with the first widely used hosted hit counter service called Web-Counter.
• 1999: Coremetrics is launched.
• 2001: The web analytics market shrinks by 7%.
• 2002: Web analytics industry consolidation begins, with many companies going out of business or being acquired.
• 2004: XiTi analyzer is launched.
• 2005: Google acquires Urchin software.
• 2006: Radian6 and Scout Labs launch, enabling social media measurement and analysis.
• 2007: PostRank monitors and collects social engagement events; Klout releases The Klout Score.
• 2008: Omniture introduces mobile analytics capabilities; Yahoo! buys Index Tools.
• 2009: Adobe acquires Omniture; Bit.ly Pro offers real-time traffic aggregation and analysis; Facebook introduces its analytics.
• 2010: Webtrends Mobile Analytics and Facebook Analytics are released; Gartner names Social Analytics one of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies.
• 2011: Webtrends integrates PostRank data into Webtrends Analytics 10; IBM acquires Coremetrics and Unica.

This timeline outlines the key developments in web and social media analytics over the years, showcasing the evolution of these fields.