March is a big month for conferences in digital, with South by Southwest Interactive taking up the lion’s share of the spotlight. For web analytics, it’s the conference month. All the major vendors have their user conferences, and eMetrics takes place in San Francisco. So, I thought it’d be good to provide a quick wrap-up on what went down this year, and what’s new with the major platforms.
Webtrends
The month kicked off with Webtrends Engage in San Francisco. It was a fantastic event, with some top-notch speakers and sessions. Webtrends put the icing on the cake with the announcement of Webtrends Analytics 10. Justin Garrity, Webtrends Director of User Experience, summed it up with this quote: “We want analytics 10 to be the platform you can see all of your digital presence together in one view.”
The product features a much more “marketer-friendly” interface, and some awesome integrations with Twitter and Facebook data. Ultimately it allows marketers to monitor metrics for activity in these spaces, in conjunction with their own site metrics. One of the other new features that got me excited is integration with PostRank. A very valuable feature in my opinion. There’s a great video of Justin Garrity speaking about PostRank and other Webtrends Analytics 10 features of the product in this post on PostRank blog – definitely exciting to see what Webtrends and Justin have done to extend the platform beyond the boundaries of one’s own site.
Omniture
The second week of the month brought about the Omniture Summit. Always a big party, and maybe even more so with Adobe’s backing in the last several years. This year the Summit peaked with the announcement of new features and a new platform for Adobe Online Marketing Suite. The platform changes are a combination of more robust user interface, and supposedly a more scalable back end. The highlight of the new features is the release of Adobe SocialAnalytics. This new component of the suite promises heavily to help marketers capture the elusive social media ROI, and examine the effectiveness of social touch points in all parts of the customer life-cycle. Adobe has published a brief blog post on the features and capabilities of Adobe SocialAnalytics.
The other change that Adobe has made that should excite some agencies and others running larger traditional digital media buys, is the integration of more 3rd party partners into the suite. The new partners include demand side platforms, ad servers, and video networks. See the official press release for a complete list of the new partners for Adobe Online Marketing suite.
Google Analytics
Just yesterday, following on the heals of eMetrics, the first Google Analytics User Conference was held in San Francisco. Though not an “official” Google event, Phil Mui (Google Analytics Group Product Manager) spoke, and Google used the event to announce the release of Google Analytics v5. Changes to the platform are a mix of cosmetic and functional. The cosmetic include a more streamlined interface, and changes to how reports are organized in the sidebar. The functional include some nice changes to what and how data can be displayed in dashboards; also moving toward the more marketer-friendly side of analytics. For analysts, the best two new features are the ability to use events for goals, and to use filters in custom reports. The first means that we no longer have to spoof pageviews to track goals that involve clicks or dynamic in-page events; thus avoiding inflated pageview numbers. The second means the ability to apply a filter to a custom report, and have it “saved”. This will save time, and allow for the automated export of more detailed custom reports. Here is a great video from Justin Cutroni highlighting some of the major features and changes in Google Analytics v5.
Other Analytics News
Some other analytics related news to come out of March included the release of comScore’s new analytics platform Digital Analytix. Besides creative use of the letter X, the platform also promises the ability to leverage some of the mountains of data that comScore collects, to provide analysts with a better understanding of who their audience is, and the reach of their campaigns. Definitely a platform we are excited to test and explore.
IBM’s more recent acquisitions in the analytics space are coming together, literally, in the form of Smarter Commerce. This new “suite” promises to provide businesses with a 360 degree view of their market and customer life-cycle. From some conversations I’ve had with folks in the industry, and IBM’s information on Smarter Commerce, this is now a very powerful business intelligence platform for companies with a major presence in digital commerce.
Overall, an very big month for digital analysts and those in the measurement space. Lots of focus on social this year; not as much focus on mobile as might be expected, but it was there. Besides the moves by the bigger players, lots of news being made by some of the up-and-comers in the social analytics and digital measurement space right now, and lots of buzz around some of those companies at SXSWi. 2011 certainly will be a busy and exciting year for digital measurement. Now get out there and measure something.
