After Omniture’s acquisition surge last year, the web analytics industry has just been made even smaller by Yahoo’s acquisition of IndexTools. What does it mean when a relatively high-end tool like IndexTools is turned into a free offering like Google had done for Urchin?

Mostly, it means that Yahoo will be able to compete head-on with Google and Microsoft as they offer measured proof that advertising on their properties is a good investment. But how does this shrinking vendor landscape play against growing customer demand?

In these rocky economic times, upper management wants to know that a dollar spent online will result in two dollars earned. The online budget is not getting cut, but it is getting scrutinized like never before. They are looking for all the tools and best practices they can lay their hands on.

As free tools get better, the pay-for-play tools do as well. I look to Omniture, Coremetrics and WebTrends to step up to the challenge and help their high-end clients with even more systems, methods and consulting services. They are incorporating multi-campaign attribution in their tools so more of their clients are learning the ropes. Soon, there will be case studies and best practices.

Until then, I turn to people like Jim Novo and his post on Marketing Attribution Models. I look to Eric Peterson and Avinash Kaushik to keep holding up the lamp so the rest of us can see. I look to the Web Analytics Association to be the collective wisdom of the industry and for the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to be the gathering place, where we can all learn from each other.

Will Google, Microsoft and Yahoo want to play at the enterprise end of the spectrum? Things move fast in this industry. Don’t blink!

Jim Sterne is president of Target Marketing and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association

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Video is video is video. People are going to consume it on all sorts of devices. They’ll watch on their widescreen TVs, on their desktop computers, on their laptops, on their phone—but watch they will. Why? This text tells you what I think, but only a video really clues you in to how I feel.

You know better than most that people buy from people. If buyers can’t touch it and feel it, they want to watch somebody else touch it and feel it. They want to see how heavy it is, how luxurious it feels, how it looks on a chain. They want to hear—and see—people talking about it. And they can via video.

So think of every video you make as content for the website. Then pay attention to see who is interested enough in the product to watch. It’s surprising how useful that information can be for upselling, cross-selling, product improvement, product extension, and, well, don’t get me started.

I just wish you could see how excited I am about this!

Register for Wednesday’s LiveEdit Lab in Santa Monica where you can pick Jim’s brain in person!

Jim Sterne is president of Target Marketing and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association.

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  After a beer and some calamari with a new marketing friend from Motorola, a conversation about the overuse of numbers in making marketing decisions came up. The premise was numbers made us feel safe and secure about our decisions, thus leading to good marketing work. And, this good marketing work based on analytics proved the age old “Good is the biggest obstacle to Great” theory. Instead of focusing on the reliance of analytic data to prove ourselves as marketers, I’d rather talk about the BIGGEST misconception in the online/website marketing world today: Analytics vs. Usability.

First and foremost, we need to define the two. Web analytics is the practice of measuring “what” is happening on your website through software solutions (usually tagging or log file). In the most basic form its visitors, uniques, length of stay, page views and more advanced analytics would be conversion funnels or other “key performance indicators.” Website usability is the cognitive science of understanding “why” people do what they do on your website. Common forms of usability are lab testing, remote online testing and heuristics. After 15 years of commercial use of the web, there are reams of data about best practices when it comes to how best to serve your user and so simple audits against said best practices are also a common entry-level usability engagement. (more…)

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