The first sign of spring is the beginning of the conference season and it kicked off for me this week when Omniture came to town hosting their European Summit in London. Around a 1,000 people from across Europe gathered together last Tuesday to listen to what one of the largest marketing technologies companies had to say.

The theme of the conference was “Lead the Change” and was kicked off with a keynote session from Josh James, Omniture’s co-founder and CEO. I wasn’t at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City but I assume that the message was the same. James asserted that prospects were still good for our industry even in these difficult times. “Technology is no respecter of the economy” he told us and outlined the potential based on the fact that “less than 10% of transactions are being optimised”. A number of product announcements were made in the keynote including the introduction of the Omniture marketing suite into Europe, the launch of Omniture Recommendations, new reporting capabilities in Site Catalyst for measuring how viral videos are and the integration with 24/7′s Open AdStream. Much was made also about Omniture’s partnership with WPP and James interviewed Mark Read, the head of WPP Digital. Read stressed the importance of digital to WPP these days (accounting for over 25% of business) and it was interesting to hear that WPP’s digital priorities were around social media, mobile and analytics.

My sense of progress from the opening sessions was it was more evolutionary than revolutionary. There was talk about the impact that social media and mobile would be having on the way that consumers and marketers interact and there were announcements of new measurement capabilities in those areas. There were also hints that there would be more focus on improving measurement capabilities on content and lead generation sites in the future. There was also talk about more activity on integration, including the integration of SearchCentre (their keyword bid management) tool and Test an Target (their multi-variate testing tool), as well as more concentration on Developer Connection and their data integration capability, Genesis. So for me the start of the conference painted a picture of consolidation and amalgamation which is perhaps not surprising given the expansive and acquisitive nature of the company over the past 2 years.

Ed Thompson from Gartner Group gave an interesting and wide ranging presentation. After talking about the shifts in the CRM space from operational CRM to analytical and collaborative CRM strategies, he focused on talking about customer experience management. He highlighted the trend for companies to look to differentiate themselves through the customer experience but identified some of the major challenges facing those companies. First of all customers are becoming more powerful, secondly no-one in those companies “owns” the customer and thirdly, on the whole, employees don’t care. So the challenge is to find someone who “cares about customers” in the company and then to put the right measurement frameworks in place. Thompson also offered an interesting insight based on his analysis on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). He looked at the profile of the companies with the highest customer satisfaction scores. They were food companies, internet companies and the like. From this he came to the view that most of the companies with good customer satisfaction scores didn’t actually deal directly with customers. “Humans screw up the customer experience” he said and warned companies not to confuse customer intimacy with good customer experience. I guess that underpins the need to get the web experience right as often people don’t want to deal with other people, they just want to get the job done.

I took the opportunity to take in a few presentations from the social media track at the Summit, covering aspects such as mobile and video measurement. Greg Dowling from Nokia summed it up for me when he said “mobile measurement is hard”. Many issues such as the proliferation of devices and browser, the lack of industry standards, problems with visitor identification combines to create a number of different measurement challenges. It reminded me of the web analytics world about 8 or 9 years ago. Matthew Langie from Omniture outlined a mobile analytics “maturity model” which starts by measuring the mobile opportunity through to profile based targeting. I think for most companies measuring the opportunity is about as good as it gets at the moment.

Later this week I head out to the West Coast to get another dose of conference input at the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit in San Jose where I’ll present on predictive analytics, May 4. I’ll give you a round up on that one next time.

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Neil Mason joins Foviance as director of analytical consulting.

The acquisition brings Applied Insight’s director and co-founder Neil Mason to the Foviance team as director of analytical consulting. With his vast experience, he will serve on Foviance’s board of directors and lead the company’s new initiative and analytical consulting practice. Mr. Mason is a renowned industry figure and brings Applied Insights best practices of predictive analytics, optimisation and measuring digital marketing effectiveness to Foviance. He also brings with him Applied Insights existing blue chip client base which includes Barclays, BP and Total Jobs and he will have a pivotal role in developing further Foviance’s strategic partners such as Omniture and Google.

Neil Mason joins Foviance with 25 years of in-depth industry experience in marketing analytics and strategy. Prior to founding Applied Insights, Mr. Mason has worked in a number of senior leadership roles for many major companies including QXL ricardo and Research International UK. He also currently serves on the board of directors of the Web Analytics Association, the global industry body for digital analytics professionals.

“The combination of Foviance’s expertise in delivering seamless cross-channel experiences with Applied Insight’s leadership in understanding data analytics, is ideal for our customers, both in providing innovative services and optimising usability and conversion rates” said Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance. “Our combined global customer base now has a partner with proven expertise to deliver a strong blend of business, analytical and technology consulting capabilities.”

“Many e-businesses are looking to improve their online performance but are not clear about what they should be measuring or how to measure it effectively, our merger with Foviance presents us with an incredible opportunity to improve the digital usability experience for businesses globally”, said Neil Mason, director of analytical consulting, Foviance.

Execs & Accounts UK & EU: IAB U.K., MySpace, Foviance
By Jack Marshall , November 10, 2008

Miles Bennett: Applied Insights joins Foviance
By Miles Bennett, November 8, 2008

NetImperative.com Foviance snaps up consulting solutions firm
By Net Imperative, November 07, 2008

M&Adeals.co.uk Foviance gains Applied Insights
By Ryan Daff, November 07 2008

Liesdamedlies.com Applied Insights falls into the gaping Foviance maw
By Ian Thomas, November 07,2008

Research-live.com Usability consultancy Foviance acquites Applied Insights. By James Verrinder, November 06, 2008

Mrweb.com Foviance Buys Applied Insights.
By www.drno.org – Daily Research News Online, part of www.mrweb.com, November 06, 2008

Growthbusiness.co.uk Foviance Acquires Applied Insights
By Growth Business, November 06, 2008

Another day, another Omniture acquisition! How fun it is watching the leviathan consume all in its wake searching for the Holy Grail that is the perfect online business optimisation solution. Is this the final piece of the puzzle? If so, how will this fit in with the rest of the Omniture suite?

On the face of it, acquiring these central elements of Mercado’s business will allow Omniture to help its own customers market their products better. Online retailers are gaining a good deal of experience selling products and services, but they also want to be able to provide customers with pointers towards related products that best marry with their purchases.

Merchandising in this sense is an effective way of collaborating products together. Mercado’s technology will allow Omniture to record sales details, receptiveness to merchandising, track and compare customer data from external search with internal searches, and manage keyword and pay-per-click campaigns dynamically. The concept of merchandising is not just about collecting information about what customers look at in terms of site design, it is about analysing pure product focus information – what is hot and what is not?

Of course collecting data across online channels is one thing, but refining businesses based upon the information collected is more of a challenge. One of Omniture’s more interesting acquisitions of late was web optimisation company Offermatica. This flagged Omniture’s intent of moving from its analytical routes to something much more ambitious, a completely automated online business optimisation solution.

Test & Target, as it is now known to Omniture customers, provides the ability to conduct real-time multivariate testing – an extremely powerful tool that could provide the answer to what combination of content drives customers the most. But here’s the flaw; what happens if all the permutations Test & Target displays are bad? Just because ‘Layout A’ has the highest conversion rate does not mean it is the most you can achieve, maybe it is the information itself and not the means by which it is displayed. What if there was a means of determining the best content to serve on products to push?

Enter Mercado’s merchandising technology.

Merchandising encourages commercial activity via the promotion of content. This process involves analysing sources of data to determine which content sells and what doesn’t. Quite simply, Omniture is attempting to come up with an automated merchandising solution that analyses data sources and serving product/services information directly into Omniture Publish (online CMS system) via Omniture’s Test & Target.

Omniture started life as a highly-effective statistical reporting company. By acquiring new tools like Offermatica & Mercado, the Omniture suite is another step closer to delivering a fully automated online optimisation tool. The benefit of which will be the most powerful tool on the market giving businesses a ‘switch to flick’, kick-starting a self-learning tool that will automatically increase the likelihood of turning visitors into a customers.