When I did the podcast with six European web analytics experts several of them said they will miss ClientStep. Even Dennis, who works for competitor, admitted that using ClientStep has some distinct benefits.

Neil Mason, who was also in my podcast, had the following to say back in January:

If I had a small gripe about Instadia it was that I thought that the interface was a bit clunky. But I also tend to segment systems between tools that are predominantly reporting orientated and tools that are truly analytical. As a sweeping generalisation the latter group usually have clunky interfaces. It’s the nature of the beast. I think Instadia falls into “analytical” camp and the other feature that it has that I like is its “Filter Builder”. This is a visual way of creating filters and segments and it enables quite complex filters to be built very easily. It’s one of those neat ideas that works very well.

So I think that Omniture have picked up a little gem of a company with Instadia. From what I know of the two companies it should be a good fit. Good luck to Anders and the rest of the Instadia team. I hope that we see some of the more distinct Instadia features on the Omniture roadmap at some point. It would shame to loose them from the space.

Steve Jackson, another expert from my podcast, posted the following yesterday:

Instadia had a very useful system, one I considered a real contender to be the No.1 web analytics system in Europe because of the system structure and data collection method it had.

You could use it in a very similar way to Visual Sciences. Practically all the work with Instadia was done on the vendor side backend (filtering, report set-up, segmentation etc). Once your (very simple) tags were implemented on the site, you pretty much had it all. All you needed to do was then use the Instadia ASP system to find and get what you wanted, you didn’t need to go back and add tags to pages if you wanted to do something new. It is/was a web analytics system designed as web analytics systems should all have been designed from the first time someone thought of using Javascript and an ASP server.

In my opinion, if Omniture had any sense they would develop their next release based on Instadia’s data collection method and backend, not discontinue the system. They could then use Site Catalyst as a superior front end for Instadia but still allow people like us to develop very powerful filtering and segmentation into the SC suite.

I agree with Neil and Steve. ClientStep is great for its ease of implementation, flexible filter builder and survey tool. SiteCatalyst has a more refined interface in general. I’ve always said not to drop the filter builder.

When I spoke to Neil Morgan from Omniture in May he had the following to say:

• The plan is that all users of ClientStep should be migrated to SiteCatalyst in a year.
• Approximately a dozen accounts have already been migrated, and some 30 are currently in the process of being migrated.
• The InstantSurvey tool from ClientStep will be integrated with SiteCatalyst in the third quarter.
• ClientStep’s Excel integration will also be used by Omniture.
• There are currently no plans on keeping the filter builder (for data mining) in ClientStep.

Phil Kemelor wrote the following about the transition from ClientStep to SiteCatalyst in the beginning of July:

After speaking to several ClientStep licensees, it appears that the biggest downsides going forward will revolve around price, page tag maintenance, and possibly reporting. They foresee potential upsides in user interface and online support.

I guess we will know if Omniture made all the right decisions in a year.

ShareThis