The survey of 800 predominantly UK-based companies found 23% were using Google’s free tool exclusively, up on 14% a year ago, while 57% said they were using it in conjunction with another analytics platform.

Excluding Google Analytics, Omniture was the most commonly used web analytics package with a 42% market share, followed by WebTrends.

Lynchpin managing director Andrew Hood said: “The technology market for web analytics is still in many ways turbulent. There are clear pulls in two directions: unrelenting consolidation at the high end set against increasing dominance of Google Analytics (apparently across the board).

“With Google starting to open up APIs [application programming interface] into analytics data and Yahoo Analytics coming to market, technology is likely to continue developing apace over the next year.”

But while technology gets “more and more sophisticated”, Hood said, the challenges in interpreting and actioning web analytics data “only get bigger”.

Just 27% of companies said their web analytics “definitely? provide actionable insights, with a further 55% reporting that this is only sometimes the case.

Limited human resource is flagged as a key barrier to uncovering insights and acting on them. “Since 2008,” the report said, “there has been an increase from 8% to 15% of companies who have two dedicated web analysts and a decrease in the proportion of companies who have one analyst (from 32% to 26%). However, exactly the same proportion of companies ( 46%) report that they do not have any web analysts.”

But steps are being taken “to redress the balance”, writes Hood in an analysis piece penned exclusively for Research. Click here to read that article.