Intelligent Enterprise

Now that the dust is settling on Microsoft's failed Yahoo! bid, let's turn our attention to the announcement (burried under the hostile-takeover talk) that Yahoo! will make IndexTools a free service. Coming so quickly on the heels of the acquisition, it would seem to serve notice to Omniture, Google Analytics, and other Web analytics vendors about the seriousness of Yahoo!'s intentions.

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

You can rank the vendors 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, how many they say they have:

Everybody loves a party, and Web Analytics vendor Omniture is no exception, using its annual summit to announce the release of SiteCatalyst 14 and a truckload of other news, including a partnership with Baidu and the roll out of the combined Touchclarity/Offermatica offering.

If you have SiteCatalyst, you probably are now just getting familiar with the new release. So, what do you think of it?

I recently received a briefing, and certainly the new Ajax interface jumped out as a big improvement... 13.5 was getting tiresome to look at, especially when compared to Google Analytics, IndexTools, and Nedstat.

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 recent Omniture Q4 Earnings Call.

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.

Omniture completed its acquisition of Visual Sciences last week. So where does that leave HBX customers? For the party line, you can check out the HBX migration FAQ. After reading through it, my guess is that you'll have a bunch of questions. As suggested on the site in a number of places, "contact your account or services manager." Well, here are some of the questions I'd ask if I were in your position:

Microsoft has been making noise about its free Web analytics solution since January. The company finally announced the beta of Gatineau at the end of October.

Focused primarily on those who use Redmond's AdCenter service, Gatineau will draw comparisons with Google Analytics. However, Gatineau offers some interesting differentiation, such as the ability to derive demographic data from site visitors who have signed up for a Live ID through Microsoft's Hotmail or Messenger. Microsoft claims that all this data is made anonymous before being passed to Gatineau.

There has been plenty of discussion over the last few days about consolidation in the Web analytics marketplace due to the Omniture/Visual Sciences deal. I believe the whole notion of consolidation is really more relevant if you invest in Web analytics companies, rather than use their products.

The Web Analytics Association (WAA) recently released its definitions of 26 common terms used for reporting and metrics. Those familiar with Web analytics will probably not learn a great deal from reading the standards; they are meant primarily for industry newcomers. However, here's a few ways you can use the document:

Not long after my "WebTrends Release Boosts Scoring, Segmentation" post, WebTrends' Director of Product Marketing Matt Langie contacted me to tell me that I'd gotten their pricing wrong. Pricing for Marketing Data Warehouse is not $1,000 per month, as I thought I'd been told during the demo. Langie said this statement contained errors:

"Existing customers of the Marketing Warehouse will be upgraded to Score and Visitor Intelligence at no additional cost."

It should read:

"Existing customers of the WebTrends Marketing Warehouse will be upgraded to WebTrends Visitor Intelligence at no additional cost."
He added, "In addition, WebTrends Marketing Warehouse is no longer a standalone product that is licensed, but serves as the underlying database which powers the two new products in ML2, WebTrends Score, and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence. As such, new licensees of WebTrends Score or WebTrends Visitor Intelligence will now receive the Marketing Warehouse inclusive in these product offerings."

To this I responded with the following questions — questions that you might ask as a current or potential customer:

Web analytics vendor WebTrends released Marketing Lab 2 early this month, an ambitious effort that seeks to raise the analytics value of the product while improving usability.

The introduction of WebTrends "Score" and WebTrends "Visitor Intelligence" are the featured upgrades to Marketing Warehouse Version 2.0. Score lets you set values on events in order to measure engagement. While the idea of setting values is not ground breaking, analysts who currently spend time doing this offline in Excel will save time by setting values within the interface and having reports generated natively.

Omniture recently announced a 78-percent increase in revenues over the second quarter of 2006 and 15-percent increase over the first quarter of 2007. Much of this growth was driven by international sales that accounted for $8.8 million, or 26 percent of all revenue. This was a 184-percent increase over last year. Of course, with growth comes challenges.

Ominture entered Europe two years ago starting in the UK, and it has since built a presence in France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain. Its January purchase of Instadia established a foothold in Scandinavia, and was quickly followed by the acquisition of UK behavioral targeting company, TouchClarity.

You could be excused for thinking that packet sniffing-based data collection for Web Analytics was long gone. Packet sniffing -- or network-based data collection -- was the basis of web analytics pioneer Accrue Software's technology in the mid '90s, but like log file analysis, it fell out of favor at least in the US market with the advent of page tag-based data collection.

Proponents argue that packet sniffing is superior because data collection becomes "hands off" once the collection appliance is installed between the router and network switch. There are no tags to maintain, nor log files to administer. On the other hand, if a data collector fails, you have not data.

If you're a Visual Sciences customer (i.e., HBX and Visual Site analytics, Publish CMS, or the former Atomz Search), you'd have to be a bit concerned by last week's report that the company is actively considering "unsolicited inquiries" to be acquired.

A press release indicates the company has hired Goldman Sachs as a financial adviser to assess potential deals, followed by the assurance from CEO Jim MacIntyre, "Meanwhile, we will continue to focus on building our business."

Nick Sharp, the VP and general manager of EMEA at WebTrends, recently wrote a piece for mycustomer.com entitled "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 e-marketing."

There are 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?

In presentations at conferences, I always ask how many people use Web analytics tools. A vast majority of attendees raise their hands. But in follow up with individuals, conversations often go like this:

Me: Are you getting real business value from your analytics solution?

Frustrated Web manager: No, the tool doesn't work. We're thinking of getting something else.

Most hosted Web Analytics vendors charge you according to page views -- not unreasonable since each view is a call to their server and a new record in their database. But what happens when Ajax and other rich applications eliminate the notion of a "page"? Well, vendors are now talking about pricing in terms of "events" or "server calls," rather than page views.

Expect to be asked about the number of Flash- and Ajax-based applications you're running. And if you add applications over the course of a SaaS contract, expect a scheduled audit to count these, assuming they have been tagged.

Last week Google Analytics customers reported service outages that affected some for more than 24 hours. Worse, Google issued no official comment until Tuesday. As "Web Analytics Report" readers know, Google's official support partners fare no better than users, and in this case received no communications on the outage.

I spoke to customers and vendors at the recent Emetrics Summit to find some answers. Customers generally underestimated the level of effort required of them -- for example the tagging required to collect "basic" data, such as downloads of PDFs, Excel and Word files. Not understanding the need to develop a process for data collection, page tagging, and analysis, customers often assume that once the Web analytics solution is in place, it will run itself.