OX2 Web Analytics Blog

In the wake of Omniture’s purchase of Instadia on January 18th, a discussion regarding this acquisition was initiated by Jim Sterne on the Web Analytics Yahoo! Group.

I had the following comments:

As an Instadia partner in Europe, we here at OX2 had sort of a hunch as Aurélie heard about Instadia recruiting a marketing manager 🙂

I, for one, can only regret the disappearance of the only major European WA vendor, which provided for healthy competition over here.

Then again, I suppose this can be seen as a sign of times, with globalisation leading to mergers and acquisitions.. or the quiet elimination of competitors 😉

Let’s see what Omniture has in store for Instadia…

Cheers,

Julien

If you believed the “WA predictions for 2007” fad, you may not be surprised by this acquisition. To paraphrase the good folks at GA Experts, the biggest surprise has yet to come from the purchase of Deepmetrics by Microsoft.

As an open letter to WA vendors, I’d like to address the following points:

• While multinational environments call for consolidated understanding and reporting of web data, there are regional specifics that do not always fit into any of the buckets provided in WA tools, there are reports that become truncated or meaningless. One does not consider Web Analytics the same way in Japan, Scandinavia, Brazil, Nigeria or the US of A.
  Multiculturality, anyone? 😉
• You always need an outsider to stimulate competition and bring new blood to an industry. And yet, outsiders seem to be assimilated/purchased by bigger actors by the time they reach some sort of critical reputation, market share or client portfolio size.
• By absorbing smaller vendors, you end up forcing newcomers into niches… which end up being assimilated into a bigger vendor’s solution that lacks that particular feature 😉
• On the bright side, this globalisation-induced approach takes us closer to the establishment of Web Analytics standards that go beyond the usual trinity (page views, visits, visitors).
  If we consider Microsoft’s case, Office document formats are now commonplace. And yet, Microsoft is only just now adapting to full-XML documents that are more easily integrable into other documentation systems.
  The same could happen to Web Analytics once a major actor such as Microsoft enters the fray and forces the industry’s hand in terms of standards. My money is on Google, though 😉

With that said, stand by for some change in 2007!