The Web analytics feature race is largely over and we are left with Web Analytics providers competing on Price and Flexibility.
John provides great analysis and insights in this report but I do not fully agree with his conclusion that feature race is largely over. I believe that as new trends in web continue to emerge so is the need for new features. As Phil Kemelor, another great analyst, writes that audio and video are becoming an important part of the web, so there are clearly features needed to support their tracking. Other features currently missing are for Mobile Analytics. Mobile web is clearly gaining momentum and so is a need for Mobile Analytics. I am sure Product Managers of these tool providers are not ready to quit yet.
I do agree that most of the vendors are mostly competing on Price and Flexibility (post-data-capture segmentation, reporting on custom data elements etc.) at this time. (In my view, flexibility is also a feature though). However competing on price when there is still a lot of room for innovation and differentiation is a very myopic view by current web analytics vendor and will provide a way for someone to disrupt their business very quickly.
Satisfaction with the current tool
One of the surprising results in this report was that more than 69% of the web analytics clients have decided to stay with their current web analytics tool. This is a big change from the trend that we have seen in past. A lot of this has to do with education about web analytics tools, what they can do, how they operate and the fact that several most used features and reports are comparable in various tools.
72% of those 69% where completely satisfied with their current provider.
47% of the customer said that the biggest challenge they were trying to solve with Web Analytics tools was Vistor Segmentation. 47% also said that customer engagement was their biggest challenge.
And the Winner Is?
This report has a great 3 dimensional chart showing how different tool vendors rate in terms of business value, market suitability and breadth of company.
Omniture, Unica, and Coremetrics emerged as industry leaders for large enterprises while WebTrends, Google Analytics, IndexTools and Lyris HQ ClickTracks emerged as industry leader for small-to-midsize businesses along with the three listed for large enterprise customers.
It was surprising to see that WebTrends was not considered an enterprise tool anymore, though WebTrends was the only company to score 100% on availability of basic features. (Sidenote: A customer of ours is replacing Coremetrics and going with WebTrends).
Another surprising result was that Omniture was the overall winner even for small-to-midsize businesses.
You can get the complete report at http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/research:vision/79/id=100411
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Mktg Web Analytics Manager at NetApp (Sunnyvale, California)
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I know, since I consult a lot with WebTrends, I must be biased. But, frankly, categorizing WebTrends as a small to mid-size account product is just plain cr*p!
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