This year has been a good year for Omniture customers — seeing their favorite web analytics vendor gobble up other businesses such as TouchClarity, Offermatica, and Visual Sciences. The recent shake-up at WebTrends as outlined by webmetricsguru.com, poses a lot of questions for web analytics customers.

We’re actually in a unique position being both a WebTrends and Omniture customer. We use the WebTrends Dynamic Search product for SEM management and optimization. I would love to see Omniture acquire WebTrends so we can stop dancing around separate reporting for the WebTrends Dynamic Search product. However, it doesn’t look like an acquisition of WebTrends will be a reality. Oh well, for now.

Omniture’s Challenge: Information Architecture and UI
Included in webmetricsguru.com posting is the following:

I told Josh that I’ve worked with Omniture some, recently, but found the platform, while it can do everything, doesn’t always do it elegantly – he responded that I should be using the newer technology Omniture has come up with – not the older stuff; I replied the newer stuff (IE: Discover 2) is very expensive and not everyone can afford it.

The above comment couldn’t be further from the truth. The good thing about Omniture is it can do whatever you want. The bad thing about Omniture is it can do whatever you want. It can be a very complex system and for us, we have actually done 2 implementations. The first round established the basics, and after 2 months of being in production, we fine-tuned the implementation considerably after we learned more about the intricacies of the tool.

Taking a page out of the Google Analytics book
Omniture should take a page out of the Google Analytics book and check out the report designs, navigation, and general user interface of this free product. Omniture is a complex interface for the average business user. Google seems to master the ability to create interfaces that most users can figure out without any knowledgebases, tech support, or training. There is power in this and it’s why Google is good at what they do. If Omniture could start adopting some of this thinking their SiteCatalyst UI, it’d be a great start.

Omniture’s other challenge: Timely Customer Service & Support
What I really, really, really would like to see is for Omniture to focus on improving their customer support. Phone support is speedy, but rarely resolves in a question being answered if the problem is complex and doesn’t involve basic functionality of their application. This is not to downplay the expertise of their tech support — it’s just that each customer’s implementation is different and it takes time to dig into some issues. Perfectly understandable.

However, e-mail support is terrible. I’m not really sure why they offer it because the response rate is, on average, a week for basic requests (which can be handled on-the-fly with a single phone call). Support requests that require higher-tier support go unanswered for several weeks. It often takes an e-mail to our account manager to get an update that is more detailed than “we are working on the problem.” As a customer, we feel like they are either blowing off our follow-up inquiries about open tickets or their support system does not do a satisfactory job at escalating stale tickets in the queue. Coming from an agency and project management background, this is a big no-no.

Soliciting Feedback from Customers
There are several usability issues throughout their interfaces. Nothing that prevents you from getting your work done, but just design issues that force you to do a lot of extra clicking. This, combined with the continued frustration we run into with support inquiries makes me believe they would really benefit from using OpinionLab or any feedback tool for that matter. My single biggest complaint is that it feels like there is no venue for customers to provide feedback.

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After a recent post about Clickshift being acquired by WebTrends and voicing my concerns, and a previous experience with Omniture monitoring blog posts, I did get a call (voicemail) and e-mail follow-up from Clickshift. Let me go on a slight tangent by saying how much I love how powerful blogs can be and how easily accessible the information is for research and brand protection. I think there’s a definite future in this way of servicing new and existing customers and really allows companies to obtain candid feedback from real-world users, and not just people who are so fed up that they call customer service to complain — and quite frankly, I don’t have the time to do this as it’s typically easy enough to go to a competitor. Here I am now, championing their efforts and feeling important to them.

I digress. Back to the WebTrends aquisition of Clickshift. Not to worry says Clickshift: same service, just a new logo. So I’m back to looking at their very attractive SEM model again. With 2007 budgets nearing finalization, whichever route I choose can’t begin until January, so I have some time to look over it in a little more detail and learn how exactly they will integrate with our site — and how it can co-exist with Omniture. I realize that technically speaking, the code easily co-exists on each page. It’s the data analysis and path-to-conversion process that is going to be somewhat of an overlap.

On one side, I will have Omniture reporting data on non-SEM conversions and then through Clickshift, I will have SEM-based conversions. Not having this data centrally managed requires me to consolidate both sets of data either in a spreadsheet or by some other means. This was the beauty with the Omniture model is that all SEM data and web analytics data could be rolled into a single report. While they haven’t exactly made that process painless (and I’m considering going to Omniture University to learn how to get the most out of their application), I take comfort in knowing that it’s all there if and when I need it. Time will tell. If Clickshift truely works, then the time savings alone in bid management rules and the day-to-day babysitting of SEM will far outweigh the temporary inconvenience of rolling data from 2 sources into 1 report/spreadsheet.

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Good news for ClickShift.com, not good news for me (read how I was considering Clickshift). Actually, maybe it’s good news. My biggest hangups with turning over SEM optimization from Omniture to ClickShift were:

• Losing control of the Google AdWords account that handled the keyword management for us
• Having to pay up-front for the cost of SEM rather than after the work was performed
• Using yet another vendor and introducing some overlap between Omniture and Clickshift

Now that WebTrends has purchased Clickshift, this may very well eliminate the possibility of using them as a vendor because they will be integrated with WebTrends (a direct competitor to Omniture) and we previously used WebTrends and switched to Omniture (plus, I really, really dislike the WebTrends UI). This purchase also helps explain why I heard nothing from Clickshift after saying I would be able to do business with them after the new year (when we get our new SEM budget). They were so focused on trying to get me to sign a contract that it almost seemed a little pushy and…well, strange. Hopefully being bought by WebTrends eliminates this and it can safely integrate with WebTrends services. Kudos to WebTrends for a very strategic aquisition. This gives them a significant competitive advantage over the other web analytics companies.

This may be a good thing for us in that I can focus on allocating funds towards Omniture’s professional search consulting to assist in creating optimized business rules. It still doesn’t feature the Clickshift automation and featureset, but maybe through requests and complaining from enough of their customers, they will add it in a future release of SearchCenter. I really hope they do (our corporate discount with Omniture is fantastic). The amount of manual labor that goes into managing each individual business rule in Omniture is significant. Clickshift was really onto something.

On a side note, I did receive the Google digital photo frame gift today.

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