I know that I am late to the game, but today I stumbled across an article at Venturebeat, which might explain a little further why Adobe bought Omniture for a stunning amount of $ 1.8 billion. Here a few reasons:

1. Omniture’s incredible client roster (Walmart…)
2. Capabilities of track trends across the globe (and across the US)
3. Extended tracking capabilities for mobile, esp. mobile video and Iphone apps
4. Business intelligence for online shops, e.g. which products sell together, internal search…

Even that all these are great reasons, I am still puzzled about the price. Unless there was a bidding war I am sure the high-price has a few other reasons. I assume it has to do something with tracking flash or the overall “information” that Omniture collects.

Flash (owned by Adobe) is currently installed on more than 90% of the computers, but unlike in the online video world, it has never really moved to the mobile world. Mostly due to restrictions from Apple and Co.

However, I am sure that the next generation of smart phones will fully integrate Flash, which will result also in a new era for mobile apps, a market which is currently mostly monopolized by Apple.

So long story short: There is a huge potential for Adobe to offer full-blown flash apps including high-end tracking to marketers across the globe. On top Omniture’s API’s are open to a lot industry specific reporting system.

I haven’t really followed Userfly lately. However, it is still  one of the most interesting analytics companies out there.  Sometimes I wonder why G Analytics or any other vendor never looked into a great service like that.  The video analysis is very useful for usability issues or in order to get a basic understanding of user behavior. Here a good video describing their service:

My obsession with analytics software is probably obvious (if you’ve read here a little bit). Since I always try to come up with new ways of doing things and getting new ideas,  I had a look at a wide variety of products, including more than 200+ web analytics solutions. However…sometimes it makes sense to look beyond e.g. at other industries. Recently I’ve checked out a few financial analytics software products. Most of them are high-end business intelligent software and I really liked what they are offering and I am sure some web analytics vendors can learn from them:

Oracle Financial Analytics:
Among a lot of great features, the software monitors cash cycles in order to manage working capital, collections and allows to control risk. It’s dashboard also identifies channels of profitable drivers across  profit centers.  What I especiallly liked is the regional analysis, which in so many web analytics solutions often not integrated right (e.g. visitors, who visit a site with a Blackberry are usually identified as Canadian  visitors, since RIM is based out of Canada).

SAP ERP Financial Analytics:
Probably the biggest competitor to Oracle’s software, but with some nice features:
Key performance indicator module, which supports popular scorecard methodologies, such as Economic Value-Added, activity-based costing methos and balanced scorecards (BSC).

SAS Business Analytics:
Predictive SAS Analytics claims to allow to make proactive decisions based on high-impact questions “What will happen next?”. Since I haven’t really looked into the software for too long, I am sure that the flexible framework is something that could be very valuable. Apparently their framework grows over time and is not a monolithic platform (such as the ERP solutions). I wonder if web analytics provider could make an impact by offering a solution like that. Some of the solutions offer APIs, but none really offers some kind of flexibility. The high-end products more or less integrate with email marketing programs or other 3rd party software, which is not really they way it should be. Again the growing mobile analyticsm market is something that nobody really was prepared of and solutions still have issues integration these different data sets.

IBM Cognos Finance:
Cognos Finance from IBM falls in the same category above. However, IBM-like there are always a few features that are unique:
The currency conversion feature allows to manage international exchange rates beginning and end of the month, average, historical and so on. Web analytics solutions especially are pretty unflexible when it comes to currency. Some of them are able to track the different accounts in different currencies (Omniture does). The different results of different country exchange rates usually cause quite a chaos within the roll-up account. Something that almost drove me crazy about 3 years back, when I tried to combine UK Pounds, Euros and USD within one analytics account.
Another feature, that I always missed in good analytics solutions is an advanced reporting functionality. Most solutions allow to create and schedule reports, but don’t give the user the power to format and layout the entire report. Full formating and layout is something that Cognos Finance integrated. Especially with different KPI reports for several management levels it is important to be as flexible as possible.

Pretty interesting feature added to Google Analytics. Seemed like someone read my blog, when a few months back I posted about the key events graph, which basically showed what G Analytics annotations is about. Check it out:

While everybody goes crazy with Twitter Analytics it’s interesting to look at other stuff: Nextbigsound.com is a music analytics system aka actionable intelligence for the music industry.

Nextbigsounds measures plays, fans on Facebook, Myspace or Last FM and even shows comments.
Pretty nice idea…especially since the music industry trends are more and more happening on the web and numbers such as fans or comments can barely be faked (unlike fake CD buys )

Read the rest of this entry »

Pretty cool use of the Google API. A Keyword tree visualization with the most frequently used seach keywords and how are they used together. Well done juice Analytics

A comparison of analytics systems has been done a bunch of times. A head to head collision comparison of Yahoo Analytics vs. Google Analytics is something so far not many have presented. However Insightr made a great presentation ……and the winner is …….Yahooooo.

This post has been brought to you by Digital Photo Printing with PEPhoto.com

A few more days to go and then Avinash Kaushik’s 2nd webanalytics book will be released. It’s called Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity.

Congrats Avinash. Will definitely be in my bookshelf! You can pre-order it here!

The question about which  parts of your website draw the most attention is as old as web analytics. The industry has done mouse tracking, visitor tracking, eyetracking…but never really looked at attention prediction studies done by neuro scientists.
EyeQuant is one of these new solutions right out of the laboratories of the University of Osnabrueck, Germany.
EyeQant ist based on a neuroscientific attention models. These models calculate within a few seconds which parts of the Design draw the most attention. The results are stunning and are close to what Eye tracking studies can achieve, but at a fraction of the costs.

Here one of the interesting results”

Found via Gruenderszene

When a company seems to be called out for underdelivering…it’s even more surprising when it’s back up on its feet and finally goes back to it’s roots. Webtrends, one of the first players in the market,  just relaunched in one of the most interesting ways it’s brand new analytics solution. It’s the first time, that a large vendor simplifies it’s interface and makes it usable to pretty muche everybody (instead of adding layer and layer of complexity). I think a big part of this effort comes from Alex Yoder, who took over the CEO position last year and clearly made a great impact.

Here a few highlights about the new functionalities:

RSS Overlays: The graph overlays data from any RSS Feeds on top of trending metrics.

Story View: Data that will automatically be transferred into Narratives

Webtrends on Demand: Ulimited dimensions and measures based on any attribute.