Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Rétrospective WA du forum eMarketing 2008

Published
by
Julien Coquet
on January 30, 2008
in Blogging, In French, Web 2.0, Web Analytics and xiti
. 1 Comment

De retour de Paris après une journée à rallonge et un retour plus que mouvementé (le progrès ne vaut que s’il est partagé par tous), je voulais à vous faire part de mes impressions sur le 2ème Forum e-Marketing. Avant d’attirer des commentaires, je tenais à préciser que ce billet ne porte que sur la journée du mardi 29 janvier et ne prend pas en compte les interventions du mercredi 30.

Merci en tout cas à toute l’équipe de ebusiness.info pour cette organisation impeccable! Quoi qu’on en dise, cette édition du forum était nettement plus qualifiée que celle de février dernier.
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Why do I need MAXAMINE?

Published
by
David Rhee
on January 29, 2008
in Web Analytics
. Closed

Maxamine logoOX2 provides, among other things, web site auditing services for our clients. We try to help them figure out what they really want to get out of their web site, especially when the answer isn’t quite so obvious as “increased online sales.” Sometimes it’s providing product information to prospective customers, then referring them to retail sales partners. Other times, it’s helping provide product support, such as downloads of product manuals or tutorial videos. And sometimes, it’s engaging readers by providing content, as on a site for a magazine or newspaper publisher.

One of the steps of our audit is to help make sure that their analytics tools are capturing everything they are expected to. But no matter how well-written the javascript code is, and how well the Rich Internet Applications are designed (RIA such as Flash, Flex, AIR, Ajax, and others), if you have a partner such as an advertising agency who is helping with the design and implementation of your site, then you have to have a good process in place to make sure that your analytics tagging is consistent and complete.

For many of our clients, great care is taken to ensure their primary site is well-maintained, but the process sometimes fails when multiple agencies help create sites for individual countries, or business units or divisions of the company, individual product lines, or even one-off campaigns, such as launching a new product and coordinating it with television, print, and other media vehicles.

When we explain why consistency and completeness are important to gathering metrics, so that business decisions can be made with the benefit of insight and interpretation from robust data, our clients are often ask us if we can help validate their data capture efforts.

This is when we are pleased that we have partnered with MAXAMINE to offer their tactical-level auditing solutions to complement our strategic-level process and design work.
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Accenture acquires Memetrics and MAXAMINE

Published
by
David Rhee
on January 29, 2008
in Web Analytics and Web Analytics Industry News
. Closed

Maxamine logoYesterday, we were pleased to see a couple emails from our friends over at MAXAMINE announcing their acquisition by consulting giant Accenture.

Accenture LogoDebbie Pascoe, VP of Client Services for MAXAMINE, shared with me their formal statement, “We are excited about this tremendous opportunity, and believe it will ultimately expand our capacity to deliver compelling value to our customers and partners. Accenture Marketing Sciences shares our unwavering commitment to maximizing the value of digital investments and online operations, and can help us deliver on that promise within the broader context of overall marketing excellence.”

Perry Kamel, MAXAMINE’s COO, said, “This is a tremendous opportunity for us and a perfect fit in terms of driving continued industry leadership. It will ultimately give us significantly more capacity to deliver even more value to our customers and partners on a global scale. We’re excited about the future!”

Stephen Hamill, their VP of International Markets, who bounces between their UK and Australian offices, shared his excitement, too.

While we’re inclined to take any such statements with the usual grain of salt, it’s clear that Maxamine never got the respect it deserved from the market, considering the unique position its powerful site auditing tools have. Accenture’s historical reputation as auditors, and the strength of their Marketing Sciences consulting arm’s management team would seem to be good indicators that Maxamine chose well in finding an acquirer who can give them more visibility, both to their existing global client base, as well as to new prospects they may not otherwise easily be able to reach.

Indeed, Accenture’s UK Media Relations group says of Maxamine that, “The services they offered will continue to be available and their clients also will have the benefit of the breadth and depth of Accenture’s Marketing Sciences capabilities as well Accenture’s global industry experience and Accenture’s array of consulting, technology and outsourcing services.”

Memetrics LogoAccenture’s formal press release also announced the completed acquisition of Memetrics, an A/B and multi-variate testing firm, which also lists a number of blue-chip clients among its customers.

We offer our congratulations to our friends at all three companies, and hope that they are able to realize the potential synergies their clients can clearly benefit from.

Anil Batra interviews another OX2 analyst

Published
by
Julien Coquet
on January 25, 2008
in Web Analytics
. Closed

Hey folks,

If you haven’t read about them yet, I suggest you take a look at Anil Batra’s interviews of web analysts.

In the latest installment, our own David “Wandering Dave” Rhee answers Anil’s questions.

Excerpts:

What are the major challenges you are facing in this industry?

I think the entire industry is at a point where our ability to analyze goes beyond the ability of the tools to deliver unified data in a cost-effective manner. In other words, we can imagine many different data sets we’d like to correlate, but only very few of us can get the various data sources to play nicely with each other without spending an inordinate amount of time, effort, and money, most of which we don’t have access to.

Beyond that, most organizations aren’t yet at the point where they know how to take advantage of the insights web analytics, or rather, an analytics-framed mindset, can offer. As a consultant, I see mos firms struggling to implement a tool correctly, and after that, maybe to figure out some truly useful KPIs, then do some basic campaign analysis. Few organizations are at the point where multi-channel measurement is common, or where web analytics is used to help allocate marketing spend most effectively, or where true ROI is being captured, and good business decisions made accordingly.

Web analytics will mature as an industry, but part of that means that the skill sets will become better defined and more widespread, so that any firm that really needs an analyst will be able to hire one. Beyond that, web analytics and business intelligence will merge in terms of an aggressive approach to data analysis being applied to many areas of an organization — not just their web site, or even their online marketing, but all of the marketing, production, sales, and other operations. It’s neither easy nor cheap to get there, but I’m sure that those firms which can execute well on an analytics vision will certainly see unparalleled success.

Don’t forget to read other interviews, including the first interview in the series, featuring yours truly ;-)

Rubix from IndexTools

Published
by
David Rhee
on January 24, 2008
in IndexTools, Our WA Services, Thoughts and Ideas, Web Analytics and Web Analytics Industry News
. 3 Comments

IndexTools LogoRecently, Dennis R. Mortensen, COO of IndexTools, shared with OX2 a sneak preview of Rubix 1, which is part of their new marketing optimization framework, and we were so impressed that we wanted to share with you (with Dennis’s permission) a little bit of what we learned.

Aurelie Pols, Julien Coquet, and I (“Wandering” Dave Rhee) all agree that one of IndexTools strong points is that, unlike the American market leaders, they do not feel compelled to re-invent everything with new terminology, and pretend that it is new. Instead, they quite happily take the best of every tool already available, listen closely to their customers about what their most important features are, and then focus on developing only the most valuable items to the business user.
eMetrics logo

For example, Jim Sterne and the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits have influenced everyone to think about web analytics as one part of a larger marketing optimization program. Our friends at Omniture have made clear their partnerships with other firms, and acquired many other players to be able to offer a wide spectrum of complementary products and services.

IndexTools (IT) continues this trend by branching out from their basic web analytics offering, comparable to Omniture’s SiteCatalyst. (The primary difference is that IT includes their data warehousing functionality for free, while Omniture offers their data warehouse as a separately-priced product.) IndexTools also includes their integration platform (which without any fuzz is called “External Data Sources”) in the base costs, while using Omniture’s Genesis platform typically incurs additional integration charges.
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