Online Marketing Trends

Woopra is a new web analytics tool which enables you to live interact with your website visitors, based on their activity.

Thanks to the new Dutch web analytics website Webanalisten.nl I got to hear about Woopra. This new tool, which currently is in Beta with 50.000 websites, enables you to interact with your website visitors based on their activity. The tool shows you what is happening on your website at this very moment. I currently have implemented the copy & paste JavaScript code for Woopra on three of my websites and it is fun to see what my visitors are doing, where they come from and where they live.

In the screenshot below you see a visitor from Brazil, who landed on the homepage of my Madonnashop website after doing a search for an image at Yahoo Image Search for “madonna cd promo” . After landing on the homepage, this visitor did a search, and visited a detail page.

Now I would have been able to start a chat with this customer but unfortunately the Woopra chat screen does not always show correctly on my website. Probably because the site isn’t W3C compliant and has some small HTML errors which still have to be fixed.

Google Webmaster Tools unleashes information about who links to pages of your site that do not exist.

With this information you now have the power to create re-directs to altered URL’s or to block sites that are spamming your website. This is yet another step Google takes to get the internet tidy and clean, giving you information you would probably never get unless you are keeping up with your 404 logs.

With this information I was able to correct some broken links that were introduced during the migration of my blog from dasBlog to WordPress and the upgrade from older versions of WordPress to the latest version.

Google Webmaster Tools 404 Not found 1

Google Webmaster Tools 404 Not found 2

 Follow me, visit Google Webmaster Tools and get these problems solved !

WebTrends just launched their corporate blog and communicate their new philosophy; openness.

Interestingly is it that WebTrends president & CEO Alex M. Yoder writes that WebTrends is all about openness. In his introduction of the blog he tells us WebTrends is about “open access to data; open platform we develop upon; open exchange of information with our partners; and open communication with our customers and the rest of the web analytics community”. Personally I think this is a great change of mind and a good method to get closer to their end customers.

Visit WebTrends blog at http://blog.webtrends.com

WebTrends recently released a new online tool which simplifies building tags to track website traffic with software and hosted WebTrends solutions.

The tool can be found at http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com and has many configuration features like the use of first party cookies, click event tagging, tracking of downloads etc. Also very handy is the ability to save your configuration to an XML file for later use and duplication.

Soon Google will add a new feature to Google Analytics which will enable you to track activity outside your own website.

With Web 2.0 your website visitors are not necessarily playing around at www.yoursite.com only. They will probably watch a YouTube video, looking up information through Google Maps or reading comments and reviews through Widgets as part of your website. At present Google Analytics only tracks pages that have the tracking script embedded but what are your visitors doing at other Google web-properties? You simply don’t know. 

Google will introduce a tool which enables you to track activity outside your own website. This will be enabled by inserting the so called Web Property ID into the configuration settings of other Google applications. The Web Property ID simply is the UA-xxxxxxx-x ID you are already using in your script.

Hooray, finally LinkedIn will enhance their LinkedIn Groups with a group forum. Till date LinkedIn groups were nice to display your knowledge and interests but did not bring a lot of expected extra functionality. 

Next Friday LinkedIn will launch several new features for LinkedIn Groups;

• Group members will be able to discuss in the new discussion forum.
• E-mail updates will keep you up to date on new posts within discussion forums.
• Enhanced search features within group members.
• Every LinkedIn group will get their homepage.

Visit my public LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/daveverzijl

While losses at Omniture for the last quarter were higher than same quarter a year ago, it’s interesting to take a small part from the earnings conference call in which Omniture talks about Google Analytics:

It is true that many of our competitors compete with us on price because that’s all they have to compete with us on. And we believe that kind of competition actually works in our favor. Some tools are even free as many of you know, which we do not view as negative. In fact, the company with the purported best free analytics tool placed a major order with Omniture in the second quarter, and that is probably the best estimate of all to the differentiation of Omniture from the free analytics tools.

Interestingly enough, we believe the reason these companies provide free analytics tools is so their customers who advertise in their platforms can convert visitors more effectively so they can afford to pay more for advertising. Well, that’s exactly what we do. We hope our customers convert visitors more effectively. Except that we do it for enterprise customers and mid market customers, and the providers of the free analytics tool will do it for the long end of the tail. Actually, we believe that over time we will develop closer partnering relationships with the major search engines and advertising platforms since our goal is so similar. If they are confident in their technology, they should want their customers to have objective analytics that encourage more spend on the most effective platforms.

More info: Omniture posts wider 2nd-quarter loss, even as sales more than double

In my post of October 12 last year I wrote about the inability of being able to exclude Parked Domain Sites from your Google AdWords Content Network campaigns. There is some good news on this issue; the new Site and Category Exclusion tool gives you the ability to get rid of these sites.

After a long wait Google finally releases the next version of the Urchin software, named “Urchin Software from Google”. In short, Urchin Software from Google is a web analytics product similar in scope to Google Analytics, except you install and manage the software on your own servers.

You are able to download a 90 day trial of this beta from the Google Urchin site. After 90 days you will be able to purchase the product at $2995.

It will be interesting to see if this software version will be the next step for current Google Analytics users.

It’s official; Omniture has completed the acquisition of Visual Sciences. The Visual Sciences stock has been removed from NASDAQ, www.visualsciences.com redirects to the Omniture website.

Here are some notable changes (taken from Jupiter Research):

Omniture Discover OnPremise will utilize the Visual Sciences Platform 5 technology and page tags from VS can populate SiteCatalyst data, which will appear in the integrated interface. Omniture will maintain its legacy Omniture Discover (hosted) segmentation solution.

Omniture’s Search Center now appears under the header of Site Search and Content, where they wasted no time in incorporating Visual Sciences’ Publish Web Content Management Solution.

The popular HBX Analytics solution will be rebranded as Omniture SiteCatalyst HBX. Although HBX should be placed on an endangered species list, because the product will likely be phased out. Omniture states that HBX, “will continue to be supported until the key features have been integrated into Omniture SiteCatalyst”. HBX has had a long ride, from Hitbox to WebSideStory’s HBX, to Visual Sciences’ HBX and now Omniture. It looks like it’s finally time to retire the jersey and move on.