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Phil Kemelor

Some thoughts on updated web analytics vendor evaluations

19-Jul-2010

Tags: Web Analytics, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Usability

I started working the Web Analytics Report for The Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch) three years ago. It took me six months to complete the first edition, working pretty much full time. This was a new endeavor; the only other coverage of the web analytics space was done by Forrester, Jupiter, Gartner, et. al. -- research companies that are friendly with vendors and get paid lots of money by vendors to provide consulting services.

Initially, vendors were skeptical about providing information for a vendor neutral, independent analyst operation. Things have changed over the years, primarily because buyers like you have come to trust our evaluations as a complete and objective resource. The vendors are now more forthcoming with access to customers and solutions. It's made our job a lot easier, and it has also contributed to making the research more complete.

This is one of the big reasons I'm really pleased with the 5th edition we released earlier this month. It's been rounded out by lots of input from practitioners who are putting these solutions through their paces every day in large and small deployments and for both simple and complex analytics scenarios. My updates this year were also informed by my colleagues at Semphonic, who spend a lot of time "hands on" with Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics and Unica, and much of my own vendor selection work.

While we've seen change in the market over the last year, notably the acquisition of Omniture and Coremetrics, I don't think of this as consolidation. I think of this as part of a continuum in the evolution of analytics that was started when Google acquired Urchin, and continued with Yahoo's acquisition of IndexTools.  Specifically, these moves represent large, well-funded companies purchase analytics because of their perception that analytics can help them add value to their existing offerings and create upsell opportunities within their existing client base.

What I find interesting and perhaps more challenging from a consumer perspective, is that the base line functionality of these tools can no longer be taken in a vacuum, but has to be considered in context with the influence and direction of the larger company. So, the question you face in the future may go something like this: "I like Coremetrics functionality but I also like the idea of being able to embed Omniture tags in our Adobe Creative Suite content. What's the trade off if I go with one instead of the other?"

Trade offs in functionality and price already exist today. What I see frequently is that tool selection often comes down to nuanced differences in functionality and price. Sure, it sounds clever to say "all analytics tools are basically the same" or "you can get 80% of what you need from Google Analytics." But if you look really closely at the solutions you'll find small but important differences...differences that translate into solution acceptance or rejection by your user base (such as ease of use), or complete data analysis (such as ease of analytics data export).  

I think you'll find our evaluations helpful as you begin to explore those trade-offs.