Web analytics consolidation in Europe

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

Yesterday Omniture announced their acquisition of Instadia the Scandinavian web analytics company. This will probably explain why I have had trouble getting hold of senior executives from Instadia and Omniture Europe over the last week! Coincidentally I had been approaching both companies to see if they would take part in a “blogchat” over the coming weeks.

I think this is an interesting acquisition and perhaps not wholly unexpected. I often wonder about the future of European vendors in this space and what the long term prospects are for companies such as Speedtrap, Site Intelligence, Red Eye and others. The larger European vendors all have some distinctive feature to them such as a particular data collection methodology or visualisation tools, or they have a strong penetration within certain markets or channels.

With Instadia it looks like a bit of both. Obviously they had a strong presence in Scandinavia and were beginning to make moves into other markets such as the UK and it looks like this was a good fit for Omniture. However, I have had the opportunity over the past few months to take a good look at Instadia and there are some neat aspects to their technology as well which will hopefully manifest themselves in SiteCatayst at some point in the future.

One of the unique things about the Instadia product is their integrated survey tool. As you may know from other articles and blogs I’ve written I’m a big fan of using multiple sources of data including surveys to fully evaluate the performance of the online channel. A number of the web analytic tools can now “integrate” survey data and aloow users to do some basic filtering of the data based on survey responses. However, the Instadia tool has a survey tool built into it so that you can design, script and launch the survey from within the system itself and the data is fully integrated at the visitor level with the site behavioural data. I think this is very powerful.

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.