Last week, European web analytics vendor Nedstat announced a new feature called "Live Segmentation," which enables you to develop customized behavioral analysis across unaggregated web data.

This is a big step for Nedstat. Readers of the Web Analytics Report know that this missing capability was somewhat of a downside to an offering that competes in Europe with the likes of Omniture, and WebTrends -- two vendors already providing a "data warehouse"-type of feature that enables deeper and more customizable analysis.

I've seen Live Segmentation, and at first blush it looks pretty straightforward...clean interface; drop and drag filter building, and so forth. However, Live Segmentation has a singular benefit that can't be found in the technology itself: availability to all SiteStat customers at no additional cost to the basic offering.

Nedstat argues that all web analytics solutions should provide for this level of behavioral segmentation analysis as part of their core, and I would have to agree. Although why it has taken so long for vendors to follow through on this has been somewhat of a mystery. NetGenesis (a "first generation," log file-based, licensed software package) provided segmentation functionality in 1997, but tag-based, SaaS vendors have been slow to catch up. This is problematic, because these sorts of custom queries really lie at the heart of contemporary web analytics, which tries to move beyond the limitations of "out of the box" analysis and reporting queries.

Nevertheless, the marketplace is moving. Coremetrics' announced their "deep dive" segmentation analysis offering, Explore, in May, 2008. Unica, in its latest release, 7.4, also just announced this level of custom analysis. The difference here is that Nedstat is essentially providing deep behavioral segmentation analysis for free.