Web Analytics News & Articles

FatWire (news, site) is the most recent company to join the circle of bad economy repercussion evaders (BERE?).

The Web Experience Management Provider reported a 50% Increase in License Bookings in Q3, 2009, along with fourteen new customers including Amadeus, Bank of Western Australia, and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The secret so their success? Let's take a look:

CrownPeak (news, site) announced its integration with the [updated] new Website Optimizer Experiment Management API (based on Google Website Optimizer) [/updated], claiming to be the first content management vendor to do so as one of three “inaugural partners.” This integration is "a new API program that will provide users with an integrated solution for Web content management." Sounds a tad confusing, doesn't it?

Truth be told, quite a few other CMS providers -- including the direct SaaS competitors like Clickability, Ingeniux, Marqui and others -- have already dabbled with Google Optimizer integration. But let’s take a look at what CrownPeak had done and how it might be different from the others.

Editor's Note: Leave it to Google to provide some clarity ;) According to the big G, this is a "new Website Optimizer Experiment Management API...  [that] allows for the creation and management of experiments outside of the Website Optimizer interface." So, pretty much everything we talk about below in regards to tapping into the existing API, less coding steps and a more native within the CMS integration still seems to be valid.

What's the next step for Web analytics? Good question. Various companies are working this out as we speak--a fact most recently illustrated by Adobe's surprising acquisition of Omniture. Analytics together with a creative suite? Who knew.

Here to reveal yet another angle comes the business-to-business (B2B) solution provider Demandbase. The team unveiled enhanced analytics aimed at helping marketers see which specific sources are delivering high value Web traffic, on top of a new level of prospecting list automation based on their target audience's interests, behaviors, industries, company size and responsibilities. 

Utah-based Web analytics provider Omniture (news, site) fed the development fire this week by opening up a public beta of the Omniture Developer Sandbox.

By utilizing the SiteCatalyst development environment, developers can tinker with a set of test data or upload custom data of their own. Along with a full set of integration APIs for bi-directional data exchange and administration between developer applications and Omniture products, the sandbox aims to ease the creation process.

"Because of the Omniture Developer Sandbox, our community, including interactive agencies, professional services partners, and software developers, can more effectively leverage the 1 trillion transactions we capture for clients each quarter to create innovative solutions for customers," said John Mellor, executive vice president of business development and corporate strategy at Omniture.

The announcement comes as a follow up to Omniture's June 2009 promise to provide real-life data and information. It also follows close behind Adobe's US$ 1.8b acquisition of the company, which continues to fuel a lot of speculation over what's next for Web analytics, among other things. 

Wanna play? Interested developers can request access here. 

 We’ve been following SeeWhy (news, site) since the inception of their so-called abandonment tracker, a tool primarily designed to lure waffling e-commerce customers into purchasing.

Many people have been (understandably) a bit skeptical about the tool. And so, in what is presumably an attempt not only to enhance their capabilities but also prove their value, SeeWhy has partnered up. Will working with e-mail marketing platform provider ExactTarget help gently drag shopping cart abandoners back to the checkout line? Maybe.

CrownPeak (news, site) recognizes the importance of URL shortening for social media and social networking, while retaining the ability to measure that content through web analytics tools.

The news release of the CrownPeak URL Shortener allows CrownPeak CMS users to take advantage of the automatically generated short URLs, or modify them manually to create a customized URL. Voila, and we are social media-ready.

A job that can be done by services like bit.ly and 3.ly, is now handled within the CMS itself to generate CPeak.us and alike URLs.

Some of the uses of CrownPeak’s new URL Shortener include:

• Web and social media content publishing with CrownPeak CMS ability to automatically publishe content directly into some popular social networks.
• Web analytics integration (with CrownPeak Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture’s Site Catalyst, etc.) can be used to track both regular and short URL-ed pages with a breakout of the traffic.
• URL illustrations for highlighting available content in CrownPeak CMS Social Networking Tools for further dissemination and re-use.

Being a module of the SaaS CMS, The CrownPeak URL Shortener is available to all current customers as part of their existing SLAs with no extra licensing fees.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the news: yesterday, in an acquisition to end all acquisitions style, Adobe (news, site) announced definitive plans to acquire Omniture for US$ 1.8 billion. Most initial reactions involved a lot of whooping over what on the surface looks like the first step towards a complete web solutions package -- design, build, publish and monitor -- but what's really going on here?

As per usual for the speculative bunch, there’s just a tad more to it than cooler workflows and more insights.

EPiServer (news, site), on its ongoing quest in "the new era of the Engaged Web," has news for marketers, who are looking to deliver dynamic, personalized, optimized and measurable web experiences.

EPiServer Marketing Arena is a new product designed to do just that, and then some.

It goes without saying that we are increasingly betting our businesses on our websites. They represent us, who we are and what we stand for.

Your website is the first impression people have of you, not those fancy plants in the foyer, a charming handshake, or your passionate attention to customer service.

Your website is you and it meets all of your prospects. That's the great thing about it, it scales to meet hundreds and thousands of new people every day.

Summertime may be the time for blockbuster movie releases, but I don’t usually associate summer with blockbuster releases among web analytics vendors. WebTrends (site, news), with its Analytics 9 release in early August, sought to change all of that. WebTrends is having quite a busy summer, also acquiring a small multivariate testing firm called Widemile at the end of July.

Recently, Scott Suiter from Google stood at Times Square in New York and asked passers-by about their definition of a web browser, as part of the Google Chrome thing and all that. If you were into betting, then this might be a question that you could have a lot of fun with.

However, the answer is not really what’s important today (Suiter, by the way, claims only 8% of people could answer the question accurately). What’s important today is that Czech start-up Webnode (site) got all huffy over the question and has been telling people that the answer doesn’t matter.

Doesn’t matter that is, if you use their simple Web CMS/website builder, because Webnode is that simple you don’t have to even know what a browser is to use it. Ahem!

X Change could mean a lot of different things in San Francisco. In this case, we're referring to a stellar gathering of web analytics practitioners, sharing everything they know. And from what we know, no date is required.

The web analytics industry is about 13 years old, yet the space is in no way in a placid state. According to Phil Kemelor, VP at Web Analytics consulting firm Semphonic, the irony is that the evolution of the technology has far out paced the use of the tools themselves.

If you're one of those struggling to make sense of volumes of data or just trying to work out the best practices for applied web analytics, there's an event on the horizon for you.

The X Change Web Analytics Conference, put together by Semphonic, kicks off Thursday September 10th and runs for two days. It will take place in the heart of our dear San Francisco, at the St. Regis Hotel.

It's the format that sets this event apart. The conference is run as an immersion event with the primary format being small group discussions, lead by web analytics professionals from large enterprises including Nokia, Charles Schwab, Intuit and the New York Times.

According to previous attendee, Judah Phillip of Monster WorldWide, "This conference is different from all the others. No Powerpoints, no canned speeches, no talking heads. Instead X Change offers an intimate opportunity for real-world practitioners to get together and have focused conversations about real business challenges."

If the event's format doesn't convince you, then the headliner most likely will. X Change will start off with what is being called the founding fathers keynote. This will be a discussion conducted by some of the best and most experienced minds in the industry. The current line-up includes:

• Brett Crosby -- Group Manager, Google Analytics
• Matt Cutler -- VP, Visible Measures; Co-founder, NetGenesis
• Bob Page -- Group Leader, Yahoo!; Co-founder Accrue Software
• John R. Pestana -- Co-founder, Omniture; Co-founder ObservePoint

Conference registration will cost you US$ 2000, but you'll get 15% off with the CMSWire discount code: XCCMS. There's also an in-depth training day called THINK TANK, running on September 9th. That checkbox will run another US$ 666 for conference attendees.

Imagine a combination of SaaS CMS, Web analytics, A/B and MVT testing, and optimization of landing pages -- sounds like a novel idea? Hardly.

Although every vendor wants to make us believe they are the first ever to step on the surface of the hosted Web CMS/analytics Moon, we know that others have approached this endearing to marketers subject before.

Nevertheless, here’s Autonomy’s (news, site) announcement about a new product designed to enamor marketers and allow them to build and test website landing pages in a hosted environment. The Autonomy Optimized Landing Page offering comes hot on the heels of Webtrends’ newest version 9 release. It sure is a hot summer for the web analytics industry.

The telling of stories is perhaps the most ancient of human arts. And as most of us know, it's not one easily mastered -- who hasn't told a joke that flopped or recounted a hilarious scenario to group of blank faced friends?

Webtrends 9 (news, site) has been officially released today, and with it comes a new model of web analytics story telling. We spoke with the company's CEO, Alex Yoder, about the art of the UI, and most importantly the fact that great UIs will never be enough -- open APIs and open schemas are the real way forward for intelligent analytics.

It seems like no matter how popular we report social media outlets to be, it’s still going to sound like an understatement. The phenomenon continues to grow not only up, but also out, around, through and directly into every corner of the Internet-accessible planet.

How to deal with the explosion of information? That is the question.