Pattern Finder

A topsy turvey Web Analytics world

Omniture posted its, "See, we're doing great," press release yesterday, and the results are impressive: fifty new brands have come on board (note: probably less than fifty customers, as an individual enterprise may field multiple brands) and its installed base has expanded its SiteAnalyst coverage, ultimately tracking 50% more page views than before.

Reading such stats, it's hard to remember that four years ago, Omniture was MyComputer.com, targeting small and medium-sized businesses. In fact, it's hard to remember how different the Web Analytics market was then. The powerhouse vendors were Accrue, NetGenesis, and WebTrends, all software-based solutions. The ASP-based vendors, while doing well, were viewed by the world as more mid-market solutions.

How times change. After the rocket ride of growth percentages of 300%, both Accrue and NetGenesis saw sales drop precipitously and sections of their installed base walk away when the recession hit. Eventually Accrue filed for bankruptcy and has emerged as Datanautics; NetGenesis was acquired by SPSS; and WebTrends was bought by NetIQ.

Meanwhile, the ASPs started to bulk up and gain market buzz. Coremetrics, Omniture, and WebSideStory now all have a much larger installed bases, capabilities, and expertise than they did four years ago. Makes you wonder what the Web Analytics market will look like four years from now....

What are your thoughts?

Document the process, not the features

I maintain my Web site with Microsoft FrontPage 2002 (OK, OK, that's another discussion) and I've been trying to figure out how to embed a third-party generated Weblog into one of my Web pages over the past several days. Easy? No. (But I was ultimately successful; after all, you're reading this.)

It's not that I'm technically challenged. I was a programmer for 9 years, and in my most recent programming stint supported and wrote sample code for the Imaging ActiveX controls (.OCXs) that shipped in Microsoft Windows 95 and 98. So although I'm not a C/C++ guru, I'm not too bad with Visual Basic, and a little fancy coding isn't going to trip me up.

So why was I hitting a brick wall? I tried inserting several Web components (Insert Page, HTML, JavaScript, PlugIn), and none of them worked, or at least the way I wanted them to. At one point, I stumbled upon "Insert Inline Frame" and voila!, I was in business.

Eventually, it dawned on my that my trials and tribulations were not my fault, but rather how the documentation I was looking at (FrontPage 2002: The Complete Reference, published by Osbourne) was written. It was all feature-centric, rather than process-centric. Here I was looking for "portlet," or "embedding a page," or "inserting third-party content," and neither the Table of Contents nor Index was organized that way.

I'd guess that the author was handed the product spec, and then carefully and painstakingly documented what that feature did. Instead, I wish he or she had taken the feature set and worked backwards -- for example, realizing that both "Insert Page" and "Insert Inline Frame" were two different ways to embed content from another Web page. Therefore, the two options would be grouped under "Embedding Content," and compared and contrasted (Insert Page only works with content from the same Web site; "Insert Inline Frame" comes up short if the viewing browser doesn't support frames). That would have saved me both time and aggravation.

So the moral of this story is: tech writers and authors, remember that users are trying to DO something -- if you keep that in mind, your documentation will be so much more useful.

Welcome!

Welcome to my Weblog.  Here you will find frequent commentary on the state of Online Optimization -- what's working, what isn't; what the latest vendor acquisition means, what it doesn't; how to do it well, and how to do it poorly.  I hope you'll find my thoughts of interest and value.

Regards,
Guy Creese, Managing Principal
Ballardvale Research