After the acquisition of Visual Sciences, we all wonder how Web Analytics vendors will react. So let’s get back to the different vendors out there and try to take a look at the future.
If we take the latest Forrester Research regarding Web Analytics that Megan Burns wrote a few months ago, which you can download here at Unica’s website, we find the main Web Analytics vendors well represented. Here’s a graph that sums up Megan’s findings:
I (“Wandering” Dave) moderate the Web Analytics Forum, and a few days ago, Tim M posted a question about cross-sell activities, and determining the effectiveness of some changes they recently made. In particular, he notes that, “The difficulty I’m finding is in determining the attributable growth in store sales overall to cross-sell.”
This is indeed a difficult problem that I seldom see addressed, so I wanted to note that there are a couple of ways to “buy” some measurements in situations like these. Of course, they are dependent on a few attributes of the product or service you’re selling, such as the average unit price. If you’re selling $1000 items, then you can probably afford a short 3-day coupon promotion where a web-printed coupon is brought into the store for a $25 discount. That will cost you $25 per response, but if you’re already doing something like a $20 discount promo, then it’s only an incremental $5 to collect some cross-sell data. Of course, if your average unit price is a $2.49 bottle of aspirin, you’ll need some other kind of incentive, like, “Print this coupon out and bring it in for a free buyer’s guide.”
Yesterday I had a journalist calling me to ask my opinion regarding Visual Sciences’ takeover by Omniture. Since becoming a public company, Omniture has been acquiring different companies, but one can wonder: where’s Omniture going
Omniture strategy: Pacman?
We see different types of acquisitions done by Omniture in the past:
Complementary products to enhance the portfolio of solutions proposed to their clients. This is the case for TouchClarity and Offermatica. One could argue that buying TouchClarity also allowed Omniture to have a better UK presence, but my feeling is that the technology was the first motivation for this acquisition. Other Web analytics players have also done acquisitions of this type as WebTrends with Position Gold and Dynamic Search or WebSideStory with Publish.
A different type of acquisition made by Omniture is the one represented by that of Instadia. Instadia was a great Danish WA product that got acquired last year and if it wasn’t clear enough at the beginning, it is clear crystal now what the intentions where. Even if the product was interesting, Instadia’s product has been abandoned and clients are being migrated towards Omniture’s SiteCatalyst. The objectives behind this acquisition were to gain presence in the European market through customers and skillful employees that could integrate the rapidly growing European Omniture’s team (Omniture is now one of the vendors with most resources in the European market).
Based on this, where the does Visual Sciences acquisition fall? Well, a bit in between both scenarios. Buying Visual Sciences provides Omniture with clients, great minds and probably the best analytical and data visualization tool out there. See below for more details about Visual Sciences in the Omniture ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »
Omniture, le géant mondial des WA vient d’annoncer le rachat de son concurrent direct, Visual Sciences (anciennement connu sous le nom de WebSideStory) pour la coquette somme de 394 millions de dollars, soit un peu moins du quart de la valorisation d’Omniture.
Au-delà du montant de la transaction qui ne sera finalisée que l’année prochaine, ce rachat de VS permet à Omniture de consolider sa position de leader mais remet surtout en question l’équilibre de la concurrence entre les différents éditeurs.
Pour les partenaires d’Omniture ou de VS, la situation risque de devenir intéressante car ce rachat permettrait de proposer une gamme de solutions vraiment modulable même si je pressens que HBX va disparaître (à terme) au profit de SiteCatalyst. Il y aura donc tout un effort d’accompagnement des clients à ce moment-là.
Plus d’informations sur l’intégration des offres et services à partir de l’année prochaine 🙂
Visual Sciences has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Omniture, Inc.
The press release announcing this acquisition is available for review on our website. Until regulatory review of the acquisition is complete and the transaction closes, both companies will continue to operate independently and will continue to compete in the marketplace. This means that we will continue to deliver the products, service and support that your businesses can rely on.We understand that you will have questions about the future of the products lines. Future direction for products will be determined following the closing of the transaction and after comprehensive planning and feedback from customers and partners.
There we have it folks; I personally like to think of it as the integration of the best of both worlds.
Comme annoncé dans le billet d’Aurélie, Brett Crosby de Google (et ex-fondateur d’Urchin) a annoncé au cours du sommet eMetrics de Washington que la solution Urchin allait enfin être publiée dans sa version 6, que tout le monde attend depuis presque 3 ans.
Il faut dire que depuis le rachat d’Urchin Software par Google en mars 2005 pour intégrer la technologie UTM (Urching Tracking Module) à l’offre Google Analytics, on se demandait si Google n’avait carrément pas tué Urchin en se concentrant uniquement à Google Analytics.
It’s always a pleasure to go to the eMetrics summits and hear from Brett Crosby what’s new and what Google has been working on in a very concise way. 15 minutes tops, crystal clear and true value for your money 😉
Last eMetrics in Washington, Google announced the launch of Google Website Optimizer. This time around, they are pushing a bit further by rolling out some very exciting features and holding true to their word to continuous support of their Urchin software version.
I’m pretty sure Julien will comment further about these new features. Let me just announce the big steps. So, what’s new with Google Analytics?
In a nutshell:
Internal site search
Event tracking of Web 2.0 Rich Internet Apps
Outbound link tracking (TAGLESS!)
Optional new GA.js code
Urchin software from Google in beta version, only sold through GAACs.
Getting a bit deeper into the different features, Internal Site Search will show you the who, what & where of your internal search module. Reports will include time spent after search & reports of what happens afterwards. You can tie this back to your goal conversions and your e-commerce. I already know of a couple of clients who are going to be utterly thrilled with that!
Event tracking of Web 2.0 apps will allow you to track RIA in Ajax, Flash, Silverlight & Air and it will not inflate artificially your page views. It’s based on an event hierarchy of objects, action & label. Your object can for example be your player, the actions the buttons you use such as play, pause, etc. and the label will displays the name of the content.In your reports, you’ll be able to cross segment this with your other data such as geography for example.
As mentioned, outbound links will be tracked without additional use of tags. Gosh, that’s going to make life soooo much easier!
If you want to be able to use those 2 last features mentioned, you’ll have to update you code to include the new GA.js tag. It will also allow you to automatically detect SSL/HTTPS so that won’t be an issue anymore. Thank you very much! The new tag uses object-oriented code so it’s more compact and faster. And as a the cherry topping the cake, if you switch over from your urchin to your new GA code, EpikOne’s SiteScan is at your disposal, for free! Yeah!
Last but not least, Urchin software from Google is out in beta version, sold only by GAACs. It’s the software version that supports both page tagging and classic log files (if you still need that) and the good thing is that you can have both GA & Urchin running with a single tag. Urchin software from Google will therefore allow you to reprocess data and audit your raw logs if needed.
In terms of pricing, it’s a single fee of 2.995$, including all modules. It’s free if you’ve bought advanced support and if you didn’t, don’t worry: we will apply what you paid for moving from Urchin 5 up to Urchin 6.
So, on that note, thank you Brett, Google and the entire fabulous Google Analytics people working on this great product. And last but not least, happy birthday Avinash!
Brussels, October 16th 2007 — Eric Peterson becomes shareholder of OX2, the Belgian/pan-European interactive agency leader in the field of measurement and analysis of online behavior, also known as Web Analytics or WA. Eric Peterson becomes a shareholder as well as a member of the agency’s board. As such, Eric’s mission will be to influence the WebAnalytics.be business unit by confronting his vision of web analytics against that of Aurélie Pols (Web Analytics Team Leader chez OX2). Eric Peterson will also travel to Europe to assist OX2’s European clients, should they require his unique presentation and strategic workshop management skills. Read the rest of this entry »
David Rhee (former Director of Web Analytics at Gateway Computer) joins OX2 to lead the agency’s new German branch
Brussels, October 10th, 2007 — OX2, the Belgian interactive agency and a leader in the field of website measurement and online behavior analysis (a.k.a. Web Analytics) increases its international clout. After expanding into France last January, OX2 develops its activities in Germany by opening a web analytics branch in Frankfurt. This endeavor was made possible with the addition of a renowned web analytics expert to the already celebrated Web Analytics European Dream Team. OX2 went all the way to California to retain the services of David Rhee, former Acting Director of Web Analytics at Gateway Computer (NYSE:GTW) and Primary Moderator of the Web Analytics Forum, run by the Web Analytics Association.
Here’s the video that we sent for the BarCamp event last week-end in Buenos Aires. I was requested to speak about the state of Web analytics in Europe and give some examples of things that we were doing with Web Analytics for our clients. As you can hear it’s in Spanish.
If you had it installed already, you will notice an additional drop-down menu that helps you categorize your site and eventually, the get the best KPIs for your site and to compare your site against industry peers. Also, you can now enable/disable the KPIs you wish to see on the dashboard.
This year, attendance at OMD, the Online Marketing conference held in Düsseldorf, was expected to top last year’s 6000 attendees — but I think everyone was surprised by the 11.000 who registered!
And for much of Tuesday, it seemed as though they were all blocking the aisles between me at the next seminar I wanted to attend or booth I wanted to visit.
Naturally, the web analytics vendors were represented — Omniture, WebTrends, Nedstat, Visual Sciences — though they all had smaller booths since for them, it’s a “must be there to show your face” kind of event, not one where prospects really coming looking for you. Google had a huge presence, and at least one or two of the GA folks where at their booth, but you couldn’t find them among the 50(!) other Googlers who were wearing brightly-colored T-shirts and chatting with everyone who came by. Read the rest of this entry »
This month, Juan Damia, asked me to participate to the first BarCamp in Argentina that will take place in a few hours in Buenos Aires. I was given 10 minutes to discuss about the state of Web Analytics in Europe and provide some examples of works that we have done at OX2.
You may know what a BarCamp is, if not, here’s a quick definition from Wikipedia:
BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.
As it was a bit complicated to travel to Argentina for this week-end (next week I’m traveling to the Canary Islands, in 2 weeks to Washington and in 4 to Stockholm), we decided to prepare a little video with my intervention and connect online for the Q&A. Read the rest of this entry »
I had made a comment on Rene’s thank you post but it didn’t give due credit and visibility to the different organizations, sites, blogs and other publications who were kind enough to help us spread the word and bring you to this very successful event. So here it is, thanks again, folks! 😀
It’s becoming a little tradition to fly over to the US to attend the eMetrics Summits. In a few weeks in Washington Aurélie and I will be attending the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and we’re really looking forward. Aurélie will be presenting and I’ll be networking and attending the lobby bar as usual. And yes, don’t worry, I’ll bring the chocolates 😉
I’m really looking forward catching up with all our Web Analytics friends from the other side of the Atlantic (Eric, Jim, Avinash, Bryan, Clint, Stéphane, Ian, Joseph, Judah, Dylan, Andrea, Brian, June, Braden, …) but also some European friends that will also be making the trip as Vicky, Neil and Oliver.
If you’re serious about Web Analytics, this is the conference you need to attend. If you attended our Web Analytics Day and you enjoyed it, attend eMetrics you will be bluffed.
Here’s a little video that I hope will make you think about it:
With the recent arrival of Dave Rhee at OX2, our web analytics team now includes three full-fledged Omniture Certified Professionals, including Aurélie and yours truly. This is due in great part to the partnership that was just signed between Omniture and OX2 and announced by Neil Morgan during the Web Analytics Day on September 14th. Neil graciously acknowledged OX2’s expertise with Omniture since both Dave and myself had the unique opportunity to deploy Omniture’s web analytics tools for Fortune 500 companies and now this expertise is officially available to OX2 clients.
OX2 is now Omniture’s preferred partner for Belgium but our partnership extends of course to France, Germany, and beyond!
Adding Omniture to our skill portfolio was a logical step in our quest to best serve the interests of our clients and help them grow their online strategy by taking decisions based on hard, concrete data.
Thanks to the Omniture team for placing their trust in us and we are looking forward to a fruitful collaboration! 🙂
The Web Analytics Day was also a good occasion for OX2 to present Dave and myself as Analytics Country Managers for Germany and France respectively, with Aurélie leading our (increasingly) European activities from our Brussels offices. This reinforced OX2’s image as a leading pan-European consultancy in the field of Web Analytics as well as bringing more credit to our position as a vendor-independent agency.
As you can see from the map here, there is plenty of room for us to grow but we’re working on it 😉
Take note in your calendar that OX2 and Omniture will both be presenting at the Customer First event in Brussels between October 18th and 19th.
Thanks for reading and, as usual, constructive comments are welcome 🙂
For those of you who couldn’t attend our Web Analytics Day and enjoy Eric presenting, you can view hereunder a video taken at eDay in Rotterdam that features Eric’s Peterson presentation “Web Analytics is Easy” which was the first of the 3 presentations Eric did at our last week’s event.
The advent of free Web Analytics tools puts pressure upon pricings. Media buying agencies are working hard to report useful results. Advanced Web Analytics clients are adapting their data gathering strategies to feed online data into data warehouses and revisiting the very concept of business intelligence.
We all agree that we have to make decisions based upon data. Where to start?
With which tool, using which team to support findings – and actions -, which consequences would it hold upon the very core of your organisation? Read the rest of this entry »
– All OX2 team that has been working hard on top of their day2day jobs to get this event ready.
– And last but not least, all the participants that showed up. This event was for you and the best gauge that I can think of to measure the successof the event are the feedback forms. Besides one person that complained because it was too much oriented for big compagnies, here are some interesting statistics from the 50 forms that we received back:
100% of respondents found the conference instructive
100% said that the agenda and topics matched their expectations
100% would recommend the event to their friends
Regarding the speakers, the ranking of satisfaction was pretty much as expected: Eric leads with almost everybody stating that he was very good followed by Aurélie, Dave and Stephan. On the vendors side, the ranking of satisfaction placed Omniture followed by WebTrends and then Indextools, Nedstat and Extenseo.
I have to admit that we were really amazed by the feedback forms and the positive emails that we have received since last friday. Here are some of the comments we have received:
“René, Aurélie, just a short note to say congratulations and thank you for today, I thought the audience, content and venue were all first class!”
“Thanks for hosting the event last week. I thought it was very informative and I certainly picked up a few useful insights.”
“I just wanted to congratulate you guys again in setting up this great event. All the people I have spoke to during the day where all enthusiastic about the event and Web Analytics.”
“Thank you for your event, I was really impressed”
“As I just told Rene over the phone. I think it was an amazing event on the level of Emetrics (and I do about 25 shows a year).“
this last comment really made my day, as eMetrics is for me the nirvana of the Web Analytics event.
Thanks again to everybody that came and allowed this event to be a great success.
And yes, see you next year at our third OX2 Web Analytics Day Brussels (It’s going to be difficult to do better I think…).
My conference journey started out on Thursday, when I hooked up with a couple of Belgian clients at the eDay in Rotterdam, before heading back to Brussels together with Eric, after his brief radio interview, where I was lucky enough to play around with his iPhone. To be quite honest, I’m not really an early adopter but if you touch it, believe me, you want one and leaving your credit card at home doesn’t really seem to work 😉
The car ride back home went fast – as we both like to drive fast – and discussed on the way recent evolutions of the Web Analytics industry, including Megan Burns’ latest Forrester wave that had been officially released a couple of days before.
To be quite honest, the night was short and the next day promised to be quite long as I picked up both Dave and Eric to head to the Federation of Enterprises in Brussels in order to have breakfast around 8 am.
When setting up the Web Analytics Day in Brussels, our intention was mainly to get practitioners from major Belgian companies – and picked up a couple of international attendees in the process – in order to allow them to get a full review of what Web Analytics is actually about, looking beyond the pure acquisition of a web analytics tool. As Eric’s Web Analytics is Easy presentation also emphasized, using his RAMP analogy, the first letter stands for Ressources which include both technology as well as people. The other acronyms respectively stand for Analysis, Multivariate testing & Processes. Read the rest of this entry »
“Wandering” Dave Rhee here – reporting on last Friday’s second Web Analytics Day organized in Brussels by OX2, for which I had the honor of delivering a presentation about one of my favorite subjects, Social Networks, and more specifically, analytics which can help determine the influence of individuals within those networks.
Overall, the day went really well, and not just because the venue was well-chosen and food and cocktails were great, but because we had a very large proportion of actual web analytics practitioners present, and just enough of a vendor presence to help answer the questions which inevitably arose. Although a few people had to leave in the afternoon, the vast majority chose to stay until the very end (a good success metric!), and even though the day was full of information, the attendees were so engaged that we usually ran out of time before running out of questions.
Microsoft’s worldwide first look at Gatineau was certainly a surprise highlight for most attendees, and emphasized how much Microsoft values its European audience for Web Analytics tools, as well as how highly regarded OX2 is in the global web analytics community.
Watch this space for video highlights of all the presentations, including Stephan Loerke’s opening keynote from the World Federation of Advertisers, and Eric T. Peterson’s usual brilliance in summarizing difficult concepts in a way that makes perfect sense to the rest of us. And of course, our own Aurélie Pols, whom you know from this blog, provided an overview of running a web analytics implementation project smoothly, given her extensive experience in helping OX2 Clients avoid common problems with their own sites.
I led off my own presentation in the afternoon with the worst slide of the day: a very dense table comparing several media, including press releases, surveys, blogs, audio and video podcasts, discussion message boards, social networks like Facebook or Myspace, and immersive environments like Second Life. The comparison attributes included style, “coolness factor,” ability to control your message, the value of feedback you can collect, the level of intimacy and trust possible, what resources are required to commit to creation and maintenance, the primary risk factors, and finally, the best use for that type of medium. Read the rest of this entry »
Last friday, Aurélie and I had the pleasure to host our second Web Analytics Day. It was a great event with over 100 participants attending. One of the key moments was when Ian Thomas presented to the audience the forth coming Web Analytics tool: Microsoft Gatineau. Eric and Robin have already published the slides of the presentation, you’ll find hereafter the video of Ian’s presentation:
We wanted to thank again Ian for this Worldwide Première presentation of Gatineau and for even personalizing the presentation to the Belgian market with his chocolate example 😉
If you want to sign up for Gatineau’s Beta, you just need to go here.
We will be publishing more material and comments from OX2’s Web Analytics Day 2007 in the coming days so keep checking if you’re interested or subscribe to our RSS feed.
Reading an old post on the blog of Ian Thomas, ‘Lies, Damned Lies’, on Web Analytics in online recruiting, and having worked on a couple of Web Analytics projects for online recruitment agencies, together with the OX2 team, we decided to find out which web analytics tools are currently used by the different recruiting companies which have a presence in Belgium, the Netherlands and France at the same time.
What initially aroused my interest in Ian Thomas’post was next paragraph:
One of the loops that people often get themselves into with Web Analytics is an assumption that what you learn from your web analytics can only be applied directly back to the site, or at a stretch, at the marketing for the site. But that’s not true, of course: web analytics can provide all sorts of insights that can be applied across a business, sometimes in areas not related to the web at all.
And this last sentence is of course more than true, but typically companies, and this doesn’t apply only to online recruitment agencies, don’t take full advantage of what is possible with the web analytics tool they have.
I have summed up some KPIs for online recruitement sites, and tried to show some possible areas, online and offline, where they could be applied: Read the rest of this entry »
Alan Boydell of Google Analytics France first pointed me to this nifty little tool (in French) but at first I got frustrated because I could not use more than one reportlet in my iGoogle page. Yes i was pushing my luck but hey, you can’t blame me for trying 😉
Anyhow, Michael was very quick to react to my comment and presto, three days later his team had put together a fix 😀
If you like Google Analytics and would like to have your KPIs right when you open your browser, this module is for you!
KPI customization appears to be in their plans so watch this space, we’ll cover it when it’s released.
Tip: if you still like to have your news feeds and other gadgets, create a new tab dedicated to your GA reportlets. By the way if anyone knows how to bookmark an iGoogle tab, please let me know 😉
This is the blog of WebAnalytics.be, a Business Unit of OX2, a pan-European Interactive Agency based in Bussels capital of Europe.
This Blog has been created to allow our team members to share with you and the rest of the world their ideas thoughts and views on Web Analytics.
Yesterday I had a journalist calling me to ask my opinion regarding Visual Sciences’ takeover by Omniture. Since becoming a public company, Omniture has been acquiring different companies, but one can wonder: where’s Omniture going
Omniture, le géant mondial des WA vient d’annoncer le rachat de son concurrent direct, Visual Sciences (anciennement connu sous le nom de WebSideStory) pour la coquette somme de 394 millions de dollars, soit un peu moins du quart de la valorisation d’Omniture.
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It’s always a pleasure to go to the 
Brussels, October 16th 2007 — Eric Peterson becomes shareholder of 
Brussels, October 10th, 2007 — OX2, the Belgian interactive agency and a leader in the field of website measurement and online behavior analysis (a.k.a. Web Analytics) increases its international clout. After expanding into France last January, OX2 develops its activities in Germany by opening a web analytics branch in Frankfurt. This endeavor was made possible with the addition of a renowned web analytics expert to the already celebrated Web Analytics European Dream Team. OX2 went all the way to California to retain the services of David Rhee, former Acting Director of Web Analytics at Gateway Computer (NYSE:GTW) and Primary Moderator of the 
This month, 
I had made a comment on 
It’s becoming a little tradition to fly over to the US to attend the 
With the 
OX2 Web Analytics Blog 