People controlling the marketing and customer service budgets of a large company need to be educated on web strategy and tactics in order to interpret the data they receive from analytics, according to Microsoft.

Contributing to the official Microsoft adCenter blog, founding president and chairman of the Web Analytics Association Jim Sterne, wrote: "We have the data, we have the pretty reports. But we do not have an educated team made up of technical and business people who can take the resulting statistics and turn them into meaningful plans."

Mr Sterne said there is a gap in the feedback loop between the interpretation of data and the planning stages of a company's log file.

This he attributed to the business heads of a company not knowing how to handle or interpret web data, while the technical operators tend to have an insufficient view into the business side.

Mr Sterne claimed that business people need to become more analytics savvy, being able to use data reports to their optimum potential in order to plug the gap between the interpretation and planning stages of a company's log file.

Microsoft adCenter works to boost a company's web traffic with content advertisements and enables sites to manage keyword lists and maintain metrics. 

Living Streams comment:  We don't agree with Mr Sterne.  Our analytics service is based on applying business criteria to the data and providing clients with guidance alongside selected data.  We provide the bridge between analytics data and its business significance - leaving clients to maintain focus on their own business rather than becoming analytics experts.