Web analytics industry transformation (con't)

Not to beat a dead horse - but after sharing my views on Adobe-Omniture, IBM-Coremetrics and speculation about Microsoft-Webtrends some people inquired about my views on the fate of other vendors.

Let's recap:

• Adobe "branding & rich media marketing focus" will bring Omniture in this direction – shying away from anything that is beyond online marketing (from ads to presentation layer).
  
• IBM history of "middleware integration" is in the opposite direction - probably bringing Coremetrics as an integral part of WebSphere (closer to the logic layer).
  
• WebTrends, who's been trough rough times over the past 10 years still puts off a good fight as one of the major player. The single guy in the room will definitely be looking for a new mate - and I speculate Microsoft could be such a fit.
• Google is Google, right? The mission remains so simplistic and so powerful "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". They are on the right path but being at the top of the hill also makes you an easier target - including claims that Google Analytics is being subsidized trough Google AdWords... a practice that could be considered to be "unfair competition".

What else?

The “extremes” probably won’t remain between Google on the "low-end", and Omniture on the "high-end". I'm quoting those terms because they are mostly irrelevant by now. As Avinash put in his keynote at the last eMetrics Toronto "it's easy to do better than your competitors when you don't have to repeat their mistakes". Google Analytics will keep improving and in some respects it already offers more than some paid vendors. Furthermore, not everyone will want to venture in IBM long, expansive approach… and not everyone is a friend of Adobe either (not mentioning the dim future of Flash, one of the flagship product of the company).

As the market consolidates, new players can emerge and the online analytics ecosystem is still far from maturity. There are plenty of opportunities for innovative startups to fill specific needs.

Who else?

While thinking about other players I tried to extract the "unique selling point" - what makes this player different from others. Of course, this is my own appreciation and I would love to hear your feedback and own perspective.

• Unica: Although I haven't had a chance to use Unica extensively, the feedback I hear about their data model and flexible interface is always positive. They are particularly well suited to integrate any data source and grow as more complex requirements emerge.
• Webtrekk: The EU web analytics market is quite fragmented, but some players, like Berlin-headquartered Webtrekk, have developed the business within the unique requirements of this market. They are particularly sensible about privacy and legal considerations. As such, Webtrekk might be particularly good for some types of environment such as banking and other financial services.
• AT Internet: The privately held, French company is not a new comer and boast an impressive client list in France. Their unique value proposition includes personalized consulting services, effectively avoiding the risk of "judge & jury" often found when the web agency developing the site is also the same reporting on site performance. I had also posted a review of AT Internet latest NX product.
• KISSmetrics: the startup, which product is now available, is already sending very good vibes in the market. Crafted by experienced entrepreneurs and benefiting from strong financial backing, the fresh approach to web analytics promises to bring a powerful yet very intuitive interface specifically focused on people and conversion.

My take

Those are just a few players in the online analytics ecosystem - I didn't mention voice of customer players such as Kampyle or iPerceptions, or even very specialized tools such as Tynt or PostRank. As the market mature, larger players will continue to expend horizontally, aiming at acquisitions of complementary tools.

At the same time, nth generation vendors will come up with fresh alternatives that will bring a different perspective to such things as the tagging nightmare, real-time slicing & dicing capabilities, data integration and above all, a stronger business focus (as opposed to marketing-centricity).

IBM-Coremetrics: why it matters & my take

Disclaimer: I do not have any insider info and those comments are my personal opinion and point of view. In legal terms... those are not forward looking statements.

Another shockwave in the small web analytics world: IBM Advances Analytics with Acquisition of Coremetrics.

The history

This shouldn't come as a huge surprise. When Adobe announced the acquisition of Omniture few people understood the strategy and complementarity between the three players. In "Adobe + Omniture + WPP = game changer" I commented that "There seems to be some concensus this acquisition is awkward. However, it is in the same vein as IBM's Websphere partnership to integrate Coremetrics within the development platform and production cycle."

In some ways, IBM fix a mistake: according to some people, they should not have sold Surf'Aid in 2006. Remember this was at a time when Google had a much smaller market penetration and Micrsoft purchased a small web analytics player named DeepMetrix, based in Gatineau, Canada... the rest is history. But the re-purchase has not much to do with Surfaid.

Today's picture

According to a study of the top 500 US retail sites study, Google Analytics enjoys a market share of 62%  (up 19% from a year ago). Compare that to Omniture 40% (up 8%) and Coremetrics mere 18% (up 2% from last year). Google 60% figure is consistent with other confidential studies I conducted for the European market.

"Double dipping" (using more than one tag), is up to 33% and significantly in favor of Google.

Coremetrics offering was traditionally considered to be very strong for retail sites - a position that is obviously eroding when looking at the market share results.

What's the deal?

Google dominates the market
It is not even a matter of price, it's a matter of features. The usual claim that Google Analytics was used on small insignificant sites and amateur blogs doesn't hold anymore. Google Analytics has reached the "enterprise-class" level, and businesses are massively adopting Google.

There are a couple of perverse effects however (more on that bellow)

Adobe + Omniture
The goal is to integrate analytics into the development life cycle. There were also some speculations on some type of ad network enhancements trough Flash and better measurement but I don't believe it... Flash long term survival is seriously threatened by HTML5.

Adobe culture and historical offering is focused on marketing and rich media.

IBM + Coremetrics
The relationship between IBM WebSphere and Coremetrics is already in place. I recently mentioned IBM is pushing for analytics front and center in a massive, worldwide, multi-channel marketing campaign (I really like it and went back to it several times!).

IBM isn't about ad placement, marketing or rich media, IBM is about running core business processes. It's about business analysis and business intelligence contributing to bottom line core business optimization. We are in a whole different ballgame.

My take

IBM move is wise and certainly an influx of fresh air for Coremetrics. IBM's culture and experience with acquisitions leads us to think Coremetrics might become closely embedded with WebSphere and maybe marginalized as a standalone product.

In my Roadmap to Online Analytics Workshop I conclude with the slide bellow:

What it means:

• IT & Logs: Early websites started in IT, and like any system, websites had logs (circa 1993). IT admins were looking at those logs for traffic source, usage and errors.
• Marketing: Eventually, marketing found out IT people were talking to customers - bad idea! So Marketing took over the web (circa 1998)
• Tags: Marketing still had to ask IT for logs - complex, slow, not sexy (think old WebTrends) - tags solved the issue! Google democratized this approach (circa 2005)
• Business: Modern websites are not only about marketing - they transcend all business functions.
• Online: Measuring the web isn't enough - think about the growing complexity of the online ecosystem, including social media & mobile.
• BI: As we evolve our web analytics practice, we seek to integrate external data sources: call center, voice of customer, core systems data... we're going toward business intelligence (not the technology, the concepts)
• Business: Marketing optimization isn't enough. You can do a great job at marketing, but if you bring all those visitors to a broken process you are wasting your money. Eventually, to optimize the online channel you have to look at the internals - you need to become business analysts.

In the IBM-Coremetrics context, the path toward business analyst and business intelligence is pretty clear.

What's next?

Microsoft-Webtrends?
There have been speculations for some time about WebTrends. The company bumpy road in the past several years is now more stable and the product was improved (although it's a strange coincidence to see the VP of Marketing leaving WebTrends the same day IBM-Coremetrics is announced). Microsoft-WebTrends would certainly be a good fit. Microsoft is already a heavy user of WebTrends and since the debacle of Gatineau, Microsoft is left with no web analytics offering. Culturally, WebTrends remains one of the few solution that can be hosted internally. WebTrends would be a natural fit with other server-based offering from Microsoft, be it SQL Server, Sharepoint, IIS and other MS Office "enablers". Some people think Oracle-WebTrends is a possibility but I don't see a good fit.

Firing at Google
Anyone in the online world saying Google isn't a threat is either stupid or lying (and for that matter, even in the offline world!). Since a little controversy is always interesting, and will all due respect for the benefits and strengths of Google Analytics, I think there is some unfair market competition and clear subsidizing of GA from AdWords.

• There is clear market dominance of Google, and it's grown from about 40% to 60%. At this rate, Google Analytics will own over 80% of the market within a couple of years - often the threshold beyond which "monopoly" becomes a risk.
• Even for organizations standardizing on a competing product, Google Analytics sneaks in trough the "path of least resistance": agencies are largely using it and the fact there is no cost allows it to go under the radar. When time will come to renew paid contracts, and when companies will look at their analytics maturity, the choice will often go toward GA.
• There is a legitimate concern the entity providing marketing effectiveness metrics is also the same who handles the marketing campaigns. It's a clear judge and jury risk. (In the same way I see it as a business risk when the web agency creating the site is also the one doing the web analytics analysis - not illegal, not really unethical, but certainly a risk for abuse).
• But more importantly, most people now make the connection that "if I do AdWords, therefore I need to use Google Analytics". And who doesn't do AdWords as part of their marketing strategy?

The market dominance of Goole makes it very risky for anyone to sue them for anticompetitive practices. Most of the time, smaller web analytics players would much rather be purchased by Google than risk alienating them by venturing into a long and expensive legal process. But... Microsoft or IBM would probably not be as afraid to do so...

So, what's your take? Any radically different point of view? Am I off track or do you agree?

"Unique Visitors" doesn't have much to do with people

I was taking my morning coffee, reading Brian Clifton post about "Should you focus on website visitors as individuals?", his views of a recent e-Consultancy interview of Coremetrics Chief Strategy Officer, John Squire. I commented on Brian's blog, but as is often the case, my thoughts turned into something too long for a comment. I strive to participate in conversations I know won't end up with the now classic "let's agree to disagree".

Tracking individual customers, really?

Coremetrics is differentiating its technology by focusing on individual customer data in a multichannel environment. They look at “complete historical online behavior and brand interactions on websites, across multiple ad networks and via email, video, affiliate sites, social media, and more”.

(emphasis mine) I salute Coremetrics (and others) objectives to track "unique people" instead of "unique cookies" in the hope to get more precise and detailed information. But this is a lost cause... the inherent technologies of the web don't allow that, unless you can authenticate every single visitor coming through all channels... As soon as there is "multichannel" and "web analytics" in the same phrase I get suspicious... "multichannel" when everything is online is something, but how is data from call center, back-end core systems and other touch points integrated to give a "single view of the customer"? We're heading in the realm of business intelligence (BI) and customer relationship management (CRM), and despite the marketing fluff, I don't see any of the current web analytics vendor really playing in this space. In the above statement, all of the mentioned "channels" are "online", which, I agree, gives you a very good view to start with, but a view where your sight is concentrated and everything else in the periphery is blurred.

I like Brian argument that aggregating & sampling is the way to go. After all, web analytics is closer to statistics: with a population, segments, sampling/aggregating... and a margin of error, confidence and significance... then it is to core systems where each piece of data should be 100% accurate and traceable.

Trust me, I'm accurate (and honest)

One of the thing playing against Google Analytics is the fact that experienced analysts (those who have a statistical background, come from the offline world or have lots of experience in a real multichannel, multi-system environment) want to audit, validate and diagnose the data they are relying on. The inability to audit the data and have a peak at the methodologies employed by Google to provide the data is a big showstopper to some organizations. It's basically asking for a blind trust where your provider (AdWords) is also giving you your results (analytics conversions)... or your employer is also managing your bank account... For that mater, your also have to trust other vendors because you can't have access to the algorithms they use for aggregating or sampling data, but they do not play a dominant role in your online marketing (PPC) spends.

From time to time, access to the raw data, or the lowest level possible, is justifiable and necessary. The latest Forrester Wave: Web Analytics Q3 2009 reveals that 49% of surveyed web analytics clients said "accuracy of information" is one of their three most important factors when selecting a vendor. This comes ahead of reporting options, and far ahead of TCO! Yet, despite vendors secret formula to calculate accurate visits & visitors, research I conducted using WASP shows the number one source of distrust and inaccurate data comes from inappropriate and incorrect instrumentation.

My take

Detailed or aggregate? Really multichannel or "online channels"? I'll put my old record again: it depends on your Web Analytics Maturity Level. For most organizations, even if they have access to detailed data, they simply won't be able to make good use of it. If you wonder, it's probably because you don't need detailed data and Google Analytics will be just fine. If you do your homework, you'll look at offerings from various vendors and put aside frivolous and inflated claims boasted with buzz words such as "real time", "multichannel" (when they really mean online channel), "single view", "complete" and the worst of all: "leading".

Job: TD Insurance Web Analytics Expert (Montreal)

The economy isn't bad for all fields of expertise. Here's another job in the web analytics business, in Montréal!

---

Are you an expert in Web analytics? Move your career forward with TD Insurance! At TD Insurance, a leading insurer on the Web, we are looking for people with 3-5 years of experience in Web analytics to fill a new position and join the best insurance team on the Web in North America.

The person in this position will play a defining role in the orientation of future Web projects. He or she will study and interpret data from different sources on our websites. Responsibilities include analyzing and converting data, and making concrete recommendations to key players.

Responsibilities

• Identify successes, trends and areas of improvement by using web analytic data. Translate analysis into actionable recommendations.
• Set in place activities (dashboards) to monitor for anomalies; report the anomalies when present and communicate recommendations to resolve it
• Develop testing plan and platform for AB and Multi-variant testing and then work with project leaders to define, design, execute, analyze, results.
• Participate in site re-designs and quoting engines enhancements as a measurements expert, identifying reporting requirements, monitoring the implementation process and evaluating post-launch reporting.
• Measure and understand customer lifecycle and usage patterns in order to understand online client behaviour for better targeting and focus on projects on areas with the greatest profitability impact
• Evaluate profitability of the Web Sales Optimization projects to support business cases
• Assist in setting project Key Performance Indicators (KPI) objectives
• After project implementation, evaluate degree of success based on project objectives
• Ensure that the tracking structure continuously evolves to meet the web business needs and are adequate to measure the success of projects
• Build confidence in data sources in order to ensure data integrity and reliability by developing processes and procedures.
• Compile weekly and monthly metric reports from various data sources in order to see the evolution of periodic reports for historical and analysis purposes
• Generate ad-hoc request (reports/data extracts) into insightful analysis and perform recommendations.

Skills and key competencies

• Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce, Information Technology or any other related analytical field
• Experience with Omniture’s suite or similar and current analytics programs.
• Familiarity with SAS and SQL and advanced MS Excel skills
• Experience running complex analyses and developing complex reports
• 3-5 years of experience in Web sites analytics
• Superior analytical skills and thinking, ability to develop creative solutions
• Strong communicator, multi-tasker, customer-focused, business minded
• Ability to work in a dynamic environment
• Detailed driven and hands-on approach
• Excellent in problem solving skills with an ability to provide solutions
• Fluent in both French and English
• Strong oral and written communication skills
• A strong understanding of Insurance
• Excellent Communication Skills written and spoken, French and English

This permanent position comes with a host of benefits, including insurance, bonuses, discounts on financial products, pension plan, etc.

If you think you have the expertise required and are looking for a stimulating work environment where discussion, commitment and pay equity are part of the package, please send your résumé and contact info to Jean-François Beaulieu [jean-francois(dot)beaulieu(at)TDInsurance(dot)com] so he can provide you with more details about this position.

WASP v1.08 released

WASP v1.08 is now available through the official Mozilla extensions site at addons.mozilla.org

This version fixes an annoying bug that was introduced in v1.07... In order to get approval on the Mozilla site I had to tighten the security around the core detection module. In doing so I broke the detection for some tools...

As always, you can get the latest version from WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com or in Firefox, simply do Tools/Addons and click on the "Find Updates" button.

Interesting posts about WASP on immeria

The very first post about WASP was on September 12th 2006: Web Analytics Solution Profiler - WASP!

Tag auditing, using WASP for Analyst and WASP Pro sidebar and crawler:

• WASP case study: WebTrends tag audit 
• WASP case study: SiteCatalyst hierarchies
  
• Quality assurance of web analytics tags implementation
• Yahoo! Web Analytics and WASP
• WASP: a good tool to audit site tags
• Web Analytics implementation Quality Assurance
• The challenges of JavaScript Tagging
  

Market research:

• Top 500 Online Retail Sites 
• Behind the scene of the Top 500 Retail Sites study 
• What are the top retailers using? 
• UK Universities 
• Web Analytics on European automotive sites
• Web Analytics vendors market shares
• Web Analytics market analytics

Other articles where WASP was mentionned:

• Whitehouse.gov: snafu around a web bug 
• Switching Web Analytics solution: a case study 
• Live from eMetrics: got interviewed by Robert Scoble

Rants and praises

I'm receiving tons of feedback about WASP. Some of it comes through email, bloggers and well known analysts reference it, vendors includes WASP in their training and use it as a support and implementation tool. Here are a couple of interesting posts that are related or talking about WASP:

• WASP ver 1.x Inauguration - for Google Analytics and 124 other solutions, by Brian Katz, VKI Studios
  
• "7 Deadly Sins of Web Analytics", by Bryan Eisenberg, United States. Sin #1 is "Improper implementation"
• "The Ultimate Web Analytics Data Reconciliation Checklist", by Avinash Kaushik, also in the US.
• "Google Analytics Lag Time woes? - Get immediate gratification with WASP", from VKI Studios, in Canada.
  
• "Troubleshooting Tools for Web Analytics", from Brian Clifton blog, UK. Brian says "I highly recommend this to anyone that needs to quickly check what web analytics tracking code is present on their pages"
• "7 must use firefox addons for web analyst", from Web Analytics India Blog. Anil says "WASP needs no special mention, iam sure it’s used by most of web analyst."
• "WASP - Webanalyse Firefox Plugin", from Patrick Ludolph, Germany.
  
• "[ツール]アクセス解析に便利なFirefoxアドオン10選＋αを使って評価してみた", Japan
• "Top-5 addons de Firefox para Analítica Web", Asociación Española de Analítica Web, Spain. Victor Perez says "One word: Essential."
• WASP love! on immeria.net

I also want to reiterrate my invitation to use User Voice to suggest and vote for new features!

Even more Web Analytics Dashboards Fun in Excel 2007!

Update 2010-05-07: If you want to use this dashboard with Google Analytics data, check out "Tatvic enhances immeria's Excel web analytics dashboard".

Attention Internet Explorer users (MSIE)! When clicking on the link to download the .xlsx template, MSIE wrongly try to save it as a .zip file, which it's not. Make sure to rename the file with the proper .xlsx extension (or better yet, switch to Firefox!)

A couple of weeks ago I published "Web Analytics Dashboards: fun with Excel 2007", it got on Stumbled  and became one of the most visited article. A while back I also published Box plots and whisker plots in Excel 2007 and it consistently receives a lot of views.

So here's an update of Web Analytics Dashboard Fun with Excel 2007!

What is it?

I'm glad to release "Web Analytics Dashboard Fun" (Microsoft Excel 2007, 85KB .xlsx), a free Microsoft Excel 2007 template for web analytics professionals. It can be used for learning web analytics, Excel in general or as the basis for more elaborate dashboards. The goal is to use only Excel 2007 features and ease customization of the template and update of the data.

Why Excel?

As a teacher of web analytics and a web analyst myself, I noticed people often struggle to define KPIs and get going with dashboards. My clients use different web analytics tools, be it Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Xiti or others. Although some of the tools offer very advanced dashboarding and analysis capabilities, there are a number of reasons why you would want to use Excel:

• Control the information being distributed
• Publish the information in a format people are used to (either Excel or PDF)
  
• Avoid granting access to the web analytics tool itself
  
• Include other sources of data
  
• Ease "month to month" and "year to year" analysis
• Ease analysis of major segments (such as two countries, two sites, etc.)
  
• Include the analyst comments and evaluation

Get Web Analytics Dashbaord Fun!

Based on the feedback I got, and some further tweaking to make the dashboard more generic and easier to modify for your needs, I'm releasing "Web Analytics Dashboard Fun with Excel 2007 v1.1". To get started there are just a few steps:

1. >>> Get the template <<< (Microsoft Excel 2007, 85KB .xlsx)
   (Get the Excel 2003 version - with some features disabled)
   
2. Right-click on the S1 and S2 radio button and "Edit Text" to your licking
   
3. Change "Success Event 1" through "Success Event 3" in all worksheets
4. Update the data in WebDataS1 and WebDataS2
5. Voilà!

Once you are comfortable with the spreadsheet, you can modify the dashboard to add/remove/modify KPIs to your liking. Although this step requires more work, it should become fairly easy once you understand the general pattern of the spreadsheet.

Feedback, comments and contribution

One of the goal of immeria.net is to "make it easy to do web analytics" by providing educational ressources, documented processes and tools that are both easy to use and non-specific to a vendor ("product agnostic"). You are free to use this template, modify it and even redistribute it as long as its not for profit.


Web Analytics Dashboard Fun by immeria.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

"Omniture and Google Analytics over-hyped" - CMS Watch

"Omniture and Google Analytics over-hyped", that's the headline of the press release from CMS Watch I got in my mail box this morning.

They go on to say that "today (they) rejected the snowball of hype suggesting that Google Analytics and Omniture are the only remaining solid choices for Web Analytics" and "CMS Watch research finds that enterprises can select from a broad selection of established vendors that work well in diverse scenarios and can scale as web site traffic grows".

CMS Watch is absolutely right that there are some great products, some of them much better suited for a particular client and situation (because of price, local presence, specific features, etc.). This seems to be especially true in Europe.

However, I don't agree that larger market share means over-hyped. Are they delivering on their promise? I think so.

Furthermore, you can't really compare Google Analytics and Omniture, they are at different positions on the large spectrum of web analytics solutions.

Google Analytics is great to start in the field and Forrester put it near the middle of their Wave: good offering, good strategy. Other products can compare advantageously to Google Analytics.

I also share Forrester's opinion about Omniture: strong strategy and strong offering. Omniture SiteCatalyst goes way beyond Google Analytics in terms of segmentation, custom metrics, system integration and advanced analysis capabilities... for a price. But web analytics doesn't stop with data collection and analysis, one need to look at the larger offering and think about other complementary tools to complete the Trinity approach put forward by Avinash Kaushik: Behavior, Outcomes and Experience. This includes A/B and multivariate testing, surveys, performance analytics, etc. Should you go with best of suite or best of class?

Companies looking at spending tens of thousand of dollars annually in a multi-year contract for a tool/service, training and put their faith in such a product to take important business decisions better do their research seriously. Although expensive, I think the report might make a lot of sense for companies currently in the selection process.

The web analytics vendors market shares I have started to publish might also be a consideration in the selection process. I leave it to you to decide if going for the bigger player is a good or a bad thing.

It's still XMas time: WASP 0.3 released

What is WASP?

(if you still wonder...)
WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a free Firefox extension aimed at web analytics implementation specialists and web analysts who wants to do quality assurance and understand how their web analytics solution is implemented.

>>> Install it now! <<<

What's new

It's getting very close to v1.0, I still have one small memory leak to fix (when closing a pop up window) and I want to tweak a little bit more for Omniture and Google. Here's what's new in this release:

• Now detects 68 web analytics and ad networks solutions
• Tweaked tracking for Omniture SiteCatalyst and the recently released new Google Analytics tags
• Various bug fixes, including a memory leak and the "hanged" status bar icon bug
• Improved analytics of web analytics... that is, WASP includes it's own tags that allows me to provide web analytics vendor market shares statistics (you can opt out of this feature from the options menu).
  

Your feedback is important!

Thanks to all of you who sent me such great feedback. Companies from all around the world are contacting me to add new products that have a local focus, such as in Brazil, Spain and Italy. Your positive input is always appreciated, but constructive critics are also accepted!

If you haven't done it yet, please take a few seconds to fill out my two quick polls:

1. If a special edition of WASP had a price tag, which packaging would be most effective for you? Take this poll
2. Which features would you like to see added to WASP? Take this poll

If you are inclined to do so - or if you use WASP for professional purposes - a donation would be appreciated!

Web Analytics vendors market shares

In this second installment of my analysis of web analytics vendors market shares, 7,788 web sites were analyzed between December 4th and January 2nd.

Figures remain very similar to last month's results, which makes them even more valuable because we now have a baseline of nearly 15,000 web sites and over 300,000 page views that were collected over a period of about two months:


Remember last month I said "Google Analytics might be very widely used, it is implemented on web sites that receives, overall, less traffic than Omniture". As we see in the next chart, SiteCatalyst alone already has more depth than Google. That is, more page were viewed where Omniture's solution was found than pages with Google Analytics. What does it mean? Basically it's a confirmation that sites with high traffic implements Omniture SiteCatalyst more than anything else (maybe not such a big surprise).


Some interesting insights:

• It will be interesting to see how MS Gatineau will grow it's market share.
  
• Solutions such as TapeFailure, RobotReplay, ClickTale, CrazyEgg were found on less than 1% of the sites.
• WebTrends is a bit tricky since WASP doesn't look at log-based solutions. So in this case, WebTrends stats are only for WebTrends Live (i.e. pages with JavaScript tags).

Again, your feedback and comments are welcome.

Note: This anonymous data is collected by WASP from users who have not opted-out from sending it. WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a free Firefox extension aimed at web analytics implementation specialists, web analysts and savvy web surfers who wants to understand how their behavior is being analyzed.

Web Analytics market analytics

WASP was primarily created to ease quality assurance of web analytics solutions tagging. But as often the case with innovations, the primary idea leads to a bunch of other possibilities. I also listened to your suggestions and 20% of the 120 respondents to my little poll about future WASP features said they would like to get market stats.

How does it work?

WASP was downloaded about 30,000 times and the latest version includes it's own analytics tags. This means that I can collect anonymous and aggregate information about the tools implemented on the sites visited while WASP is active. So as you browse, you not only get info about the tags on a page, but you also contribute to a global view of the web analytics market. A bit what like Alexa does for site rating, but especially made for web analytics. Cool isn't it? (And yes, this is stated in the EULA and no personal information is collected).

Here are some base metrics:

• 30,000 downloads since the first version of WASP released in Feb. 2007,
  
• 8,000 installs of the latests in a month,
  
• 200,000 pages analyzed in a month,
• 10,000 sites analyzed in a month

I think we now have enough data to look at!

Web Analytics market shares

Out of 10,016 sites visited by about 8,000 users over the last month:

• Google Analytics was found on 64% of them
• Omniture SiteCatalyst on 16%
• WebSideStory/VisualSciences HBX on 8%
• WebTrends on 7%
• Coremetrics on 2%
  

But, when looking at the volume of traffic, we find this:

• Google Analytics was found on 34% of the page viewed
• Omniture SiteCatalyst on 20%
• WebSideStory/VisualSciences HBX on 15%
• WebTrends, 9%
• Coremetrics, 2%

Analysis of web analytics vendors market share

Despite Google Analytics taking the lion share of the market in terms of installation (64% of visited sites), Omniture SiteCatalyst move to purchase VisualSciences is very wise. Not only it will give it nearly 25% of the market, it will also put Omniture at par with Google in terms of reach (as shown by the 20%+15% combined page views of SiteCatalyst and HBX). Simply put, Google Analytics might be very widely used, it is implemented on web sites that receives, overall, less traffic than Omniture and VisualSciences.

With the recent tsunami of changes at WebTrends, it will be interesting to see if their market shares will erode in the future. Coremetrics getting out at 2% seems a bit low, especially considering Forrester's most recent positioning put them with the Leaders, with a stronger strategy than Omniture and show a similar market presence. But that being said, Forrester also shows WebTrends with an even stronger market presence in the same quadrant, which I find a bit odd.

I'm curious to hear you about this first analysis. Does it make sense? Considering WASP looks at actual sites being visited instead of information provided by each vendor, could it reveal a more accurate market picture or be somehow biased?

Yulbiz tonight, [WAM] tomorrow!

Yulbiz

Yulbiz is a gathering of business people interested in blogs and bloggers interested in business.

It's going on tonight at Café Melies in Montréal. The latest news says there will be somewhere around 50 people. Sadly I can't be there, but I attended the one in Québec city and I will try to attend the next one in Montréal.

WAM!

[WAM], and his friend [WAQ], are monthly meeting of the local Web Analytics community held in Montréal and Québec city. It's an happy gathering of practitioners in the field of web analytics and related interests: strategy, website optimization, SEO/SEM, design, and the Internet in general.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday, November 28th at 6:00pm) is also the last "[WAM] Web Analytics in Montreal" event, also at Café Melies! And it promises to be the largest ever, with 40 people confirmed and another 20 potential. This month the event is sponsored by Coremetrics, Digital Marketing Optimization and web analytics vendor and we will see lots of new people coming from web agencies, SEO/SEM freelance consultants, and of course, practitioners and web managers. We'll have the usual networking, but I will also present some industry news and Coremetrics will do a presentation on do's & don't of web analytics.

Q&A on web analytics

Yesterday I got a nice email from an advertising student at University of Oregon. She had just a few questions, but very good ones!

What's the most...

... important thing I look for in a web analytics product?

To me it's ease of use, which translates to segmenting data the way I want, get insightful reports that are accurate, visually appealing and easy to customize.

How do I...

... use web analytics in my job? What has it helped me do?

In one word, "understand". In 3 questions: where they come from, what they did, were they successful? (and if not, why?) Then I can communicate my insights (some would say "make a good story") and help decision makers take the best possible course of action.

Is there one...

... product I believe is best?

There is no clear winner (otherwise there would eventually be only one product on the market!). I can only talk about the products I've implemented or used. Coremetrics is great for ecommerce sites because it includes the notion of ROI in almost every reports, WebSideStory HBX Active Segmentation feature is really great for segmenting the data, Omniture SiteCatalyst is often considered to be one of the best (for a number of "small" edges over their competitors). Google Analytics best argument is obviously that it's "free". Webtrends was one of the early player and remain one of the few log-based solution. The newly released CMS Watch Web Analytics Report might help you decide which one is the best for your needs.

What sort of people or business...

... have the most potential as future web analytics customers? At what point does a business decide it needs analytics?

The field of web analytics is as old as the Web itself since logs existed from day 1. However web analytics as it stands today is still in its infancy, so there's lot of opportunities for those who want to make a career shift. I'm probably one of the few practitioners with an IT background, most people seems to be coming from marketing, and some from a statistical background. The "need" for web analytics most often comes from the marketing/communication department because they want to better understand how the money is being spent on advertising, and if the site is effective.

What has been...

... my worst experience with a web analytics product?

I wouldn't say "with a product", but rather "as an analyst". Failing to "sell" web analytics to a large organization that could really have benefited from it. They focused on the price of the solution, while I should have been a better salesperson and made them focus on the benefits of web analytics (and the risks of not doing it!).

... my best experience with a web analytics product?

Analysis of a local ecommerce site similar to Amazon.

Where do I...

... get information on web analytics?

The web analytics field is in full "ebullition", I read all the books I can (see the sidebar at the right of my blog for some recommendations), but I also track, on a daily basis, something like 50 blogs from US, Canada, Europe, vendors or consultants and practitioners, etc. I'm the organizer of the local Web Analytics Wednesdays, so I get to meet fellow practitioners from nearby, and I helping Omniture organize the first Omniture Café in Montréal, on May 16th. The eMetrics Summit I'm attending next week (and being the speaker for the Web Analytics for Site Optimization workshop) will be a great opportunity to meet "face to face" with some of the best people in the field.