Content Management Matters ™

Not only do many websites have unreliable metrics; they're usually measuring the wrong things.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tools in use today; partly because it’s free, partly because it’s fairly straightforward to use. Now Google ratcheting up the analytics game with their latest feature set in the analytics tool shed: Google Analytics for Bloggers.

It's a rare organization that does not track at least a minimum set of web analytics for their customer facing websites. The problem is rarely that there's no data. Rather it's what to do with that information once you have it in your hands. More often than not, it's under utilized and probably finds it's home in that virtual pile on your desktop.

It doesn't have to be that way. There's an upcoming Webinar co-hosted by Bridgeline Software and the Gilbane Group that will show you how to better use your analytics data to make decisions and improve the customer experience, and in the end improve your bottom line.

Hot Banana is a web content management system (Web CMS) with a heavy emphasis placed on web marketing and content optimization, but with a full range of core content management capabilities which attract customers with a broad range of needs.

The CMS is a part of and integrated with the Lyris suite of marketing solutions, most notably with EmailLabs.

The Lyris marketing suite -- following a slew of takeovers of top players in core marketing technologie -- has now been formally packaged into Lyris HQ, which is comprised of Hot Banana, EmailLabs (email marketing), ClickTracks (analytics), EmailAdvisor (email campaign analysis and toolset) and BidHero (bid-management).

Bridgeline Software is a provider of web content management software. They are moving in the SaaS arena offering a suite of products referred to as iAPPS. The iAPPS Framework and Product Suite is a combination of Content Management, Analytics, eCommerce and eMarketing.

Their newest release is iAPPS Analytics – the second release of products under the iAPPS Framework. Bridgeline says that this new product “enables a new intelligent form of "analytics-driven" content through the seamless integration of web analytics and content management”.

They also say this integration between analytics and content management is unique to the market. Well we say – uh, no…see Clickability for starters.

But we were still interested, so we went a little deeper.

Enterprise info management firm Datawatch has announced that Monarch|RMS, its hosted report mining and analytics offering, is now integrated in IBM's DB2 Content Manager OnDemand.

Monarch|RMS enables clients to view statistics relevant to their sites from remote locations so they can make more expedient decisions about what's working and what isn't. It does this by converting existing reports in a given CMOD system into hosted, filterable and more pliant data.

Clients can filter data most relevant to themselves and even perform multidimensional cube (OLAP-style) analysis. And at will, they can convert reports into tables, charts, graphs or spreadsheets.

Data can also be exported to templates, spreadsheets and even presentations in XML form.

You -- the tech guy! -- could look like the coolest kid in the boardroom.

Discover the magic at the Datawatch website.

Vignette has secured three US patents for core elements of its Web CMS and collaboration suite.

The news caps a busy twelve months for its developers, which launched a marquee new product in Vignette Digital Services Hub, before posting disappointing Q3 financial results, then bounced back with the launch of a well-received new version of Vignette Content Management.

A recent report by CMS Watch finds that organizations are now considering vendor commitment to their customer base and product development paths to be more critical, due to recent shake-ups in the web analytics industry.

There has been plenty of discussion recently about the consolidation of the web analytics marketplace due to the Omniture/Visual Sciences deal, and some comments on my last posting speculating about the future of Coremetrics and WebTrends.

Singer songwriter Sheryl Crow once said that "a change would do you good", and it seems that the folks at J.L Halsey took this advice to heart.

Early website management was obsessed with volume. Today, an increasing number of page impressions can mean a website is failing rather than succeeding.

SurfRay, a provider of search technology, has climbed aboard the global search provider bandwagon by acquiring Mondosoft, a pretty well-known-to-the-Microsoft-crowd enterprise search and behavior analytics vendor.

Following Percussion's recent repositioning of their Web content management solution the company will be holding an open-for-all webcast during which they'll lift the covers, open the kimono and poke around in the (safe for non-geek) guts of their Rhythmyx Web CMS / WebTrends Analytics integration.

The event, entitled Drive Your Marketing Effectiveness with Tight Integration of Web Content Management & Analytics, is tailored primarily for business folk who are tasked with the success of online marketing efforts.

• When: Thursday, November 1st @ 11:00am EDT / 17:00 GMT
• Where: Um, your nearest web browser

Registration is required (of course), and happens here.

Jumping square in the middle of the Web 2.0 bandwagon, enterprise Web CMS vendor, Percussion, has announced a new Solution Series for their Rhythmyx Web CMS platform.

While we're all aware of the broad scope of Web 2.0, the focus of Percussion's effort are on target, if a bit more focused. This latest update hones in on integrating Web 2.0 content flows, and on a concept that other Web CMS vendors, such as Hot Banana, have placed a lot of value on -- measuring the performance of content and creating feedback loops.

We love conference season. This year, the Federation of Enterprises in Brussels, Belgium will be hosting OX2's Web Analytics Day, which takes place next Friday the 14th of September.

The big news is that Ian Thomas, the gent responsible for the Microsoft Gatineau project, will be doing the first public demo of the beta version.

What's Gatineau, you ask? Why, its Redmond's stab in Google Analytics' back.