Last Wednesday I had the honor and pleasure of helping break the story about Yahoo’s acquisition of IndexTools. My post was pretty well received, generating over 40 comments and a handful of citations in the popular press. In that post I speculated two things:

1. That Yahoo! would offer IndexTools at no charge by Christmas 2008
2. That this acquisition was potentially a permanent game changer

This morning Dennis Mortensen sent me an email with the following message:

“your predictions was not that far off!
:-)”

At his blog Dennis announced that Yahoo! was now waiving all fees for current clients, essentially making IndexTools free. Dennis also announced that current IndexTools partners would be able to deploy new IndexTools implementations free of charge. Finally, Dennis commented that for the time being IndexTools would be closed to new customers, giving Yahoo! a chance to determine what their next move would be.

Christmas, Tax day, whatever. Free is free.

While I am already on record as believing that Yahoo made an excellent strategic move in acquiring IndexTools, the “make it free now” decision is absolutely freaking brilliant and the guys who pulled the trigger deserve a medal.

In one fell swoop, Yahoo! and IndexTools:

1. Assuage all of the fears of current customers regarding the transition, any hiccups, etc. by offering the best possible olive branch in the world: free stuff! Worried about the transition? Okay, don’t pay us. Concerned about your data? Okay, don’t pay us. Don’t like Yahoo! that much? Okay, don’t pay us.
2. Create instant demand for the product, and an instant revenue stream to the few companies that have been loyal to IndexTools all along. Imagine your glee if you woke up this morning and learned that you’re part of a limited channel able to offer IndexTools at no charge to your clients? I know I’d be pretty happy!
3. Serve notice to your competitors, whoever those competitors are, that you are not messing around and they need to get their act together quick. Regardless of what Google says (or rather, has not said) and what Omniture says, IndexTools directly competes for both of their business (and everyone else in the sector to be sure.)

This third point is important, and it speaks directly to why I think this acquisition changes our market more or less forever. So far the team at Google Analytics has been eerily silent — or if they have spoken I have missed their comments — but I have already talked to multiple people who have basically said, “It’s a no brainer, I’ll deploy IndexTools and either run Google Analytics for validation or drop GA entirely.” More importantly, I’m talking to some pretty bright consultants that are chomping at the bit to get away from having to make excuses and write hacks to make Google Analytics do stuff it is not designed to do (screen scraping, really?!) and use a more full-featured application.

It’s not that Google cares all that much I suspect; rather I think they’re more than happy to have a real competitor in the free market, especially one that offers a logical “step up” from the basic functionality that Google Analytics has to offer. I won’t be surprised at all if Brett Crosby publicly welcomes Yahoo! (back) into the web analytics arena in the same way he welcomed Microsoft to the game last year at Emetrics. I’ll be less surprised if Google’s Analytics Evangelist has a happy post about IndexTools sometime this week, especially given his historical evangelism for IndexTools and professed respect for Mr. Mortensen.

The real challenge I see on the horizon is for the paid service providers, especially those focusing largely on the mid- to higher-end of the market (which is to say everyone.)

Consider the following:

1. Like it or not, IndexTools is pretty much as good as most of the best analytics offerings out there today. It may not be as pretty, it may not be as “AJAX-y”, it may not be as fast, but this is an offering that goes toe-to-toe with the “mass market” analytics offerings from all the major vendors and in my opinion is every bit as good. Why would I say that? Simple, I have been running IndexTools on my web site for the past six months. IndexTools is not easy, but it is no more complicated than anything else out there (IMHO.) If you look around at comments and what some people are saying you’ll head the same thing over and over: Companies of all sizes have been selecting IndexTools for years based on rich, comparative functionality made available at an affordable price point. IndexTools has great filters, great segmentation, great custom report building tools, great extras like color coding, notes, and dashboards. Did I mention it is now all available for free?
2. The complaints about IndexTools are, for the most part, underwhelming. One (nameless) vendor has said that IndexTools is inferior because it wasn’t included in the last Forrester Wave and JupiterResearch constellation. The same vendor said that IndexTools is inferior because someone else said most of their clients are SMBs. The same vendor tries to created FUD around the data center being in Eastern Europe. The same vendor says that IndexTools doesn’t have “deep domain expertise” or “specialized services” The problem is that A) both Forrester and JupiterResearch focused only on U.S.-based vendors and (I believe) excluded IndexTools based on geography, not functionality, B) IndexTools does have some very large clients (Vodafone, PriceRunner, Tesco, ToysRUs — read this interview with Dennis Mortensen for details), C) I suspect Yahoo! will be doing some work on the data collection and reporting architecture over the next few months, and D) IndexTools is very likely to follow Google’s model of relying on external web analytics experts to provide expertise and specialized services (YAAC, right?)
3. The valid complaints about IndexTools are either being addressed currently or are likely to be addressed very shortly. Phil Kemelor from Semphonic who also does some work for CMSWatch has looked at the major analytics applications perhaps more than a normal human being should in the process of writing his really, really big book on web analytics tools. Regarding IndexTools, Phil said the following:

“IndexTools does not offer the functionality that distinguishes it from Omniture and WebTrends — for example the ability to analyze unaggregated data from a graphic UI and to perform repeatable Excel reporting. For now, you must use regular expressions to analyze unaggregated data and do manual updates of Excel…just like Google Analytics.”

Good assessment, Phil, and a reasonable critique of IndexTools except. I would only offer that all the major vendors require add-on applications to analyze truly unaggregated data from a graphic UI (Omniture Discover, WebTrends Visitor Intelligence, etc.) and on this point IndexTools has already showed quite a lot of people “Rubix” which is the inevitable response (and which I sincerely hope that Yahoo! decides to release, even if they make us pay something for it.)

Personally I think that the ability to analyze unaggregated data should be in a separate interface, one designed for expert users working in the web analytics hub, and that IndexTools following the SiteCatalyst/Discover, WebTrends Analytics/Visitor Intelligence, NetTracker/NetInsight, etc. model is the right decision.

Regarding the “repeatable Excel reporting” … in my interface under “Settings” I have something called “Scheduled Email Reports” that seems to work pretty well. I can add a bunch of reports and schedule them for delivery in whatever format I choose; It’s not exactly what I want (having used HBX Report Builder, still the gold standard for Excel integration IMHO) but it certainly fills an important need for web analytics practitioners. This may be an IndexTools 10 feature that I am a BETA tester for, which may explain the confusion …

Finally, I would personally offer that Google Analytics and IndexTools are (in their current state) dramatically different applications targeting very different audiences. I am sure to take endless shit for this but I believe that Google Analytics is a great entry-level tool, something designed to seem “easy” and get folks used to the idea of doing web analytics on a professional level; IndexTools is not a great entry-level tool, rather it is a rich analysis engine that is the next logical “step up” from Google Analytics for practitioners and companies needing robust segmentation, customization, and drill-down capabilities.

Don’t believe me? Go to Google Analytics and create the following segment then apply it to your most commonly used reports:

In the body of the document, which I hope I am okay quoting a little bit from, Phil also says (and I paraphrase) that IndexTools strengths include “on-screen drill down detail in reports; ad-hoc analysis features; dashboard presentation and customization” and that in addition to the weaknesses listed above, that a weakness is that IndexTools requires the “manual entry of distribution list recipients.”

Those of you who have seen Phil’s book know that he has done an absolutely amazing job summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of each tool. In his conclusions, Phil has says the following:

“IndexTools should receive consideration if you want a well-priced, commerce-focused reporting solution and do not want to pay Omniture, WebTrends, or Coremetrics prices. If most of your users are part-time analysts and marketers who basically need reporting, IndexTools may be a reasonable selection. If you require complex slicing and dicing, IndexTools should still be on your list. Automated data integration and multiple sites with huge volumes of traffic and multiple campaigns may present challenges to IndexTools. However, because the company has a history of accommodating custom requirements, you should consider the possibility of IndexTools meeting your needs even though you want something outside of their standard feature set.”

My interpretation of this is more or less “look at IndexTools” as part of your consideration process. There are instances where IndexTools may not be appropriate — absolutely true, no application is all things to all people — but if you compare the assessment above to the conclusions provided for Omniture and others I think you’ll see a favorable recommendation for IndexTools (at least I did.) If you’re interested in reading the rest of what Phil had to say, I strongly recommend buying a copy of The Web Analytics Report 2008 from CMSWatch.

Some things are missing in IndexTools 9, mostly the ability to create custom metrics (something I have become pretty used to in Visual Site), and a couple other minor things I like to see in a mass-market analytics solution but I think there are quite a few people who will be willing to look the other way on small points like this given the price point. My basis for saying this? Simple, a rumored 1.2 million Google Analytics deployments and the army of people willing to look the other way regarding the limitations in GA …

Which brings me to why I believe IndexTools is a permanent game changer:

1. The paradigm shift I cited in my last post on the subject is going to happen a lot sooner than some people thought. Now, if you know an IndexTools partner, or soon if not, companies really don’t have to worry about the vendor selection process. If you’re new to web analytics you can get Google Analytics; if you’ve pushed past the limited functionality in GA, you can get IndexTools. Total cost for tools: nothing. Companies will be able to (finally) focus on how the tools are used and the process of doing web analytics, not haggle with vendors over pricing, fight with IT over implementation, etc., which is exactly where we need to be. Web analytics is not about the tools, web analytics is about how the tools are used to improve the business.
2. The existing for-fee vendors have been served notice and will have to figure out a better sales proposition than “the competition sucks.” I’m willing to be wrong on this point, but I don’t think the current “anti-IndexTools” messaging I’m hearing is likely to hold up under scrutiny. Eventually buyers are going to realize that they’re talking to sales people, some of whom are somewhat integrity-challenged, who will say anything to get them to look away from Yahoo’s offering. This rocks, in my opinion, because it spells the end of the negative selling that has been a hallmark of some vendor’s capabilities. Let’s focus on what makes you truly different, given that I can get something very similar for free, huh? As far as the claim that IndexTools sucks because the analysts don’t cover it? Um, are you sure?
3. For the existing for-fee vendors to continue to thrive, they will need to move quickly up-market and focus on the needs of a very sophisticated audience. This is really very interesting since it highlights a growing schism between vendors trying to own the Enterprise and those trying to play nice with others. Don’t know what I mean? Look around for things like “Closed-loop Marketing” and the implication that you should be bringing all your Enterprise data into your web analytics system; compare that messaging to the idea of open architectures and the notion of integrating appropriate web analytic data back into the rest of the business. In fact, now that the pricing battle is coming to an end, I think that this is the next really interesting conversation we’re going to have …

So we start to focus on the application of the tools, not the tools themselves. Game changing. The vendors are forced to refine both their offering and their sales process. Game changing. Consultants have better free tools to work with. Game changing. Web analytics technology is pushed further along towards being a commodity. Game changing.

I’m not one to make a bunch of predictions, but I would challenge those of you who disagree with my assessment to set an alert in your calendar for twelve months from today. When the alarm goes off, take a look at the adoption rate for IndexTools, the trading price for OMTR, and the ownership status of the remaining privately held web analytics vendors in the marketplace today.  Again, I am perfectly happy to be wrong about how IndexTools might change the market …

I should reiterate that all of this is not without risks: there is still a lot that could go wrong as Yahoo! integrates IndexTools into their larger offering: the team could become de-focused, key people could leave Yahoo, Microsoft could succeed in their take-over efforts, etc. (and yeah I remember Keylime too, but that was a different time, a different technology, and frankly a different group of people managing the process.)  I am very impressed with what I’m hearing so far and look forward to the evolution of the entire web analytics sector, driven in part by Yahoo! and IndexTools.

Again, congratulations to the teams at Yahoo and IndexTools and, um, Merry Christmas to the few IndexTools partners who will have the market cornered on this technology for the time being.

Those of you who regularly attend the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit here in the states know that from time to time we hold big Web Analytics Wednesday events in conjunction with the conference.  Especially in San Francisco where the philosophical founder of WAW lives (June Dershewitz!) we like to have big events.

This time June and her partner David are planning a doozy!

Thanks to the very generous support of Coremetrics, ForeSee Results, SiteSpect, Tealeaf, and Jim Sterne (Marketing Optimization Summit) we are having a big party at the Fluid Nightclub on Mission Street (just around the corner from the conference hotel.)

You can download a very snazzy PDF invitation or read the press release about the event.

If you’re coming to Emetrics, even if you’re planning on attending a vendor dinner or just hitting the town, we sincerely hope that you’ll join us at this special Web Analytics Wednesday (on Tuesday) event.  You can register to join us and get all the details here.

The nice folks at Elastic Path asked me awhile back to give a presentation on web analytics for online retailers.  Their request made me realize I am still sitting on data I collected last Fall — a mistake I know but a function of the velocity at which Web Analytics Demystified, Inc. has grown in the past year.  To make up for this delay in some small way I will be sharing the data I collected from online retailers in a free webcast this coming Thursday.

If you’re an online retailer doing web analytics please consider spending an hour with us Thursday at 9:00 AM Pacific / Noon Eastern.  Among other things I will be covering:

• What the measurement landscape looks like for online retailers
• How satisfied online retailers are with their web analytics vendors
• How web analytics has impacted spend on paid search marketing

This last point I think many of you will find especially interesting.  Given Yahoo’s recent (re)entry into the web analytics market, and the assertion from Google that Google Analytics drives sites to spend more on search marketing, I set out to answer the question “Do you spend more on paid search marketing because of information gained via web analytics?”

Tune in Thursday morning to hear what I found out.

You can register now for free thanks to Elastic Path.  Talk to you Thursday!

Yahoo! just announced that it has acquired IndexTools. When I first heard about this deal I thought “Oh, that’s nice for Dennis and Dennis is a pretty nice guy so that’s nice … and the title of Director, Data Insights at Yahoo! is a pretty nice title.” But then I really stopped to consider what Yahoo! pushing IndexTools out to the world means to web analytics (Disclosure: I have been working on a white paper for IndexTools; unfortunately that work is on hold for the time being.)

While we have seen a lot of deals in the last two years, this one is potentially the permanent game changer.

Depending on the deployment model that Yahoo! uses to bring IndexTools to the masses, this acquisition may spell the beginning of the end for some folks who are pretty invested in the status quo. I was unfortunately forced to write this post well in advance of the announcement because of my travel schedule so I am sure I have missed some details but consider the following:

• Many people consider IndexTools to be every bit as good as far more expensive solutions, offering strong support for visitor segmentation, customization, marketing workflow management, advanced merchandising, and reporting that is far superior to that currently offered by other free and low-cost solutions. In fact, IndexTools is often referred to as “Omniture at a fraction of the cost” and having used both applications I’m hard pressed to disagree — everything you need to do “Enterprise” (sic) analytics is in IndexTools, without exception, and Dennis has shown an uncanny ability to roll new features into the product that directly address emerging market needs at the point they’re needed, not years ahead of time and certainly not years too late. For an excellent review of IndexTools see Eric Enge’s piece at Stone Temple Consulting.
• Prior to the acquisition, IndexTools was poised to release their own ad hoc segmentation and analysis engine, dubbed Rubix, that directly competes with the likes of Omniture Discover and similar high-end offerings. I have seen Rubix and my first reaction was “Oh man am I glad I left Visual Sciences when I did.” Dennis and his team have taken advantage of the work that Visual, Omniture, and others have done and essentially packaged it up in a much more user friendly and approachable way. The result is something that I believe a far greater number of analysts will be able to take advantage of, regardless of the price point, and something that other free and low-cost vendors simply have no response to today. Lars Johanssen of SATAMA and my very good friends Rene and Aurelie from LBi/OX2 have similar summaries of Rubix worth reading.
• Yahoo! will almost certainly be able to take advantage of the good work that Google has done establishing their Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) network, giving Yahoo! an immediate deployment network (oh man do I hope they call it the “YAAC” Network!) Having run IndexTools on my own site for some time I very much expect that many GAAC partners will actually prefer IndexTools for most of their deployments given the dramatically improved capabilities of the application. Here is a list of companies I expect to call Dennis and the team at Yahoo! to inquire about how they can be YAAC partner.
• One of the things that people really like about Microsoft Gatineau is the inclusion of a small amount of demographic data available for segmentation. I like what Ian and his team have been doing, but I suspect that A) Yahoo! has access to very much the same data (only a whole lot more of it) and B) the existing segmentation capabilities in IndexTools, not to mention Rubix, will make that data a whole lot more useful to marketers. Imagine if you deployed IndexTools having real-time access to age, gender, income, and behavioral demographic data to apply to all the reports in your system, collected via Yahoo’s huge network, obfuscated, and presented properly showing sample sizes and statistical correlations. That would be cool, huh?

The net effect, again depending on the specific go to market strategy Yahoo! uses, is potentially a profound shift in the nature of the web analytics market today. Consider the following options Yahoo! has:

• Yahoo! can simply slap a big “Y!” on the IndexTools products and continue to sell them, perhaps through IndexTools and Yahoo’s existing partner network. The advantage of this option would be minimal interruption to IndexTools customers and it gives Y! a chance to migrate data collection and reporting technology from Europe to locations around the world. This would also give Y! time to look slowly at adoption and use of the product and think about their long-term strategy towards web analytics.
• Yahoo! can brand IndexTools and give away the E-Business edition while continuing to sell the Enterprise version, Rubix, etc. The advantage of this option would be driving adoption and taking some of the attention away from Google Analytics in a sane and measured way. This would also give Y! better data regarding the amount of effort really required to support a real web analytics application (because let me tell you, for most of us, it ain’t easy!)
• Yahoo! can slap the logo on and say “Come and get it, people!” giving away the whole hog to all comers. The advantage of this option would very likely be a high adoption rate (for IndexTools target audience, which is definitely different than the G.A. audience and more directly competitive with the likes of Omniture.) The disadvantage of this option is it has the potential to break IndexTools current architecture and could cause service interruptions which is something nobody wants, regardless of how much they pay for the service.

If it were up to me, I would select the second option, driving adoption and interest in the application while protecting IndexTools most valuable (Enterprise) customers at the same time. The second option would give Y! the greatest amount of information about the road ahead — to be sure there will be challenges — but would also give the company some much needed love.

Knowing some of the players involved, however, my money is on the first option. Nice and conservative, and basically exactly what Google did when they acquired Urchin. Despite what I’m sure is a strong desire on the part of Dennis and Yahoo! to have a tremendous impact on the marketplace around them, they say that “slow and steady wins the race” and that is probably more true today than ever before.

If Yahoo! chooses the third option immediately, or as Google did, waits six months and then goes to a totally free model, suddenly there are far fewer reasons to pay for web analytics at all. Even if they charge a nominal fee for more advanced functionality like Rubix, or force us to buy ads on Yahoo! a la Gatineau version 1.0 (which Microsoft has since put an end to, for good reason), I suspect there will be a profound disparity between what Yahoo! will charge and the CPM rates that most companies are paying today.

Wait, before you say “Yahoo! will never give IndexTools away for free … it would be too expensive” keep in mind that you said that about Google and Urchin.  My money is on free IndexTools before Christmas 2008.

While it is very easy for the top-tier of vendors to dismiss Google Analytics as “pretty, but basically inadequate” and “little more than an entry-level tool” the same claims cannot be used against IndexTools; consider again that many reviewers have said that IndexTools provides 80 percent of the functionality in Omniture at 20 percent of the price. If Yahoo! begins to provide 80 percent of the functionality in Omniture for NONE of the price, well, you get the gist …

If Yahoo! provides a low/no cost option for IndexTools, suddenly companies wanting to invest in web analytics will be far more likely to take advantage of the 10/20/70 rule for web analytics success I described over a year ago, focusing their efforts on people and process and worrying less about the technology used. Companies will be able to get their feet wet with Google Analytics and then, as the need arises, upgrade to IndexTools when they’ve mastered the basic processes and have hired the right people to move beyond basic reports and start to generate more complex analysis.

Obviously this acquisition is not without risks — Yahoo! could take too long to integrate IndexTools into their arsenal, the Microsoft/Yahoo! drama could play out in an unexpected way, and Google could respond by bringing Google Analytics dramatically up-market to be more competitive with Yahoo’s new position. Mitigating these risks are the fact that the team at Yahoo! is exceptionally bright (Bob Page, Michael Wexler, many others), any MSFT/YHOO drama will inevitably take years to play out, and if Google Analytics comes up market, well, then we have two truly great free or low-cost tools to choose from!

We have long talked about web analytics technology becoming a commodity, forcing a paradigm shift from the vendor-focused world that we live in today to the end-user focused world we truly need. Instead of asking “What tools should we use?” the conversation is now poised to become “How do we best use the data to drive our businesses strongly forward?” In a market where some vendors are still incredulously insisting that “web analytics is easy” I think this shift is long overdue and will be more than welcome by the majority of us practicing today.

Again, congratulations to Dennis, the team at IndexTools, and the acquisition team at Yahoo! I am very much looking forward to seeing how this announcement is received by the marketplace and how this change in the landscape benefits consultants and practitioners alike.

Matt Belkin of Omniture recently posted on a few of the pitfalls companies fall into when deploying web analytics. I was pretty surprised to see Matt, someone who was worked in this field nearly as long as I have, make the following statement:

“Analytics success is all about building a baseline for performance (your KPI trend), and trying new things to improve on this baseline. That’s it! That’s why I think it’s easy. I know other bloggers have argued that analytics is hard, but I’ve done this for a living and I can tell you that it’s not.”

Ironically enough I have been meeting many of Omniture’s largest customers recently, none of whom seem to think web analytics is easy. They universally have some difficulty associated with technology, people, or process—the triumvirate that is truly “web analytics”—and I suspect many of them had the same response I did when I read Matt’s statement above.

I quickly scribbled out the following response late last night but for some odd reason it has not been approved yet. I figured I’d post my comment here so that Matt and his customers would have a chance to read an opposing point of view.

“Hysterical! I talk to Omniture customers constantly who complain about how hard it is to do the most basic things like calculate bounce rate, integrate data using your Genesis platform, make sense of your reports, and even just get the data they need when they need it.

Perhaps the problem that you and people like Stephane Hammel are having with my statement is something called the echo chamber effect. You say something for so long, and your buddies all repeat it, that eventually you ignore the reality of the situation and begin to believe something that is clearly not true. Seth Godin accused me of doing this once (he was wrong, it turned out, people are deleting cookies … you’ve said so yourself!)

But you’re wrong, Matt. Web analytics is hard. Ask your customers, they’ll tell you.

It’s not just hard to improve your baselines, it’s hard to implement code properly, it’s hard to understand reports and definitions, it’s hard to find qualified staff to run these applications, it’s hard for HR to stomach the salaries we are asking for, it’s hard to train newbies, it’s hard to produce quality analysis based on only quantitative data, it’s hard to get management to listen, it’s hard to make management understand, it’s hard to select a good vendor when so many are failing, it’s hard to know if and when to migrate off of HBX, it’s hard to know which low hanging fruit to pick, …

You get the picture.

You make my point yourself in your post. If there are multiple versions of the truth, it’s hard to know who to trust. If there are multiple systems, it’s hard to know which system’s “click” is the right click to count. If you yourself have had to spend “countless hours trying to reconcile differences” in data, how is that “easy?”

In a way I’m happy you wrote this post because it reinforces everything I say when I travel the globe and meet with your biggest customers. They say “Our vendor says this is easy … there must be something we’re not getting.” I say, “Why would you expect your vendor to tell you that web analytics is hard? Would that make the sales process move forward more quickly? Would that make you more likely to buy their ever-expanding series of offerings? Would it make you think you won’t end up spending more money counting events, creating custom reports, or adding ad hoc segmentation tools?”

No. If you told the truth about web analytics, your prospects and customers would think twice about their investment. But that is exactly what companies need to do to be successful, really successful, with web analytics — take the science of audience measurement seriously!

When I say “web analytics is hard” I’m not saying that it is impossible, I’m not saying it’s not complex, I’m not saying that it is best left to the experts, and I’m not saying that companies should give up and go home. I’m saying that vendors, consultants, and customers should set their expectations regarding web analytics appropriately.

In my humble opinion, your customers need to know that web analytics is hard so they can:

1. Plan to spend a reasonable amount of time determining their needs
2. Allocate resources appropriately for implementation and deployment projects
3. Set expectations with management about when results will begin to appear and what will need to be done with those results
4. Make the case to management when they need additional resources, more software, or more time
5. Have an appropriate relationship with their vendor, based on clear expectations

When people are told that “web analytics is easy” they take their investment for granted. They expect that a “standard implementation” or something that comes from a cut-and-paste template will serve their needs, that a 0.25 FTE will be enough to produce analysis, that results will be available in a matter of days, that the software they have will solve all their problems, and that they won’t need their vendor’s support from time to time.

In a way it’s ironic that you say “web analytics is easy” given Omniture’s obvious commitment to their customer’s satisfaction — Larry Freed of ForeSee Results taught me that satisfaction is a function of expectation; when you say “I’ve done it, it’s easy brah” then as soon as they realize the truth, you’ve failed to set their expectation correctly and thusly they’re unsatisfied.

With the increasing numbers of your customers experimenting with less costly tools, I would think that customer satisfaction would be your #1 priority.

I doubt you’ll publish this comment and I suspect you’ll be pissed off at me (again) for voicing an alternative viewpoint but consider this: I’m not saying anything bad about Omniture or any of the companies you guys are buying. I think Omniture is a great organization full of incredible talent. I think the market position you’ve carved out is enviable. I think you guys have tremendous potential to advance the market, driving adoption of Web Analytics 2.0, Web Analytics 3.0, and beyond.

“Web analytics is hard” isn’t about any vendor technology or any one person. “Web analytics is hard” is about your customers and their ability to use your technology and your guidance to their greatest advantage.

When you say “web analytics is easy” you’re oversimplifying what is involved in being successful with web analytics. When you say “I’ve done [web analytics] for a living and I can tell you it’s not [hard]” you’re not paying attention to what your customers are going through. When you say “from your perspective, it’s just not that hard” you’re demonstrating your intelligence but not your wisdom. In fact, your statement “Analytics success is all about building a baseline for performance (your KPI trend), and trying new things to improve on this baseline. That’s it! That’s why I think it’s easy” really says it all.

Suffice to say I was bummed to see this hyperbole and tired rhetoric in an otherwise insightful post.

Sincerely,”

I think it’s one thing when people evangelize for free products as an easy-to-learn entry point into the market, and another entirely when one of the market leading vendors makes such bold and (in my opinion) unfortunately misleading statements.

Our collective ability to be successful depends on having clear expectations, not false ones, and our satisfaction is a function of our expectations. I think Matt is setting the wrong expectation with his comments. What do you think?