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Phil Kemelor

Bumpy transition for Instadia customers

3-Jul-2007

Tags: Web Analytics, Implementation, Marketplace at Large, Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst

Instadia was one of Europe's leading web analytics vendors prior to its acquisition by Omniture in January 2007. The acquisition took Instadia's customers by surprise. Omniture announced that it would migrate Instadia ClientStep installations to Omniture Site Catalyst, as well as retain functionality that led customers to select ClientStep. The success of this effort remains unclear.

Omniture plans to support ClientStep until June, 2008 and at the same time encourage all of Instadia's (200) customers to migrate to SiteCatalyst. To encourage this, Omniture offers free support and training to customers until December, 2007.

After speaking to several ClientStep licensees, it appears that the biggest downsides going forward will revolve around price, page tag maintenance, and possibly reporting. They foresee potential upsides in user interface and online support.

"It's still too early to tell how smoothly the migration is going, since not many have migrated -- one of the larger tasks will be to customize SiteCatalyst to the specific needs and migrate the ClientStep reports to SiteCatalyst," according to Marc Saarde, a Web Analytics Business Consultant at Creuna, who has several clients using ClientStep, and who formerly managed a large ClientStep installation. Another customer reported a relatively seamless migration of scripts, but some challenges in migrating historical ClientStep data to SiteCatalyst. They added that Omniture is addressing these.

Be aware of significant differences between ClientStep and SiteCatalyst as you plan beyond this migration. ClientStep's tag was very comprehensive, and designed to collect a significant amount of data. As Web Analytics Report readers know, the SiteCatalyst data collection architecture relies on more specialized tagging. This requires more planning and forethought regarding the types of reports that need to be generated.

Other differences could be important. ClientStep supported PDF output and automated distribution of reports, whereas this becomes a manual operation in SiteCatalyst. Another function gone missing in SiteCatalyst is ClientStep's survey capability. Omniture indicates that this will be included in an upcoming release of SiteCatalyst.

Another difference: Omniture provides for online support, whereas Instadia did not. This may or may not be considered an advantage to customers. ClientStep support is now being handled through Omniture. The same support resources remain available. However, a company that is currently migrating to SiteCatalyst noted that Omniture support had been somewhat slow, albeit improving.

Support is a big issue for European enterprises, according to Saarde, and an area that Omniture and other North America-based vendors will need to pay sufficient attention in order to be successful in the lucrative northern European market. Customers tend to want to speak to a live human to resolve problems, rather having to rely on online support. We noted this commitment to local support among European vendors in the Web Analytics Report as well as in an earlier blog about the the US and European market.

US-based customers have expressed concern about the responsiveness of Omniture support. While this may be considered a nuisance in the US, it could become a critical factor for Omniture in the European marketplace. It will also be interesting to see how WebTrends revisits this market in light of their recent acquisition of WebControl, a Swedish web analytics services firm. According to Saarde, many European enterprises possess WebTrends licenses, but currently view it as a product without a great deal of support.