The Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q3, 2007

Forrester has released a new web analytics vendor selection report. Yes, we’re talking about The Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q3, 2007.

They have put a lot of work into covering aspects such as data handling, integration, usability, support, cost and more. As many as 127 criteria have been used for the evaluation. Those criteria were grouped into three categories: current offering, strategy and market presence.

The report has a clear American bias, having an international representation is only given a 5% weight within the market presence category. In the overall evaluation it carries no weight at all.

Therefore the report lacks European and Asian vendors and isn’t quite as relevant outside of the United States.

Also worth noting is that only vendors providing web analytics to a large number of billion dollar companies and generating revenues of more than $25 million were included.

I do, however, still like the report. What I like best is their Excel tool where you can adjust weights based on what matters to you. I haven’t seen the tool for this particular edition, but its predecessor was good.

Forrester found Coremetrics to be the best, based on the fact that Forrester believe they’ve managed to balance power and simplicity. Other leaders are Omniture, Unica, Visual Sciences Visual Site and WebTrends.

Forrester is impressed by Omniture’s education program, the unified interface of Unica Affinium NetInsight, the sophistication of Visual Sciences Visual Site, the level of customization of WebTrends, the user-friendly interface of Visual Sciences HBX and ClickTracks’ data visualizations inspired by Edward Tufte.

Forrester found Coremetrics to have a stronger strategy than WebTrends and Omniture. The latter has a slightly stronger current offering though. The strongest offering of all is Visual Sciences Visual Site. Visual Sciences HBX is not considered a leader, but a strong performer. They did like the interface of HBX best in terms of usability, but did not appreciate that it’s not as customizable as the leaders and the fact that visitor segments are being priced a la carte.

What Forrester found less satisfying in general was the differences in data collection, data processing, vocabulary, strange pricing models and a few other things. They also found that all tools have usability issues. In fact, not even one vendor passed all of the tests!

Strategy and current offering were given equal weight in the evaluation.

Buy the report including the Excel tool

Register and download the report for free from Unica’s website (minus the useful Excel tool)

Vendor comments
Visual Sciences
WebTrends
Coremetrics
Unica

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