Web Analytics Breaks into Mainstream
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Enterprises increasingly see analytics as the "brains" behind e-marketing, but underestimate resources needed to execute
Silver Spring, MD, USA - CMS Watch, a vendor-neutral analyst firm that evaluates content technologies, has completed path-breaking research into the Web Analytics marketplace that finds enterprises and vendors alike working to integrate web analytics into a wide array of e-marketing services -- including e-mail campaigns, keyword bid marketing, and customer segmentation -- making Web Analytics a more mainstream enterprise concern.
Today CMS Watch released the Web Analytics Report, which evaluates 13 major Web Analytics suppliers based on extensive vendor research, interviews with customers across a range of industry sectors, and "hands on" testing of solutions.
Phil Kemelor served as lead analyst for the report. "Web Analytics vendors are moving quickly to try to become the 'brains' behind their customers' e-marketing efforts more broadly," said Kemelor. "This makes a lot of sense," Kemelor added, "but web executives and marketing managers are finding they often lack the human and infrastructural resources required to take analytics to the next level, and we think 2007 will see enterprises addressing this more directly as Web Analytics appears more frequently on corporate radars."
The report also found:
o New data mining and customer segmentation solutions are being rolled out by vendors such as WebTrends and Coremetrics. These can help enterprise customers focus online marketing efforts more effectively. However, many customers underestimate the analytics experience required to maximize the potential of these tools.
o Partnering with other e-marketing suppliers enables vendors such as Omniture and Fireclick to offer best-of-breed tool choices to their customer base. However, this does not always solve tricky integration challenges amid debates over where the master e-marketing data warehouse should reside.
o Increasingly sophisticated data and process integration requirements are driving a renewed reliance on IT resources to support e-marketing. In the past web marketers predominantly procured and managed analytics tools on their own.
Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch, said, "At an enterprise level, we anticipate a convergence with more traditional Business Intelligence (BI) approaches -- especially since classic BI challenges of system performance, metadata, archiving, and data integrity are emerging among Web managers struggling to deal with ballooning data sets." However, Byrne adds, "Today we see little interest in Web Analytics among traditional BI vendors, but savvy enterprises will encourage BI analysts and website analysts to get outside their separate silos."
The Web Analytics Report provides detailed, comparative evaluations of 13 major Web Analytics vendors, including:
24/7
AuriQ
ClickTracks
Coremetrics
Fireclick
Google Analytics
Nedstat
Omniture
SageMetrics
Unica
Visual Sciences
WebSideStory
WebTrends
The Report can be purchased at http://www.cmswatch.com/Analytics/Report.
About CMS Watch
CMS Watch(tm) is an analyst firm that provides an independent source of buyer's advice on content technologies. Through highly detailed technical evaluations, CMS Watch helps sort out the complex landscape of potential solutions so that project teams can minimize the time and effort to identify and evaluate technologies suited to their particular requirements. To retain its independence as a vendor-neutral analyst firm, CMS Watch works solely for solutions buyers and never for the vendors it covers.
