I haven't posted in a while, which I can blame on being in the middle of the holiday season as well as a nasty case of procrastination. I do have a few topics of interest that I want to get to, so hopefully I can get back into the rhythm of things.
I followed a press clipping yesterday to a demo of Ominture's new Genesis product, and I have to say that I'm impressed at first blush. While Omniture has always been one of the premier online analytics firms, I've held the opinion that their reporting interface seemed somewhat awkward when trying to measure traditional E-Commerce KPI's.
Granted, I've only seen the online demo and Data Sheet so far, but this looks like a step in the right direction for Omniture. It certainly addresses one of the biggest pain-points that we have to deal with on a regular basis, which is how to take analytical data from multiple sources and capture it in a way that enables you to make actionable decisions about your site. There's an adage in this business that suggests that if you have a $100K annual budget for site analytics, you should spend $10K on software and $90K on someone to manage it for you. A bit of an exaggeration obviously, but I think it illustrates the point that it's very difficult to properly manage the sea of qualitative and quantitative data that exists for any E-Commerce business.
Here's the angle with Genesis that may enable them to stand out from their competition:
They acknowledge the fact that most of their customers use a handful of marketing applications from other vendors (email, affiliate programs, site search, SEO, etc..), and most of the common applications are already integrated into a simple drag-and-drop interface. They have basically created a common reporting platform to manage all of the disparate data that marketers have to sift through in order to make decisions on their marketing campaigns and site usability.
This is obviously Version 1.0, and everything looks great in a Flash demo, but I am certainly looking forward to getting a closer look at the Shop.org First Look event.
