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Nedstat Sends a Message

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 02:51:00 -0400

Last week, European web analytics vendor Nedstat announced a new feature called "Live Segmentation," which enables you to develop customized behavioral analysis across unaggregated web data.

This is a big step for Nedstat. Readers of the Web Analytics Report know that this missing capability was somewhat of a downside to an offering that competes in Europe with the likes of Omniture, and WebTrends -- two vendors already providing a "data warehouse"-type of feature that enables deeper and more customizable analysis.

I've seen Live Segmentation, and at first blush it looks pretty straightforward...clean interface; drop and drag filter building, and so forth. However, Live Segmentation has a singular benefit that can't be found in the technology itself: availability to all SiteStat customers at no additional cost to the basic offering.

Nedstat argues that all web analytics solutions should provide for this level of behavioral segmentation analysis as part of their core, and I would have to agree. Although why it has taken so long for vendors to follow through on this has been somewhat of a mystery. NetGenesis (a "first generation," log file-based, licensed software package) provided segmentation functionality in 1997, but tag-based, SaaS vendors have been slow to catch up. This is problematic, because these sorts of custom queries really lie at the heart of contemporary web analytics, which tries to move beyond the limitations of "out of the box" analysis and reporting queries.

Nevertheless, the marketplace is moving. Coremetrics' announced their "deep dive" segmentation analysis offering, Explore, in May, 2008. Unica, in its latest release, 7.4, also just announced this level of custom analysis. The difference here is that Nedstat is essentially providing deep behavioral segmentation analysis for free.

Web Analytics Vendor Cross-Check H2/2008

tregli@cmswatch.com(Phil Kemelor and Theresa Regli) — Thu, 7 Aug 2008 05:51:00 -0400

It is all too easy to select web analytics vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market -- status either conferred by analyst firms or assumed by the vendors themselves. However, CMS Watch analyst Theresa Regli argues that you need to look more closely at product and vendor alike -- and understand where both are headed -- to properly evaluate your longterm risks and opportunities in an evolving marketplace...

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 challenge of mobile analytics - Part 1

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Thu, 29 May 2008 00:06:00 -0400

Last year everyone was talking about Web 2.0; this year it's all about the mobile web. Let's take a look at what this means for mobile analytics...which by the way, I'll be speaking about on a panel at the Internet Marketing Conference in New York on June 4.

The bottom line...mobile analytics is relatively new; beyond infancy, but certainly not for the faint of heart.

Biggest challenges are

Identifying unique visitors, because mobile browsers don't often accept cookies (you will likely need to rely on browser, OS and IP combinations)

Identifying the phone and manufacturer (you may need to integrate data from the Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL)

IP addresses changing based on moving between mobile towers.

Vendors committed to JavaScript page tagging, such asCoremetrics and Omniture, are touting a "no JavaScript" image tag implementation strategy. However, these and other tag-based vendors rely on a JavaScript library file to collect data about the OS, size, and resolution of the monitor. To compensate, you need to stuff the image tag with query strings that will collect the data you require for reporting.

From the perspective of collecting browser (user agent) data, log file and packet sniffing still make sense because these are server-side methods, and therefore the http request gets logged. So AuriQ (packet sniffing), Unica and WebTrends are all possible alternatives, but still suffer the same issues with regard to unique visitor identification.

On the reporting side of things, vendors will point out that you can get the same reports as you'd get normally, which is true; you just have to filter accordingly to get a break out of mobile activity. Nedstat is an exception, recently announcing a more packaged treatment of their mobile analytics reports.

Reflecting the ongoing industry fragmentation within web analytics, a collection of new firms have emerged with a more specialized approach to analyzing the mobile web. I'll take a look at these companies in my next post.

Coremetrics releases ad hoc analysis functionality

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Thu, 8 May 2008 06:14:00 -0400

The recently concluded eMetrics Summit was somewhat quiet on the vendor front except for the Coremetrics announcement of its Spring 2008 release featuring ad hoc query functionality in its new offering, "Explore."

This now gives Coremetrics a competitive offering to Omniture Discover and WebTrends Market Intelligence.

More advanced users of Coremetrics will likely be pleased. As Web Analytics Report readers know, one of the major pain points among customers seeking deeper-dive analysis was needing to go through account managers to run custom queries and potentially have to wait a long time to get results. If Explore works as billed, it will mitigate that problem.

I've always thought that Coremetrics did a decent job at creating out-of-the-box reports that address the needs of marketers and less sophisticated analysts. While they have lagged their competitors in offering a strong ad-hoc analysis tool, another way of looking at it could be that they have been tracking their customers learning curve more accurately...and now they believe there is enough analytics maturity among their client base to actually use a deeper analytics tool.

If this is the case, it represents a different approach than what has often characterized web analytics..."a build it and they will be sold" strategy that provides tools that are too sophisticated and challenging for the customer base to use effectively. As you review web analytics software -- as you would any technology -- make sure not to over-buy something you don't know how to use.

Y! IndexTools...let the games begin

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:19:00 -0400

The announcement to make Yahoo! IndexTools a free service, coming so quickly on the heels of the acquisition, would seem to serve notice to Omniture, Google Analytics, and other market leaders, such as Nedstat, Coremetrics', Unica, and WebTrends' about the seriousness of Yahoo!'s intentions.

Eric Peterson has written a very thoughtful post that delves into the market implications on this latest move.

But from a customer perspective, this could become a bit confusing in the short term. According to IndexTool's Dennis Mortensen, current customers were contacted to let them know they'd be able to continue using the service at no cost if they sign forthcoming agreement from Yahoo!. Details about the agreement and how this impacts current customization projects is still being sorted out, as is how long customers will have to determine if they want to accept the terms.

I'm sure most customers will be inclined to sign the agreement to maintain continuity, unless they have concerns about Yahoo! storing their data, as Google stores Google Analytics data.

Is this a founded concern?

It all depends on your privacy policies -- something you should consider in your requirements for a web analytics tool to begin with. If you haven't figured this out, then you should.

My guess is that for most current IndexTools customers, this will not be a show stopper.

If it does present difficulties for your enterprise, now would be the time to review the vendor profiles in the Web Analytics Report.

In the meantime, current IndexTools customers will surely be asking some important questions, like whether all their current functionality will remain available for free, and if so, for how long. Will data from the pre-Yahoo! days still be available? For how long? How will this affect custom work that you're doing or planning have done by IndexTools, as well as whether there will be a new technical and professional service availability and cost structure? And what about new features and releases, such as Rubix; what will be the cost and support structure?

Yahoo! is moving quickly, and I expect that they will seek to address these issues. However, as a customer, you'll have to make sure that you get these and other questions answered completely before signing on the dotted line.

Yahoo! steps into analytics with IndexTools acquisition

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:06:00 -0400

This past week's announcement that Yahoo! purchased IndexTools puts a new spotlight on the web analytics marketplace.

Yahoo! is clearly looking to compete with Google, but the reasons for this particular acquisition remain less evident. On the one hand, Yahoo! may be assuming that the mass market wants the kind of richer features that IndexTools offers. As you raise your own level of analytics competence, you may prove them right. On the other hand, since there were only a handful of independent, mid-range analytics vendors available out there for a decent price, IndexTools may have come to Yahoo! via more of a process of elimination.

The Yahoo! "party line" is that the technology will be a great boon to its small and mid-sized business (SMB) clientele. Probably true. In many ways, IndexTools resembles Google Analytics in its usable interface, featuring both dynamic drilldown and behavioral segmentation, as well as a nice collection of out-of-the-box reports oriented towards campaign analysis.

However, it is the perceived potential of IndexTools that has many observers hoping for more than just another Google Analytics. The company has been touting its next generation release, called "Rubix," since January. If Rubix lives up to its promise, it could possibly give Omniture's Discover offering a run in terms of functionality and ease of use. This has become the second-most anticipated non-release of a product in web analytics -- after Microsoft's Gatineau.

While Rubix could be a differentiator, without it, IndexTools does not offer the functionality that distinguishes it from Omniture and WebTrends -- for example the ability to analyze unaggregated data from a graphic UI and to perform repeatable Excel reporting. For now, you must use regular expressions to analyze unaggregated data and do manual updates of Excel...just like Google Analytics.

Dennis Mortenson, COO of IndexTools, claimed repeatedly that IndexTools could do 80 percent of what Omniture could do, at a fraction of the price. People also say the same about Google Analytics. This is marketing spin at its best. It doesn't matter which 80 percent or which 20 percent; it matters only how it matches your requirements.

As Web Analytics Report readers know, larger IndexTools customers picked that solution to get good standard reports, plus additional reports customized by the vendor, all at an attractive price. Feature richness and attention to individual customer service are not traditionally the hallmark of mass-market solutions, so Yahoo! has some clear choices ahead here, and IndexTools customers will want to watch carefully which way the new owner takes the service.

Among the questions that remain to be answered:. Will Rubix ever see the light of day? Will the basic technology be morphed to a Google Analytics-type solution? A combination of the two perhaps? Or will all of this become moot if Microsoft acquires Yahoo!? Or perhaps IndexTools becomes the premier analytics offering from Microsoft?

We'll be watching.

IndexTools and WAA Standards

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:21:00 -0400

Given pervasive confusion around analytics terminology, I lauded the Web Analytics Association's August, 2007 announcement of Report Definition Standards, but was somewhat skeptical with regard to how vendors might use the cloak of compliance to make it harder for you to interpret their report definitions.

Fast forward to March 9, 2008, and IndexTools' COO Dennis Mortensen posted a refreshingly comprehensive, easy to understand, and transparent list of how the IndexTool's solution complies (or doesn't) with the standards.

Critically, Mortensen describes the methodology IndexTools uses to make the calculations, which lies at the crux of using the standards definitions to understand reports generated from any product.

Mortensen's post must also rank as an industry first for a vendor to actually go public that their product cannot produce every metric under the sun, making it far easier for you to potentially draw an "apples to apples" comparison and clearly see what you get, and what you don't, from a basic reporting perspective.

All of the other web analytics vendors...especially those with the largest customer bases, such as Omniture, Google Analytics, Nedstat, ClickTracks, Unica, Coremetrics' and WebTrends should step up and clarify in similar terms how they meet (or not) these standards.

Nobody's really number 1 in Web Analytics

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:27:00 -0400

"Who's number 1?"

It's question people ask a lot in many domains, but especially software, and as such, it regularly pops up within the web analytics community.

You can rank them crudely by number of individual customers. Let's take a look at the vendors we reviewed in the most recent Web Analytics Report and see how many customers they have -- or rather, they say they have:

Google Analytics: ~~5 million~~ "hundreds of thousands" (Enterprise/SMB)
WebTrends: 10,000 (Enterprise/SMB)
ClickTracks: 8,000 (SMB)
Nedstat: 1,200 (Enterprise) 6,000 (SMB)
Omniture: 4,000 plus(includes Visual Sciences) (Enterprise/SMB)
IndexTools: 3,000 (Enterprise/SMB)
Unica: 500 (Enterprise), few thousand (SMB)
Coremetrics: 1,200 (Enterprise/SMB)
Fireclick, : 230 (Enterprise/SMB)
AuriQ: 200 (SMB/Enterprise)
Foviance: 50 (Enterprise)

It's an interesting list, but what does it really tell you? It tells me that some products target different sizes of customers and may be more niche than others. But can you really say who's number 1 or who's winning? I'd say these results only make for good conversation, just as picking who'll win the World Cup or this or that election.

Would you buy a solution because it's perceived to be the market leader? Because the buzz is that "everyone is buying" that solution? You shouldn't. I find that vendor selection is often given short shrift in today's market because of a perception that there are only a few real choices.That's simply not true. You have some very important choices.

Figure out your requirements and manage your vendor selection process. Don't simply favor one vendor over another because it's getting all of the good press clippings, and nods from the Wall St. analysts. In the long run, you'll be much happier with your analytics tool selection. Or, to put it another way, the "Number 1" vendor is always whichever one that's a right fit for you.

PS: Have you signed up for my web analytics class in Copenhagen?

Lessons Learned from Omniture's Earnings Call

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:29:00 -0500

If your vendor is a public company, listening to the quarterly earnings calls are a great way to get some insight into what to expect from the vendor in the short and long term -- something you won't hear from your account manager.

Take the Omniture Q4 Earnings Call on February 8.

To the investor community, Omniture portrays itself, (rightly so, I think) as a marketing machine -- company that is poised to sell you on its growing product suite. Not just analytics, but behavioral targeting and search engine marketing management, as well as its Genesis integrations.

So what does it matter? If you own SiteCatalyst, you'll likely hear from your reps more frequently and probably meet some new ones, too. This could be a hassle.

Your approach may depend on the traction web analytics has in your organization. If analytics is still relegated to the gulag, then the idea of integrating analytics with third-party marketing data may seem like a remote concept. You need to do some serious evangelizing and business case development for the importance of analytics. Need help? Read Part 3 of the Web Analytics Report.

On the other hand, if your enterprise is ready to get to the "next level" in analytics, to have it help you drive decision support, you'll want to learn more about the web analytics' vendors ability to integrate with other data and systems.

This is the how web analytics can provide real business value for your enterprise. If you are selecting a vendor now, you should be looking at analytics as part of you online optimization strategy and broader vendor requirements. If you have a current installation, you should be conducting an audit to determine how best to integrate analytics with offline data and marketing programs.

While Omniture may get most of the press, they are not the only game in town. Also look at WebTrends, Unica, Coremetrics, ClickTracks, Fireclick, IndexTools and Nedstat. All offer adjacent tools or some level of partner integrations that are worth evaluating.

My advice: Listen and learn from the pitches. Separate the fact (that integrations take work), from fiction (integrations are never "plug and play"), then move your web analytics program to the next level.

A New Day for WebTrends?

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 00:14:00 -0500

Analytics vendor WebTrends announced a host of additions to their new management team on Wednesday.

But are they really new? It actually seems somewhat like a homecoming, as three of the four worked for WebTrends previously. This should assuage some customer concerns that a new team would be totally out of touch with the product, and interested only in prepping the company for sale.

The hope in Portland (where the company is headquartered) is that this new team can help WebTrends recapture market share that it's lost to Omniture and other competitors.

Currently, WebTrends is in a retrenching phase. The company says it's trying to improve ease of use in areas such as post-analysis translation, administration, reporting enhancements, data collection (especially in the areas of streaming video and audio), and admin rights (something we've talked about in the Web Analytics Report), among others.

From a customer perspective, I found this news to be somewhat heartening. The last few months have been anything but clear with regard to the company's direction. Now it appears that at least there's a team in place.

However, we run across many customers who have gripes with WebTrends, such as awkward Excel reporting, and a unique visitor counting method that bloats numbers. Will the company's soul searching lead to improvements in these, and other core functionality areas, or will the improvements be merely cosmetic?

Stay tuned.

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...

Lyris HQ links ClickTracks, CMS, and E-mail marketing

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:52:00 -0500

Lost in the news about the dust-up at WebTrends and aftershocks from the Omniture/Visual Sciences acquisition was the announcement that Lyris, Inc. (formerly J.L. Halsey), the parent company to ClickTracks, launched its Lyris "HQ" platform and BidHero, a PPC campaign management solution.

The core of the Lyris platform, according to the company, is in management of the various products -- ClickTracks, Hot Banana content management, BidHero, EmailLabs email marketing, and EmailAdvisor, a email delivery monitoring tool -- from a single user interface.

Lyris has done quite a bit of work to bring this integration to fruition, and if it lives up to its promise, could be a nice solution to the SMB market or independent divisions at larger companies.

As we've noted the importance of working with web analytics vendors with a commitment to a product roadmap, it appears that Lyris is following through on their vision. But for you the customer the story is of course a bit more complicated. Picking a "suite" of tools almost always means sacrificing a poor fit in one area or another in exchange for a (potentially) unified interface and single vendor invoice...

WebTrends' Saga Continues...

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 04:37:00 -0500

The changes at WebTrends continue.

A Friday afternoon email from the company explained that CMO Tim Kopp would be leaving at the end of this year. This follows the Halloween Day exits of CEO Greg Drew and 3 other managers and promotion of ClickShift co-founders John Rodkin and Leo Chang to engineering and hosted operations management. They served as co-founders of ClickShift which was acquired by WebTrends in 2006, providing the foundation for the WebTrends Dynamic Search product.

How does this affect you if you're a WebTrends' customer? Let's consider 3 areas of potential concern:

Technical Support: There's been a change of management for hosted services. WebTrends' has many licensed customers that it would like to move to the hosted services model. If you are a licensed customer, I suggest you speak to your account manager regularly to stay current on potential service changes meant to "encourage" you to switch to the hosted model.
Product Development: If you are considering the purchase of Score or Visitor Intelligence, get a clear understanding regarding pricing, support and the product development path. The management who left the company were key figures in bringing these deeper analytics solutions to market. It's not clear at this point what the new CEO and CMO will want to do with these offerings. Given the promotion of Rodkin and Chang, it seems logical that WebTrends will focus on doing more to sell WebTrends Analytics and Dynamic Search.
Customer Commitment: If you are an enterprise customer of WebTrends, and have a significant investment in using their solutions, speak with the new CEO and understand the company's commitment to your organization going forward. It may be the best way to understand Francisco Partners' longterm strategy for WebTrends.

While there's no way to predict what will happen with WebTrends, I doubt they'll be acquired Omniture.

Are you a WebTrends customer? I'd love to get your thoughts on the current changes. Drop me a line at pkemelor@cmswatch.com

WebTrends CEO is history

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Thu, 1 Nov 2007 10:37:00 -0400

Well that was the news out of Portland late yesterday from a piece in the Portland Business Journal. Also gone are Jason Palmer, vice president of product management; Tore Steen, vice president of business and corporate development; and Hamid Bahadori, vice president of product development and hosted operations.

There's not a lot of details coming out just at this time. However, if you have anything to share, please shoot me an email.

WebTrends has seemingly been on the come back trail with features such as Score and Visitor Intelligence. On the other hand, their WebTrends Marketing Warehouse has been slow to catch on with customers, and it's probable that their highly publicized effort to scoop up HBX customers hasn't paid off.

The new CEO is Bruce T. Coleman. Coleman is CEO of El Salto Advisors, a consulting firm that provides interim management to computer software and service companies.

Some former employees have speculated that Francisco Partners, the private equity firm that owns WebTrends is eager to unload the firm.

From an investor's perspective, this would seem to make sense. Web analytics is hot right now. But from a customers' perspective, quick sales don't often bring good tidings.

Mashing up Web Analytics and Web Content Management

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:11:00 -0400

That was the title of a recent piece I wrote for EContent Magazine. To quote:

[T]here is a strong case to be made for integrating your Web CMS with your Web Analytics tool. You face two major opportunities in particular: First, using analytics to improve the effectiveness of your Web content management. And second, using your Web CMS to improve your analytic capability.

You can download a PDF reprint of the entire article here (5 MB).