Lyris HQ Integrated Marketing Platform

Lyris HQ is a new platform which incorporates the five Lyris platforms: Hot Banana, Bid Hero, Click Tracks, Email Labs and Email Advisors. As such small and mid-sized marketers have a new platform for nearly every advertising need.

Lyris HQ provides integrated Web-based marketing capabilities that combine email marketing, web analysis and optimization, and PPC marketing. By integrating all five platforms, marketers truly can cross-promote their products through a variety of online marketplaces and ensure that each campaign is sending the same message.

Lyris is doing something no one else dares or is capable of doing right now: bundling email marketing, deliverability analytics, Web analytics, PPC campaign management and Web content management. You get it all for one low monthly price starting at $299/month and scales towards your needs. More info can be obtained here.

$78.2 million invested in Web Analytics Companies

Several smaller analytics companies are trying each to grab their own share of the pie in the highly competitive niche software industry.

Amongst those, four companies have caught the attention of venture capitalist as potential shining stars trying to break away from the pack. Each company is offering a slightly different product homing in on different types of metrics and features website owners and advertisers are interested in.

• The first report came on February 15th when NuConomy (WPP) secured a deal for $3 million. NuConomy’s tool has drawn interest from the industry and capitalists due to its more in-depth cross-compare feature. This allows sites to cross-compare items like videos and images to site traffic.

• The second deal reported by VentureBeat was a $60 million deal for Coremetrics. Coremetrics has separated itself from the pack by providing an analytics tool that combines other marketing tools. On top of the analytics tool Coremetrics has integrated several tools including search engine bid marketing, email marketing and cross sell applications.

• In May, we saw the creator of the free website grader tool, HubSpot secure their share of the cash by raising $12 million. HubSpot has been working on a tool that focuses on “inbound marketing”. HubSpot’s tool will not only show how you acquired the traffic to your site but how you are performing on converting those visitors into paying customers.

• Finally, a few short weeks ago at the beginning of June, Enquisite was able to raise $3.2 million for their analytics software. Enquisite’s analytics tool is focusing on search analytics by providing in-depth data on organic and PPC performance. The tool is “smart” in the fact it will automatically tweak campaigns based on keyword traffic as well as provide ad effectiveness data similar to what Nielsen does for TV ads.

If you’ve already tried one of those let me know your thougts/opion.

WebTrends Analytics 8.5 out now

WebTrends released the new WebTrends Analytics 8.5!

With the slogan: ‘More Insights, Less Efforts!‘ Sounds promising.

…
With the release of the new WebTrends Analytics 8.5, marketers can quickly assess the results from their growing investments in online video, blogs, social networking and other interactive media — and then use this business-critical insight to increase visitor engagement and conversion. Available now in an on-demand hosted format and later this month in software, the new release adds dynamic reports to a host of existing capabilities for testing, tracking and measurement of Web 2.0 media.
…

• Take charge of Web 2.0. Dynamic reports add standardized tracking and reporting, along with graphic views of results, to WebTrends Analytics existing Web 2.0 capabilities.
• Create calculations on the fly. Marketers can compare the results of online activities and web site performance by dragging and dropping these metrics in reports. New ratios are automatically calculated and added to reports.
• Increase control, reduce administration. New user roles and groups provide administrators granular control of user rights, along with time-saving, preconfigured user-access rules.
• Manage analytics in Asian languages. Enhanced support for Japanese, Korean and traditional or simplified Chinese enables global enterprises to manage and share analytics reports from Asian markets worldwide.

…

Read the entire announcement on www.webtrends.com. You can also download the datasheet.

We are currently testing all these new and promising features, and will share you our experience and feedback later on this blog.
If you’re interested in a personal demo, don’t hesitate to contact us.

These Days at the Web Analytics Congress Netherlands

A couple of weeks ago Sophie Meert and I represented These Days at the Web Analytics Congress in the Netherlands. This event was organised by Twinkle (the off- and online magazine specialised in e-shops and established by BBP (Beerens Business Press)), MarketingFacts and the local Web Analytics Association.
About 200 people attended some very interested presentations and cases, so we can agree that the event was a huge success.

Based on the number of people that attended this event, it shows that web analytics has really become a key element in the marketing optimization strategy of most companies in the Netherlands. Dutch companies are generally open for new technologies and strategies, but the local WAA has been quite active the last 2 years educating the market. So the efforts were worthwhile.

The agenda of the day looked very promising with Neil Mason and Avinash Kaushik as the 2 keynote speakers in the morning, and some interesting cases (Rabobank, Pioneer, Hotelspecials.nl, …) in the afternoon.
I already saw Neil and Avinash presenting a couple of times at some of the eMetrics Summits, but even so, you never get bored by the story they have to tell. And I took the opportunity to interview both of them in our serie about the web analytics market in Europe and the States. So come back soon!

Neil talked about his experiences through his years as a web analytics practioner and consultant. You can take a look at his presentation ‘From Web Analytics to ‘Marketing Optimisation’ and beyond!’ on the Web Analytics Congres website so I wont go too much in to details here, but he used a couple of interesting quotes:

• Web analytics is as the slogan of Buzz Lightyear: ‘To Infinity and Beyond‘
• Neil hates the term ‘web analytics’. It is too limited, as it’s about much more: it’s about insights, processes, marketing optimization.
• In a web analytics project 80% of the time is spend on the technological implementation and solving issues (in order ‘to get the right numbers right’), and only 20% on analysis and action. This should definitely be the other way around!

Avinash convinced the audience that you can already analyse a lot and optimize your marketing efforts in an efficient way by using FREE solutions!
In his presentation ‘Multiplicity: Be Massively Successful at Web Analytics 2.0′ he showed different very usefull tips & tricks to perfom the optimization, but the hard part is to execute a Multiplicity strategy that requires being smart about what tools you need for what job, and then be flexible.
I advice you all to go to Avinash’s blog Occam’s Razor and read the related post on this topic (that Avinash already started in November 2007).
Or you can also take a look at the video of Avinash’s presentation at the congress made by webanalisten.nl.

During the afternoon session, These Days presented as well. Together with René Nijhuis from Google, I presented one of our biggest Google Analytics cases, Pioneer Europe. In our presentation we proved that Google Analytics is not only for small companies, but if used wisely and with adequate support of web analytics experts, benefits of a freeware solution can be demonstrated also for larger companies.
We have implemented Google Analytics on 17 European country sites, the DJ Sounds blog and all brand and campaign communication. Each month These Days delivers 1 KPI dashboard per site (1 campaign dashboard per country will be delivered as from July) and 1 in-depth analysis documents, with recommendations included.
And as a result of using a professional freeware tool, Pioneer Europe can free up marketing budget for media and advertising campaigns instead.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to learn more about the processes, analysis and action that we apply at Pioneer Europe.