According to Twitter, I had the same immediate reaction to the Adobe Omniture acquisition that just about everyone else had: WTF? How does this make sense. I immediately tweeted that. Ok next time, think before you tweet.

Adobe is more than Flash. Heck, before Adobe acquired Macromedia it wasn’t anything approaching Flash.

Don’t get me wrong, Flash is important. How much of online video is distributed via Flash? A significant majority I imagine. Flash is also used for interactive web pages and light gaming. Oh, it’s also developing into a desktop connected-application platform via Flex.

Integrating Omniture (or any other measurement technology) into Flash or Flex, what’s the difference? There largely isn’t one. And Flex desktop apps are proliferating. How valuable will it be for those developers/companies to have a solved, stable integration of analytics into those apps? And of course, since Flash serves SO MUCH of the video content online, how will Adobe’s acquisition apply pressure to the standards that are used to measure video?

Adobe has not one, but two development and publishing platforms (Dreamweaver (ok, who still uses Dreamweaver?) and Cold Fusion)

What if some of the components of Insight and/or Test & Target are integrated directly into Cold Fusion?

What about Shockwave/Director for rich gaming experiences?

In-game analytics don’t really exist, not on a large scale anyway. What if Adobe-ture can solve that?

And of course the standards: Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat.

Holy Crap! Adobe has an end-to-end services & platform suite for developing connected applications, web-sites etc.

With the addition of Omniture to the fold, Adobe can now add adjunct services to their platform.

• Basic Measurement (Site Catalyst), customized for specific environments
• Data Integration & Data Mining (via Discover, Insight, etc)
• Testing & Targeting via –wait for it- Test & Target

And don’t take “adjunct” the wrong way, we all know that the worst kept secret of online is better analysis and synthesis right? The data and the insight they drive are as important as the products/sites/apps that drive the data.

Once you step past the WTF moment, you start to realize that this may be less of an eBay-Skype thing and might just be more of a Google-Applied Semantics kind of thing. It will take careful execution of a well-thought out integration plan but it could be a very interesting play.

What if Adobe dusts off HBX (or offers a trimmed down version of Site Catalyst) for free to publishers (especially video publishers) in return for aggregated and anonymous video usage data? What if they push something like that through partners like BrightCove that provide video players to publishers?

Again, once you move past the shock and think about a bit, this acquisition might just make more sense than you thought, or at least the possible reasons for it begin to emerge.

What do you think? Why did Adobe do this? Why did Josh et. al. agree to it? Are the reasons above worthwhile? Are there other more important factors? Please leave a comment and let me know!

One last random thought, does this help Adobe in positioning against HTML 5? My understanding is limited but it seems to me that the HTML 5 standard is, in some ways, a direct shot at Flash.

BTW, Gary Angel over at SEMPhonic has a very thoughtful post on this deal

Check out this graph of the Dinosaur family tree:

Photo Credit: Graeme Lloyd, University of Bristol

This image, a so-called “super-tree”, shows the relationship of 440 of the 600 known species in the Dinosaur family. It was created as part of a study with the goal of determining the various rates of diversification within the tree. You can read a nice summary of the research at Science Daily. But seriously all the chatter about Social Graphs that use a similarly formatted chart and I have to wonder, who has one as cool as this?
 

Just installed WP for iPhone app and am testing.

Don’t know these guys? Tealium is a nascent consultancy based in San Diego, CA. It was formed in March by three former consultants at Visual Sciences – Olivier Silvestre, Mike Anderson  and Ali Benham. I’ve worked with (as client and teammate) all three and would recommend them to just about anyone needing help with web analytics – wait, that’s what I’m doing here!

One of their first offerings – beyond consulting – is a little service to help you integrate online analytics data into your CRM system. Wait … what? WebToCRM does just what it says – helps you get your web analytics data into your CRM system for a more comprehensive view of your marketing efforts.

It’s interesting (to me) that they should launch WebToCRM so closely on the heels of eMetrics because while I was there I went to dinner with Eric T. Peterson, Judah Phillips and June Dershewitz. At dinner, we discussed (among other things) where web analytics is going. Eric declaimed that the next battlefront in our market is open systems vs. closed systems. Open systems let data come in and go out. Closed systems, on the other hand, are like roach motels – data might get in, but it will never get out!

Essentially what Tealium is doing with WebToCRM is eliminating the need to wait for the platforms (web analytics and CRM) to offer easy, true pass-through of data. WebToCRM is configured for several popular web analytics applications and two CRM platforms with options for ‘other’. As the service grows, I imagine that the preprogrammed options will grow too.

With the free version, you can pass a campaign ID and up to three (3) campaign attributes from your analytics system to your CRM platform.

So how does it work? After going through the WebToCRM configuration process you will receive a JavaScript, in email, that can be deployed across your site in one of your global includes (header, footer, etc). This JavaScript is programmed to "listen" for activated campaign ID and campaign attributes variables encoded on the destination URL. When a potential lead enters your site via a campaign that is properly encoded WebToCRM grabs that data and stores it in a cookie so that when the lead gets to your sign-up form, the campaign information can be passed to the CRM app.

Pretty slick right?

So now you can use online campaign data to inform offline marketing processes. For instance, you can get a ‘whole view’ of the campaign from online acquisition to offline conversion. It becomes a relatively simple matter to judge which online-to-offline track offers the best conversion rate. Or to see that some online campaigns that convert-to-lead really well don’t fulfill the backend promise of conversion.

WebToCRM Vital Info

• Cost: Free!
• Preconfigured Web Analytics Applications:
  • HBX
  • Site Catalyst
  • Google Analytics
  • WebTrends
  • IndexTools
  • Core Metrics
• Preconfigured CRM Applications:
  • SugarCRM
  • SalesForce
• Campaign Variables Tracked: 4 (campaign ID + 3 attributes)
• Implementation: Global JavaScript File
• More Information: User Guide
• Learn More: WebToCRM Information Page
• Get Started: Sign Up Page
• Offered By: Tealium, Inc.

This morning, less than a week after the announced acquisition, Yahoo! decides that Index Tools will be free. So let’s see that’s three large Ad Networks (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!) that have bought/developed a web analytics tool/service provider and are now offering that tool/service for free.

Obviously these behemoths see value in web analytics but not enough to make it a stand alone business. Instead, it increasingly appears that these ad networks think that it’s important to offer analytics as part of the ad suite in that it either draws in business, makes switching to them easier or makes it harder for advertisers to leave – if your spend AND your analytics are tied up in one ad network it will be harder to make the switch to another.

I’d love to see the folks at Jupiter or Forrester weigh in on this but it seems to me that consolidation is making the web analytics market weak and open to extinction as a stand alone. Either the current trend will continue and web analytics will be subsumed by the advertising market or the BI players will resurge and take over the remaining pieces of the WA providers.

On second thought, it will be both. Ad Networks will offer free, entry to mid-level analytics capability across the spectrum of the market (Individuals –> SMB –> Enterprise) while the BI players will integrate the remaining "Enterprise" level web analytics services into their suites in order to offer comprehensive channel analytics and advanced segmentation and data mining capabilities. Watch out folks, there are sharks in the water.

IMHO

Photo Credit: B. Stabler via a creative commons license