Digital Marketing Depot has released an updated edition of its Market Intelligence Report, Enterprise Web Analytics Tools 2013: The Marketer’s Guide.
This 30-page research report presents a market overview and covers industry trends, mergers and acquisitions, as well as what to look for in an enterprise web analytics tool. The report includes profiles of six leading web analytics profiles, as well questions to ask (both internally and of potential vendors) when undertaking the selection process.
Here is a look at some of the industry trends covered in the report.
What Is Web Analytics Software?
Defining “Web analytics” has become a moving target, as channels converge and marketing language evolves. Terms such as “digital analytics,” “customer analytics,” and “marketing analytics” are increasingly being used to describe the multichannel integration and analytical capabilities that enterprises seek from web analytics tools.
The report defines Web analytics as software that manages website data collection, analysis and optimization; and provides a sophisticated level of attribution, testing and reporting. These same capabilities may be provided for additional digital marketing channels as well.
Consolidation Slows As Market Matures
The enterprise Web analytics tools market is a mature industry, marked by two years of rapid consolidation through acquisition. The pace of consolidation slowed in 2013, as vendors instead sought financing to organically grow their businesses or reposition their products to better reflect integration of their previous acquisitions.
For example, Adobe rebranded its Digital Marketing Suite, which included the tools from earlier acquisitions of Efficient Frontier, Omniture and Demdex, as the Adobe Marketing Cloud in October 2012. The solution now offers five modules that integrate these tools as well as existing Adobe tools such Test & Target.
IBM acquired Coremetrics in June 2010, and rebranded the product as IBM Coremetrics Web Analytics, which became part of the IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Suite. In 2012, IBM dropped the Coremetrics brand name and now markets the solution as IBM Digital Marketing Optimization, to better reflect a cross-channel set of capabilities that include the web, mobile, and social media.
Web Analytics Market Trends
Several significant trends are driving growth in the enterprise web analytics market:
1. The emergence of “omni-channel” marketing to describe Big Data analysis, optimization, and marketing action.
Enterprise marketers are increasingly demanding a single interface to track, measure and optimize a growing number of digital and offline channels such as email, organic and/or paid search, display advertising, video, social networks, affiliates, e-commerce, mobile, direct mail and broadcast. This type of omnichannel marketing allows the enterprise to view data more holistically, and provides a 360-degree view of customer behavior, life cycles and lifetime value.
Marketers are also demanding – and getting – more flexible, tracking, attribution and reporting tools that cater to the unique needs of their businesses. The majority of the enterprise vendors profiled in the report offer a modular suite of tools that enables marketers to purchase each tool separately according to the scale and scope of their digital marketing activities.
Vendor solutions must be able to scale with their customers’ efforts – which has been facilitated by cloud-based data storage. More vendors are investing resources in their REpresentational State Transfer (REST) APIs to allow more extensive third-party data integration.
2. Tag management is becoming a more vital piece of the Web analytics puzzle.
The expanding omni-channel landscape has created a proliferation of javascript tags on website pages that are used to collect data from site optimization tools, ad serving and retargeting solutions, audience measurement options, social add-ons and search engine optimization tools. Too many tags can slow the page-loading process, negatively affecting the user experience and conversion rates and frustrating IT departments with frequent marketing department requests. Tags typically take weeks and sometimes months to deploy, leaving marketers at the mercy of IT release schedules even as they seek to increase ROI by employing new optimization and marketing tools.
The field of tag management has emerged to address this problem and adoption of tag management solutions is growing rapidly.
Tag management works by placing a few lines of code on Web pages that replaces the individually deployed tags, which can add up to 100 on a website and up to 20 on a single page. These tags are controlled in a web interface that empowers marketers themselves to deploy and manage tags within hours or days instead of weeks or months. Some tag management tools also enhance privacy compliance by supporting country-specific privacy laws and do-not-track browser features.
Enterprises that have deployed tag management solutions report numerous benefits, including improved staff productivity, faster page load times and less dependence on IT development and release cycles. Users say their ability to implement new or revised tags quickly (within days) jumped from 18% to 80% after deploying a tag management system, according to Forrester Research.
Tag management pricing ranges from about $20,000 annually at the very low end to hundreds of thousands of dollars as complexity increases. Overall, first-year pricing for a tag management solution will equal about 20% of total Web analytics costs and about 10% annually after the first year.
3. Mobile usage, metrics and measurement are reaching critical mass.
After years of being touted as the next best thing, mobile finally arrived in 2013. According to comScore’s Mobile Future in Focus Report, smartphones surpassed 125 million U.S. consumers in 2012 and tablets are owned by more than 50 million.
In the U.S., the time spent on mobile apps increased 120% percent in 2012, with 129.4 billion minutes dedicated to apps and 28.1 billion spent on the mobile Web, according to Nielsen’s 2012 State of the Media: Social Media Report.
Tablet owners are proving to be even more prolific in driving Web traffic. Internet users view 70% more pages per visit when browsing on a tablet vs. a smartphone, according to The State of Mobile Benchmark published by Adobe Digital Index in April 2013.
With mobile data proliferating, the Web analytics vendors profiled in this report have invested significant resources to provide mobile measurement capabilities that help customers track and optimize their mobile investments. Vendors are also seeking to compete with app-specific measurement tools by providing software developer kits (SDKs) for Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry and iOS.
Download the complete Digital Marketing Depot report, Enterprise Web Analytics Tools 2013: The Marketer’s Guide.
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