You go away for Easter and the web analytics market sees 2 big shake ups...

NetIQ to Sell WebTrends Business Unit to Francisco Partners

Once Google was a web site you visited for search, now it does e-mail, it searches your desktop and it'll be able to provide business intelligence on all your online marketing activities if you're a site owner. Certainly points to pretty broad ambitions.

Ashley

It also means that Google will know, in great detail, about the Overture, Espotting etc. PPC activity of the web sites using Urchin...

I'm not sure what their policy will be on accessing / using this insight but maybe you'll get the tool for free IF you let them in on this data (and perhaps have a few adwords down the side...?).

If your Overture spend gets a bit high you'll get a personalised e-mail saying "You don't want to be spending your money with them, you want to be spending with Google..."?

Ashley

On 11:09:12 29 March 2005 matthewtodlogantodcom wrote:

This is really interesting news - it points to the future of the analytics world very clearly, all in a single day. Conversion is becoming the main issue, and improving effectiveness of sites at converting interest to action the key driver.

1. For most of us we will get access to a very good tool through Google, tied in to the adwords campaigns. This is an interesting development, and will help us all with improving conversion rates from adwords campaigns to orders, registrations etc.

2. For those who use a serious web analytics tool from one of the market leaders (WebSideStory, Coremetrics, Omniture, SPSS, SAS, IBM) the Webtrends announcement points to renewed competition, more innovation and probably lower prices

3. It also heralds the start of consolidation - there are over 80 companies in the web analytics space and the existing market model was not going to support them all. Many smaller vendors will today be hoping that MSN / Yahoo / etc. will be coming to call in an effort to keep up with Google by making similar acquisitions.

So what is the best thing to do? Watch this space carefully I suggest before making any new commitments to web analytics, pick your vendor with great care, they may be acquired very shortly.

Matthew TodEmail:  Website: www.logantod.com

On 10:00:27 29 March 2005 Ashley wrote:

You go away for Easter and the web analytics market sees 2 big shake ups...

NetIQ to Sell WebTrends Business Unit to Francisco Partners

Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin

Once Google was a web site you visited for search, now it does e-mail, it searches your desktop and it’ll be able to provide business intelligence on all your online marketing activities if you’re a site owner. Certainly points to pretty broad ambitions.

Ashley