Web Analytics News & Articles

FatWire (news, site) is back in the news. These folks have been busy lately. In between "rescue" plans and moves towards worldwide "domination," the web content management vendor also had some time to work on two new releases -- Engage 7.5 (content targeting) and Analytics 2.5 (content optimization) -- which bring major architectural changes involving open source-based technology.

It's a day for news on the Enterprise 2.0 front and Telligent (news, site) wants you to hear what they've been hard at work on. It's about that time of the year when Telligent offers up a new version of their community solutions. This time, instead of simply a new version number with some new functionality, we get major products upgrades and new branding to boot.

Say goodbye to Community Server, Community Server Evolution and Harvest Reporting Server. Say hello to Telligent Community 5.0, Telligent Enterprise 2.0 and Telligent Analytics 3.0.

Oh, and for those of you interested in Telligent Graffiti, we have a little update, but don't get too excited.

 While most companies are frantically scrambling around, trying their hardest to throw together something—anything— that will squeeze a fortune out of the social media phenomenon, there are a select few that’ve quietly been working in the background for awhile. Sysomos, a company based in Toronto, is one example.

Sysomos’ two social media analytics tools, Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat, were released earlier this month after being under the hood for a whopping 3+ years. MAP is a feature-heavy tool for analyzing media conversations, and Heartbeat is like the no-frills, less expensive version for those who crave only the essentials.

Over the last few months, there has been a great deal of activity at the most senior levels of the US Government discussing the use of persistent cookies on federal agency web sites. If you are a Federal Web Manager or Web Analyst, you are painfully aware of the constraints on using cookies and the limitations it causes to a more accurate definition of unique visitor, and some of the more advanced segmentation features available in web analytics solutions.

As part of a greater effort to open up policy discussions, the White House, Office of Science and Technology Policy is taking public comment on the Federal Policy on Cookies as well as other issues impacting use of the Web.

SeeWhy Inc (news, site), providers of an interesting little tracking/Web analytics tool that attempts to convert website abandoners, recently announced a new CEO. The newly appointed Scott G. Silk will be in charge of SeeWhy’s daily operations as well as shaping the overall vision and direction for the new team.

SeeWhy also reportedly plans to expand its focus beyond research and development by beefing up its sales and marketing sectors. Luckily, prior to SeeWhy, Silk was president and CEO of Action Engine Corp. where he established the company’s mobile application platform and oversaw their eventual sale to Mobui Corp. His expectations of his new job seem pretty positive as well:

“SeeWhy is in the right place at the right time with best-in-class technology,” he said. “In a down economy, everybody’s focused on cost-effective revenue generation. We deliver a compelling ROI in a SaaS delivery model. Considering that up to 70 percent of ecommerce customers abandon a session before they buy, our software can basically double a company’s online sales—without any capital expenditure. With more and more business being done over the web, my job is to exploit our unfair advantage in web conversion.”

With 20+ years of experience leading technology companies under Silk's belt, it looks like SeeWhy is in good hands, but will abandonment tracking really be the next big thing? As we reported earlier, there's a lot of uncertainty around the new tactic. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

When you are doing well in the market, it's possible that you could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But while you are sitting there drinking your strawberry daiquiri, the market is likely to be shifting and changes may be required.

Sitecore (news, site) understands this well. According to their VP of Product Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia, web content management has become a commodity, plateauing on functionality and UI. For customers, it has become frustrating trying to decide which Web CMS is the right one, when they all seem the same. So what do you do?

Sitecore's answer is to provide a solution to solve a specific problem. In this case, it's an Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

I thought Omniture’s (news, site) recent Q1 2009 earnings call provided more insight into the company than past calls; perhaps this was the result of less than all positive news. Let's take a look.

So, web analytics has been a hot topic since, well, ever. The benefits yielded from knowing customer behavior patterns have been--and continue to be--quite clear.

The value formula is simple. If website owners and giant advertisers can track tidbits of information as detailed as which DOM nodes a mouse hovers over and as broad as which sites you like to visit, targeted marketing (and sales) effectiveness improves for those who know how to intelligently act on the data.

A related road less traveled is one paved by the staggering amount of people that abandon websites before doing much of anything. But here to prove that paying attention to the negative stats can be just as rewarding is a company called SeeWhy. Their new analytics tool, Abandonment Tracker, recently caught our eye.

The libraries at Oxford University are the heart of one of the oldest organizations in the world. Oxford's centuries of immutable traditions aren't just old musty rituals that get in the way: they're the reason Oxford has persisted even as so many other institutions have perished. But what if change is essential or even critical? At the J. Boye Philadelphia 2009 conference, the OULS, or Oxford University Library System, gave a presentation on how they'd managed to unite forty separate libraries under a shared portal. However did they do it?

At the 2009 J. Boye Philadelphia conference, Lou Rosenfeld, co-author of 'the polar bear book' on information architecture and principal of Rosenfeld Media, called for web analysts and user experience people to work more closely together. The result? A solid basis for identifying the right design questions, and the power of surprise and vision brought to data.

A new survey by SDL Tridion (news, site), which surveyed 113 marketing, communications and branding decision makers across Europe, revealed business is slow.

Seventy percent of businesses take two weeks or longer to roll out new marketing campaigns. Back in 2007, SDL Tridion conducted a similar survey of U.S. senior marketing executives with similar results.

Back then, 68% of web campaigns didn’t happen on time.

Since Alex Yoder took over the reins as CEO at WebTrends in August, the company has been on an active campaign to make itself over…on both the image and product development fronts. Preaching a message of “openness” this has been manifest in hiring a new PR firm focused on consistent messaging and a senior management team that shows an interest in accessibility…both noticeable changes from the pre-Yoder days

Let's talk about social computing. Or we can talk about communities. Or we can talk about enterprise 2.0 and social networking, blogging, forums, wikis, what have you. Regardless of what you choose to call it, there's a need to analyze what is happening when you deploy or harness social tools. And, no, we are not talking about basic traffic stats. 

Telligent (news, site) has a keen awareness of this need. Hence we have Harvest Reporting Server -- social analytics for their social computing solutions, Community Server and Community Server Evolution. Interested in getting a better feel for what social analytics really are and how you can leverage them, we spent some time with Telligent. This is what we learned.

The latest report to come from analyst firm CMS Watch (news, site) is one that will grab the attention of those who want to understand who is visiting their site and what they are doing while they are there. We suppose that includes just about everyone then. Or at least it should.

The CMS Watch Web Analytics Report 2009, is an analysis of 20 web analytics firms against twelve potential use cases. What they found was that mobile and video analytics vendors are offering a variety of solutions to track the usage of video and mobile more closely, but there's still work to be done.

Regardless of the global economic uncertainty, online advertising is not going anywhere.

Why? One word: analytics.