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A new edition of The Web Analytics Report 2008

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:35:00 -0400

Today we release a new edition of our Web Analytics Report 2008, a Basic Edition. This new edition focuses on the smaller players in the web analytics space, for organizations with smaller budgets or analytics initiatives in only one business area or on a single web site. For those with enterprise-wide analytics projects in the works, consult our Enterprise Edition. In both editions we've added a vendor risk profile cross-check, as we've done in the past for enterprise search and ECM. This gives you, the buyer, insight into how rapidly vendors are evolving and developing their products, as well as the risk that may be involved in purchasing a particular technology. As always, both editions contain best practice advice on establishing a business case, putting together a team, product selection and implementation.

A side-by-side comparison of the two editions is here. We'll share more details from this new commentary in the coming weeks.

Is the web analytics vendor feature race over?

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:31:00 -0400

Press releases are a funny thing, I thought as I saw the announcement from JupiterResearch that the "majority of web analytics customers [are] content with service, forcing providers to compete with price and flexibility," and that "despite some small skirmishes over capabilities like video and audio measurement, the Web analytics feature race is largely over."

It's not as simple as that.

On one hand, as I noted when we released the Web Analytics Report 2008, the top 5 reasons that managers like their vendors has nothing to do with features...it's about service, value and relationships.

On the other hand, I wouldn't trivialize the importance of tracking audio and video -- two areas of content that are becoming increasingly important to all web content managers -- and have been historically difficult to track completely and easily, hence the rise of independent vendors.

Interestingly, the release mentions that "the new frontier for Web analytics is data integration and the ability to stitch together a holistic view of customers' experience across multiple touch points." Web Analytics Report readers know that we highlighted this trend in our first report in May, 2007. Perhaps it's semantics, but this certainly seems to be a feature issue.

In early June, I was on a panel on mobile analytics at the Internet Marketing Conference. Much of the conversation focus was about the tools...how did current online analytics tools compare to the new ones; what could be tracked; what couldn't be tracked; and so forth. As I've described in a few recent posts, mobile analytics is a new area for online analytics vendors, and this is certainly where we'll see a new round in the features race. The mobile web is too big to ignore.

Finally, software vendors must always evolve their tools to keep investor money flowing. Vendors must come up with twice/year releases to show the marketplace and investors that they are market leaders.

So, while I might be tempted to join in declaring the end of features -- if only so we can all focus on simply doing analytics more effectively -- I don't think it will happen.

And if you care deeply about measuring mobile and multimedia usage, well, then: long live the feature wars, because that's the only way you're going to get the functionality you need.

The 2008 Web Analytics Report

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:01:00 -0500

Today we released the 2008 Web Analytics Report, evaluating 15 web analytics products.

While you may have heard of Omniture and Google Analytics, and perhaps think them your only choices, don't believe the hype. As Phil Kemelor, lead analyst on the report, put it: "The web analytics marketplace has seen some instability and consolidation -- such as ClickTracks and SageMetrics being acquired by larger entities, and Omniture's imminent acquisition of Visual Sciences -- and this has led some to believe that web analytics has become a two-party system. But don't believe the hype that Google Analytics and Omniture are your only choices, because that's hardly the case."

In fact, our research found that there's especially diverse choices in Europe and the UK, and in this new edition we added one of those vendors, UK's Foviance and their tool WebAbacus, to our line-up of evaluations. As we also note in the full press release, with Microsoft entering this space later this year, the marketplace is far from limited.

You can download a free chapter, which includes our review of Coremetrics' Online Analytics.

If you are a full subscriber, you'll receive your copy shortly; if you're a previous report buyer, you'll receive an e-mail soon outlining discount eligibility.

Watch this space for more in the coming weeks...

Getting real about MPM and other silver bullets

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:33:00 -0400

Nick Sharp, the VP and general manager for EMEA at WebTrends, recently wrote a piece for mycustomer.com titled "Web Analytics is dead!". The gist of the article is that web marketers should not look at web analytics data in a vacuum, but rather, use it to drive marketing campaigns and solutions. No disagreement with the premise, and as I wrote in the Web Analytics Report, vendors continue to set up partner integration networks that enable web analytics to be the "brains behind emarketing."

There's a few things I find interesting in reading the article. One is the use of the term "Marketing Performance Management" (MPM). What is MPM exactly? According to Sharp, it's "...a consistent metrics framework for all online marketing channels so marketers have one source of data and can target segments of customers with relevant marketing messages." He concludes by writing, "Naturally it requires a leap of faith for marketers to put their trust in technology to manage a task most organisations have carried out manually in the past. But....organisations will soon discover that if they want to stay ahead of the competition and engage with consumers effectively, MPM is the only way to improve their online marketing performance."

Sounds great. If a vendor comes calling with this silver bullet, your management may indeed line up to buy in. Omniture,Visual Sciences, Fireclick Coremetrics, Unica and SageMetrics all stress the same objective.

As I wrote in an ealier post, web analytics vendors primarily target marketers, who typically see the business value more clearly than IT. However, as analytics moves into the realm of integration with other technologies and marketing solutions, it is even more critical for marketers to work with IT teams to understand the back-end integration issues required to make that silver bullet even close to a reality.

So I'll suggest that internet marketers reach out to their IT counterparts and vice versa, to establish communication through designated points of contact and cross-functional project teams, as well as establish mechanisms to evaluate how marketing partner solutions integrate with web analytics tools. This will ensure that solutions are evaluated, tested, and implemented with a focus on due diligence, security, and administration requirements and that appropriate maintenance and support processes are put in place after the implementation. MPM makes for a fancy new acronym, but real integration is never a walk in the park...