As the old saying goes, the man with one eye in the land of the blind is king. That pretty much describes the sorry state of Web analytics these days.
While there are plenty of Web analytics platforms to choose from these days the truth of the matter is that most of them are pretty complex endeavors to implement that come with pretty rudimentary reporting tools. The once exception to the complexity part of that statement is Google Analytics, but most companies running serious businesses on the Web would say you get what you pay for from Google's free offering. While it may work just fine for many, enterprise class companies that have huge business endeavors tied to the Web generally look for Web analytic tools from companies such as WebTrends, Omniture, CoreMetrics, Unica or any number of other tools.
The problem is that a lot of companies are looking to make business decisions based on the data being generated from these systems and because of their complexity, the data may not be all that reliable and even if it is you usually have to hire dedicated analysts to make sense of it. Unfortunately, the analysts spend most of their time looking for the right data in these systems as opposed to actually analyzing the results.
Into this void now steps a consulting company called Technology Leaders that has developed a new alert service that essentially sends an e-mail to alert you about any anomalies it sees in terms of your Web traffic based on the previous history of the Web traffic on your site.
This won't solve a lot of the problems associated with the implementation of Web analytics but it could do a lot for people in terms of helping them put their time to better use. Sorting through the data in these applications looking for meaningful trends is the digital equivalent of the needle in the haystack. So anything that helps automate that process is a step in the right direction.