Well, it was actually kind of an expected surprise...

In my last post I mentioned that I'd be curious how web analytics vendors might respond to Yahoo! Web Analytics at the eMetrics Summit in Washington DC. In fact it was Google Analytics that "stole the show" with the introductions of a host of long-awaited features, including an API and Advanced Segmentation.

The buzz at the conference was overwhelmingly positive, and both independent practitioners and Google Analytics partners have been providing plenty of color commentary on the features and cool things available, and so on and so on.

From what I've seen, I agree for the most part...sure I'd quibble about the value of a segmentation capability that focuses on visits and not visitors, and I found others at eMetrics who discussed issues they had with how Google Analytics cookies identify visitor status through a session or with how the segmentation report presentation was not to their liking, but this is almost besides the point in looking at how the analytics vendor landscape is changing.

On one hand, there is, and will continue to be fragmentation in the market because web analytics has a low barrier of entry for the creation of new tools. This was my take after the last eMetrics, and this continues today.

On the other hand, Google and now Yahoo! are using web analytics as part of online product platforms to drive revenue to their advertising and online store products. AdMob and Bango Analytics are doing this in the mobile analytics space; AdMob with its advertiser network and Bango with its payment services. This is all part of the "platformization" in web analytics.

OK, not an elegant term, but something that many of you will find an attractive option in looking for an analytics solution, although hard to find outside of Google and Yahoo!. You could say that Affinium NetInsight in addition to one of the other products in the Unica suite, such as Campaign, meets this criteria because it's part of a larger platform.

Now, I'll bet that I'll be getting vendor e-mails pointing to all their partnerships and so on, but I don't think these partnerships have a clear value proposition associated with them because of the customization that needs to occur to make many of them work. There are inconsistent levels of productization and a great deal of competition with offerings outside the partner networks. So, there are no "must have" reasons for purchasing vendor partner options in common areas such as search marketing, e-mail marketing or content management.

In my opinion, easy integration of web analytics data with other data and web tools, such as those listed above and the ability to do complex queries into the unaggregated data sets should have been one of the top priorities among analytics vendors. This was possible even with the NetGenesis tool I used in 1998, but has been such an issue with the SaaS and page tag vendors. It reminds me of how the US car industry spent their time in the 1950s putting tail fins on cars instead of making cars more efficient. Now with Google and Yahoo! both offering fairly robust analytics tools within their platforms, the rest of the industry is starting to look tired and in a game of catch up. I'm not going to say that there aren't bright spots, but why did it take Omniture so long to open up its APIs? Why is WebTrends all of a sudden preaching the importance of getting data out of their system? Why did it take so long for Coremetrics and Nedstat to provide query access to their databases?

Some might argue, myself included, that there hasn't been a groundswell of market take up for advanced features, due to lack of organizational understanding regarding the business value of analytics. But I'd further argue that vendors haven't helped this by generally focusing on product features, rather than real education...not just the kind that conveys how to use the tool, but demonstrating the value of the tool.

I'm not given to crystal ball predictions, but I see some tough times ahead for these companies if they can not focus on and execute on a value proposition that validates the reason to pay for primarily stand alone tools in a world that is going to both "fragmentation" and "platformization."

What do you think? I'd love to get your take.