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Phil Kemelor

Web Analytics Market Churns for Omniture and Yahoo! Web Analytics

13-Oct-2008

Tags: Web Analytics, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, , Affinium NetInsight , Analytics, Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Online Analytics, Sitestat

Omniture's share price tanked last week after it was downgraded by a Wall St analyst who found that companies consider web analytics to be a discretionary cost, as well as "an increasingly competitive environment for OMTR."

Readers of the Web Analytics Report, and my post about web analytics leadership know that I'd agree with the comment about a competitive marketplace in analytics.

This was borne out in even starker terms by the long awaited announcement later in the week on the launch of Yahoo! Web Analytics, the solution based on IndexTools. Yahoo! Web Analytics is a no-cost solution that is geared to serious web analysts who want to do behavioral segmentation on unaggregated data. If you're an experienced web analyst, this would be worth a closer look.  One important note to this: Yahoo! Web Analytics is not freely available to the entire market. As described on the Yahoo blog, the initial rollout is limited to Yahoo! Small Business' 13,000 hosted e-commerce customers, Yahoo! Web Analytics out to advertisers who seek Yahoo!’s help to build custom micro-sites, and third-party application developers who build widgets and other mini-apps for Yahoo! users via the Yahoo developer network.

Just as Nedstat raised the bar by offering analysis across unaggregated data at no additional cost in its "Live Segmentation" release, the Yahoo! Web Analytics offering puts pressure on all web analytics vendors to provide what had been previously considered a premium option, at no cost. Web analytics vendors have publically stated that Google Analytics didn't cause much concern because it is considered more of a reporting product than serious analytics platform, however, the Yahoo! Web Analytics offering potentially creates pricing pressure at the higher end of tool functionality.

So what's the next move from the web analytics vendors?

Look to see a more meaningful push to integrate web analytics data with third party marketing vendors from Coremetrics,WebTrends, ClickTracks and Omniture. When I say more meaningful, I mean productized integrations. Also expect to see greater emphasis from Unica and WebTrends on exporting data out of their solutions into corporate data warehouses for use in business intelligence scenarios with non-web data.

The upcoming eMetrics conference in Washington, DC on October 20-23 will be quite interesting, as the vendors will have their first major venue to articulate their positions in the wake of the Yahoo! Web Analytics release.