"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.

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.

Competing on analytics and business optimization

Another big news today: Omniture acquires Visual Sciences.

While Omniture tagline is "The leader in online business optimization" and VisualSciences's one is "Real time analytics", the press release headline sports:

"Combined Company Dramatically Accelerates Development and Delivery of Industry-Defining Business Optimization Platform"

We're slowly but surely getting away from "web analytics" and "online optimization" and elevating the bar to "business optimization" and "competing on analytics". Just like ebusiness buzz is fading to become pure "business", web analytics is maturing to analytics.

Some people at my current job didn't catch my move to go freelance in web analytics. What they obviously fail to understand is that web analytics is just an excuse to get in the field of analytics (without the "e") and business optimization.

At the same time, while Google is commoditizing web analytics, the acquisition of Visual Sciences by Omniture is a good indicator of a maturing market. Omniture is taking the high-end lead, way ahead of Coremetrics, WebTrends, Unica and myriad of smaller solutions.

I see all of this as being very positive for the web analytics industry, for businesses, and honestly, for me too!

Here's some of the best stories about Omniture acquiring Visual Sciences:

• Omniture to acquire Visual Sciences by Manoj Jasra
• Omniture buys Visual Sciences for 394 Million Bucks by Marshall Sponder
  
• Omniture Acquires Visual Sciences - Are You Next? by Digital Alex
• Omniture Acquires Visual Sciences by Bryan Enisenberg
• What does Omniture's purchase of Visual Sciences mean for HBX customers by Phil Kemelor
• Omniture to Acquire Visual Sciences on VisualSciences.com

Omniture is at it again! Now it's about Disney

It seems nobody else took note of this announcement: the Walt Disney Internet Group abandons WebSideStory (VisualSciences) and goes with the full range of Omniture products, as highlighted earlier in this short press release.

From my knowledge of the web analytics market, it's a huge blow at VisualScience as Disney was probably (one of) their biggest and oldest client. As you can imagine, Disney is not just your next schmuck web site, it's a conglomerate encompassing Disney Online, ABC, ESPN, movies.com and a bunch of others and one of the world's most renowned brand. In August, Nielsen/Netratings ranked Disney Internet Group at the 9th position of the most visited sites, with over 32M monthly unique visitors.

VisualSciences HBX Active Viewing Form Overlay

Someone asked on the Yahoo! Web Analytics forum about HBX Active Viewing form overlay functionality.

My experience

• The nicest thing about HBX is that whenever there are more than a couple of fields on a page, form analysis is automatically turned on. No fancy tagging, no after-the-fact missed tags, etc.
• The Form Overlay works just like the "plain" Active Viewing overlay. It will show each form field with a color tone representing it's impact on conversion, along with a bunch of useful info
• You might have trouble installing the plug-in on Vista because it requires .Net 1.1... In fact, Vista is not in the list of supported operating systems... So the latest version of Active Viewing doesn't work, but here's a hint: search for Active Viewing in their support center and you will find a link to an older version that works :)
  

Does it really work?

Absolutely! Really easy to use and quite revealing. I ran into a couple of cases where the overlay didn't work and it usually turned out to be badly built HTML pages: nested forms, invalid HTML syntax, or uses of JavaScript to alter the normal behavior of a form.

Also, if the site uses a lot of CSS layering, you might end up with the overlay behind your form fields, which is annoying but you will be able to get the results anyway.

Analysis

Here's a couple of things you might find out with the Form Overlay:

• Lots of abandonment on the first field? Might be an indication that people get scared of what they have to fill!
• Lots of abandonment on the last field? Might be an indication that people don't want to commit to the transaction (for example, in a shopping cart process, a lot of people abandon once they get the total price)
• Lots of abandonment on a specific field? Might be a badly worded question or out of context question (asking for gender to purchase a CD!)
• Gradual abandonment as you go own the list of fields? Might be an indication you have too many fields, people gradually drop off by discouragement.
  

My take

HBX's Active Viewing is by far the best I've seen, providing detailed information as you surf and the overlay feature works under almost any kind of situation: plain HTML, dynamic menus, image maps, even dynamic links, etc. (in some cases, more extensive tagging needs to be done). Although you can get similar information from the regular reports, and especially the Form Abandonment report, there's nothing better than showing the numbers "in context".