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New releases of web site analytics software and services highlight a resurgent market once thought to be subsumed by CRM and business intelligence software vendors.
NetIQ Corp. last week unveiled its WebTrends Intelligence Suite, which features a new report design tool and pre-designed data warehouse tables. Also last week, DigiMine Inc. released the first of its DigiMine Advisors suite of managed services, a Web site analysis service called Conversion Advisor.
Both companies are poised to take advantage of a market expected to grow to $463 million by 2005 from $160 million this year, according to International Data Corp., of Framingham, Mass.
Formerly called CommerceTrends, WebTrends Intelligence Suite measures user experience, marketing effectiveness, e-commerce performance and online customer service effectiveness, said Net IQ officials in San Jose, Calif.
New features in this release include WebTrends Report Designer, which is based on Crystal Decisions Inc.s Crystal Reports technology. It provides custom report design of marketing, service or support data and predesigned tables in the WebTrends Warehouse data warehouse to ease data integration with other customer-facing applications, such as CRM (customer relationship management) tools. Data from these tables can be used to build e-mail marketing campaigns or knowledge bases of Web activity for call center agents, said NetIQ officials.
The suite includes tools for integrating data from content management systems, as well as pre-packaged reports. Less is more in this new release, according to Rodney Howeedy, director of database management for Firstdoor.com Inc. Howeedy noted that the OLAP (online analytical processing) Manager cubes in the Net-IQ software have been reduced to about 40 from more than 80 in previous versions. “You were sort of overwhelmed with the amount of options you had,” said Howeedy, in Kennesaw, Ga. “It would take you awhile to go through them all, and a lot of times, they seemed sort of abstract. Im glad they pared the number down.”
In addition, NetIQ announced a move into predictive Web analytics with Quadstone for WebTrends, which provides an interface between Quadstone plc.s analytics software and WebTrends.
For customers who dont want to manage Web analytics software themselves, DigiMine, of Bellevue, Wash., rolled out Conversion Advisor, which is a managed service that provides analytic measurement and targeted product recommendations.
The DigiMine Advisors services will expand with the release this summer of Retention Advisor, which will let marketing managers identify “at risk” customers to market to; Product Advisor, to help product managers target the most appropriate customers; and Content Advisor, which will enable Web site managers to present online content and services to the most appropriate site visitors.