From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

David Kesmodel of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the Omniture cookie in this morning's online journal. I myself had often wondered about their decision to choose a domain so obfuscated for their tracking cookies. Still, as more and more companies move to spoofed first-party tracking domains I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more complaints about this kind of thing. Perhaps the most interesting thing in the entire article was the link to this very complete hosts file that excludes many tracking and advertising domains -- what a ton of work this must be to maintain!

The July 2005 edition of Hurol Inan's Attuned web analytics newsletter is now available.

From Bryan Eisenberg at ClickZ:

Measuring site performance is vital. Yet many of us have trouble understanding exactly what should be measured. Obviously, an essential key performance indicator (KPI) for all sites is conversion rate. In addition to overall conversion rate, there are two others. Let's explore all three...

From Enid Burns at ClickZ:

The first quarterly update to WebTrends' research on cookie rejection demonstrates the edge first-party cookies have over those served by third parties.

WebTrends data shows a 5.2 percent increase in user rejection of its third-party cookies since April, and the overall rejection rate reached 13.2 percent in June.

From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

WebTrends announced this morning that their customers are starting to see some of the benfits from the move to first-party cookies and updated some of their previous research on the subject. Their announcement allows me to update my chart of "risks to cookies" for the second time in the last week.

From Pete Lerma at ClickZ:

Has your online planning gotten a little stale? Have you gotten comfortable doing the same things that have always worked, over and over? Are you satisfied with where things are, or are you wondering if there are things you could or should be doing to improve campaign performance?

From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

Last week Coremetrics announced that they'd be selling access to their LIVEmark data for a nominal fee. Not to be outdone, Fireclick, the first company to actually offer this type of retail-metrics benchmarking, has released a free version of their Fireclick Index at http://index.fireclick.com.

From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

Yesterday Coremetrics released data collected via their LIVEmark Index that continues to validate what we've been saying all along about cookies. By examining growth in the number of "anonymous visitors" being tracked by their customer base, Coremetrics is able to look firsthand at third-party cookie blocking. Add this to our matrix of risks to cookies (originally described here) and you'll continue to see risks to cookie-based measurement plaguing marketing efforts.

From Jason Burby at ClickZ:

Until you act on Web analytics data to improve site performance, your Web analytics spend return on investment (ROI) is 0.0.

From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

Regarding our cookie data (here and here) , clients frequently ask me whether I think the problem is going to get worse or better. While we continue to look at the data and examine the trends, it is sometimes easier to think about possible sources of pressure on consumers to further reject cookies.

From Brian Teasley at ClickZ:

Do you know who your best customers are? Do you know how much they buy, and when they buy it? Do you know how they use your Web site?

From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

Last week, Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project published a very data heavy report on consumer attitides towards spyware. Ironically this report comes out at nearly the same time as the Anti-Spyware Coalition's (ASC) draft document of definitions and supporting documents (PDF). The former contains a handful of very interesting data points, the most interesting in regards to cookies include...

From Pete Lerma at ClickZ:

Many of us have developed sophisticated tracking and optimization systems for online campaigns. But do we look beyond what happens at the advertising level? Do we look at what happens once the audience arrives on our Web site? If we do look, what do we do to ensure the conversion process is followed to completion?

From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

I'm not sure if anyone noticed but the long-awaited announcement that CheetahMail has acquired Harvest Solutions came today, continuing the trend of small analytics companies looking for a new sense of purpose or focus in life. Ironically, when we covered the analytics vendor landscape last October (requires client login), Harvest Solutions was in a tight cluster with Fireclick (acquired by Digital River), Urchin (acquired by Google) and DoubleClick (discontinued support for SiteAdvance, partnering with Omniture instead).

From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

... does Network Computing really do the market justice to declare WebSideStory's HBX On-Demand Web Analytics their Editor's Choice for retail analytics if Coremetrics and Omniture were not even part of the review process? According to the review's author's they "set out to find Web analytics products with e-commerce components designed to help organizations increase Web site revenue" but "Core Metrics declined to participate, as did Harvest Solutions, which cited a lack of resources. Omniture, whose offering won our Editor's Choice award in a similar review last year, initially agreed to participate, and we implemented its SiteCatalyst. However, the vendor's lack of responsiveness during testing forced us to drop it from the review."

From Eric Peterson at JupiterResearch:

One of the great things about being an analyst is knowing that every once and awhile companies actually listen. Case in point: one of the near constant complaints I hear about Omniture is about complexity in their pricing model, essentially a lack of transparency in pricing that leads to "gotcha" moments down the road. Nobody likes to believe they've licensed an application that will solve their problems only to discover that "oh, if you want that answer you'll need to write another check ..." A number of companies have complained to me about Omniture making them pay for additional metrics or functionality that they believed would be (or should be) included in the base price for the application.

From Jason Burby at ClickZ:

Web analytics ASPs can save you the hassle of maintaining software, servers, and log files. But someone must still "own" the tool and manage collected data to ensure it's accurate and actionable.