webanalytics.cl

Engaging your team and getting them to share your enthusiasm for Web Analytics can be quite a challenge. Probably it won’t be easy for them to use the Web Analytics tool  deployed within your organization or to leverage their analytics skills into the appropriate procedures (WA data can be tricky).

Although it’s a big help to have a web analytics champion (If you are reading this that’s probably you!) in the team to share his(her) knowledge and speed up the learning process of his(her) workmates, it’s probably that part or most of your team would be quite apathetic or simply put just not feeling it!

How do you get Web Analytics into the workflow?
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This is a presentation I did last year at Practitioner Web Analytics Lisbon.

Acknowledgments:

Avinash Kaushik for several inspiring posts on his blog.
Eric Peterson and his thorough reviews of KPIs on his green book.
Vincent Kermorgant and Ilkka Manninen for their Nokia paper.

Hello and sorry for this long long pause on the blog…

I have several post drafts but nothing so scooping as Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture.

You probably  have read all about the deal on several financial, technology and web analytic blogs and sites (Forrester, WADemystified)

Yet I would still like to share with you 3 thoughts:

1) This past January WPP investes $25 million on Omniture at $8.76 per share, yesterday Adobe  commenced a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash. Bravo for WPP that bought cheap and would sell at a nice price!

2) 2 weeks ago Adobe acquired a Business Content Management provider/company (BusinessCatalyst). On their website we can find the following product offer:

• Build and manage their website
• Write a blog and build a forum
• Run an online shop and accept payments
• Create email marketing campaigns
• Build a customer database
• Analyze and improve results

Can you see synergy with Omniture product suite? So, within the next 12 months I can see Adobe empowering BusinessCatalyst  with FLASH/FLEX/AIR technologies and Omniture suite and reaching their clientes and partners with a SaaS offer.

3) Quite a long shot, but Adobe tried out the ads business with their Ads for pdf initiative. Their beta test program with selected publishers ended this past march. I have no news about the outcome of this experiment. But in case Adobe still is considering some kind of adnetwork/adserving related business I can certainly see some advantages on having privileged access to Omniture’s product suite.

What do you think?

by Kevin Dooley

I received some comments to the Wisdom of the WA Crowd Experiment Results regarding some of the vendors positioning and value proposition. I started writing the answer but I systematically failed to keep it short so finally I decided to make it a post:

Looking back 2-3 years ago to the current main vendors of the WA market we had:

Omniture, HBX and Coremetrics were in a very similar position. Maybe HBX had a slightly bigger customer base and Coremetrics to some extent a better solution feature-wise.

At that time Coremetrics had recently acquired IBM’s web analytics division inheriting most of websphere’s ecommerce and content portals, this was a great opportunity to position themselves as the best ecommerce-breed web analytics solution, which they missed.

HBX acquired VisualScience which was by far the elite-exclusive-expensive Web Analytics solution, maybe trying to overcome some of the drawbacks of their platform at the time.

Some months after Omniture included HBX/VisualSciences in their shopping list which has lead them to acquire companies providing behavioral targeting, multivariate testing, insite search technologies, surveys and probably I’m forgetting something on their current solution portfolio. This makes them today (in my opinion) the most complete 1-stop buy to emarketing analysis and optimization technologies. Furthermore their recent agreement with WPP shows that they are not only tool-savvy but also quite market wise gaining efficient access to top/key accounts worldwide. Currently I far as I know VisualSciences customer have been kept on the VisualSciences tool (HBX’s don’t) but I’m not sure if they are any plans or investment to continue development of the VisuaScience platform.

4 to 5 years ago Webtrends was probably the Web Analytics vendor with the biggest customer base. Most of them were legacy customers with a log-only analysis solution. Their inability to offer a suited update to a tag or hybrid solution and migration to a recurrent license fee allowed other vendors to win those former Webtrends customers. Just recently after firing several directives, maybe a year ago or less, Webtrends have shown signals of a more clear marketing strategy. In my opinion they still haven’t been very aggressive to update their customer base but at least they are trying to compete with Omniture/Unica for a share of the campaign optimization technologies market.

Urchin/Google Analytics. Before Google purchased Urchin they were just one more player in the market (one of the small ones). Why did Google choose them? What make them the right choice? In my opinion besides having a quite straight-forward tool even before becoming Google Analytics, the key element that made them a suited candidate for Google’s Web Analytics service is the tool’s architecture. I think looking back 4 years Urchin was the one tool that relayed the most on the client side for the logic of the tracking. Sure, they were several tools using tags but the way in which Urchin handled several key processes of the measurement allowed them to handle more traffic with less processing capacity on the third party collecting/processing/reporting site. After Google acquired Urchin and turned it to Google Analytics (finding inspiration-merging some product philosophy from Measure Map) they set-off to become the best free web analytics tool. And in my opinion they have succeeded. Since they are not a paid solution-provider, what’s their goal? Clearly aid the development and expansion of Google’s paying business mainly Adwords and Adsense.

IndexTools. Let’s hope Yahoo Analytics! has better luck than Microsoft adCenter Analytics (originally project Gatineu) which has recently been shut-down. In my opinion IndexTools was a rising star when they were acquired. They had a solid Web Analytics tool, they had just released and automatic bidding tool based on performance measured with the Web Analytics tool and integrated with Adwords, Overture and MSN (probably that got them on Yahoo’s site on the first place) and they had announced a behavioral target engine on their product road map. Instead of that right now they are dealing with wether or not they should really open the tool free to everyone (so far it’s free but only opened to beta accounts) and how to handle this load.

Unica. I love their positioning! The multichannel Web Analytics solution. I haven’t used the tool but I have been shown a demo and a partner of mine has actually had access to it. What I have heard and seen makes me want to work with Unica during 2009. Their origins are away from Web Analytics in the Marketing Resource Management (MRM) datawarehouse/silo infrastructure and solution providers and I think this know-how combined with their timely acquisition of Sane Solutions allowed them to enter the Web Analytics marketplace strongly and with a differentiating edge.

Is clear these are not the only vendors, just for a reference take a look at the post announcing the closing of Microsoft adCenter providing references to other tools. I guess these are the ones I have been following during the last years.

Last year Practitioner Web Analytics Event was a huge success. All attendees were happy! That’s why alt64 is organizing a 2009 event and even extending the meeting to Lisboa.

The dates are 19th and 20th of May in Barcelona, Spain and the 21st in Lisboa, Portugal. You can find additional information on the program and registration here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytic’s senior evangelist and author of Web Analytics an Hour a Day is going to participate again.

I will be presenting some topics both at Barcelona and Lisboa. See you there!