Omniture Gets It Together with Applications

Web analytics is getting its act together.

In fact, it’s been doing so for a while now, starting with the integration of Web data into a unified, single-view dashboard. That was soon followed by the introduction of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allowed other data handlers, from CRM programs and e-mail platforms to search marketing tools and site search, to tap into and use the Internet metrics that Web analytics could provide. All users had to do was build applications that could integrate with the analytics platform.

But Omniture Genesis, launched last December by the Orem UT-based company, even sidesteps the need for users to configure many of those third-party marketing applications. Instead, Genesis offers a “plug and play” solution that includes a menu of marketing applications already optimized for the platform and ready to deploy.

The platform rolled out with 30 “accredited application partners” already enlisted. Omniture has already worked with those partners to integrate their applications with its Web analytics capabilities, so that customers can take what they’re learning through the Omniture service and put that knowledge to work in other channels—for example, by building an e-mail remarketing program that’s triggered by shopping-cart abandonment.

“We’ve been working with enterprises and small specialty companies across any number of industries, and over the last couple of years we’ve seen their frustration at not being able to integrate their different online point marketing applications,” says Gail Ennis, Omniture senior vice president of worldwide marketing. “Their search marketing has been separate from their e-mail marketing and their site search, and they’ve been looking for help in integrating that environment so all those applications can use the Web analytics data and share data with one another.

That can be done with open APIs, but that approach leans heavily on marketers’ IT resources. In some cases, these are already stretched; in almost all cases, that tends to put the data and its management largely into the hands of technicians, not marketers.

“We wanted to automate the process and give marketers tools that they could deploy quickly and use easily,” Ennis says. “Meanwhile all the heavy lifting at the back end would have been done by Omniture and the integration pre-configures with our accredited partners.”

Putting the data tools back into marketers’ control was a natural extension of Omniture’s on-demand business model as a Web-based subscription analytics service, Ennis says. Just as that model freed companies from the need to develop and integrate their own proprietary analytics tools, so Genesis can make it possible to hook Web-use data to e-commerce, search marketing or e-mail without days, weeks or even months of intensive technical labor.

“The movement is fueled by the desire to go directly to the business user,” she says. “Certainly, you can’t cut out IT altogether. But it was our intent to design tools that could be used by marketing personnel rather than IT personnel.”

Customers can subscribe to Omniture Genesis as a Web application and, using a simple wizard, drag and drop the name-brand applications they want to integrate with their Web analytics reporting. These names include many of the most prominent in their areas: behavioral targeting providers (Kefta, Optimost, Memetrics and Touch Clarity); e-mail service providers (Acxiom Digital, CheetahMail, Epsilon Interactive, ExactTarget, Responsys and Silverpop); site search (Endeca, Mercado and FAST); search marketing (Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, MSN, LookSmart, MIVA, Enhance Interactive, SearchFeed and YourAmigo); CRM from Salesforce.com; ad serving from DoubleClick; user experience data from ForeSee Results and OpinionLab; and assorted functions such as Web site management from Maxamine, product reviews from Bazaarvoice, e-commerce applications from Allurent, and interactive marketing from Advertising.com.

Chances are good marketers are already using these providers as standalone services. Marketers who don’t yet use some of these services will be able to check a product showcase sector of Omniture Genesis and find out which providers have already done the work to integrate with Genesis.

And that partner list is not closed, Ennis says. Omniture wanted to launch the Genesis product with a critical mass of providers that would attract users. But the platform also allows for feedback from those users on services and functions that they would like to see integrated in the future.

Omniture worked with a number of marketer companies on the beta version of Genesis, but most companies are in the early stages of integrating their various services and channels with Web analytics. “They’re still determining that they want to integrate their e-mail, and their site search, their optimization and their ad serving on the platform,” Ennis says. “They see a real future for integrating a lot of applications, even though now they’re only working with a couple.”

Roxio, the division of Sonic Solutions that creates and sells digital media software both directly through its Web store and via deals with computer makers, has been using Omniture to capture its Web analytics for some time. To make use of the best expertise it can find for its non-core functions, Roxio has also outsourced many tasks such as e-mail, e-commerce and multivariate testing to third-party providers.

Roxio senior manager of e-commerce Matt Quirie says the company, over time, has assembled its own system for using Omniture Web analytics to inform its efforts in some of these other channels. For example, for a few years now, Roxio has done its own work to marry Web analytics with multivariate testing from Kefta.

“It’s enabled us to launch multiple programs, multiple product positionings, multiple pages of tests and look at the stats on the fly, pretty immediately,” he says. “We’re no longer spending months building stuff out, then waiting a couple of weeks for statistics to come through and digging through them. Omniture gives us the ability to look at the stats granularly and quickly.”

Those home-grown efforts have convinced Roxio of the value of such integration, and Quirie thinks that having a number of providers linked to the Omniture platform will lead his company to take even greater advantage of those links between Web analytics and other functions. He particularly thinks the analytics component will have value as a way to test the performance claims of any Genesis application partners.

“The home run in this for me as a marketer using third-party applications is that now, when vendors say “I can give you X times ROI,’ it will be very easy to test them on that,” Quirie says. “That immediate tracking ability for services will prove valuable to my business.”