The recently concluded eMetrics Summit was somewhat quiet on the vendor front except for the Coremetrics announcement of its Spring 2008 release featuring ad hoc query functionality in its new offering, "Explore."

This now gives Coremetrics a competitive offering to Omniture Discover and WebTrends Market Intelligence.

More advanced users of Coremetrics will likely be pleased. As Web Analytics Report readers know, one of the major pain points among customers seeking deeper-dive analysis was needing to go through account managers to run custom queries and potentially have to wait a long time to get results. If Explore works as billed, it will mitigate that problem.

I've always thought that Coremetrics did a decent job at creating out-of-the-box reports that address the needs of marketers and less sophisticated analysts. While they have lagged their competitors in offering a strong ad-hoc analysis tool, another way of looking at it could be that they have been tracking their customers learning curve more accurately...and now they believe there is enough analytics maturity among their client base to actually use a deeper analytics tool.

If this is the case, it represents a different approach than what has often characterized web analytics..."a build it and they will be sold" strategy that provides tools that are too sophisticated and challenging for the customer base to use effectively. As you review web analytics software -- as you would any technology -- make sure not to over-buy something you don't know how to use.