DM p34-36 Software Dec08.qxp 02/12/2008 13:11 Page 34
Software Review
Real time analytics
Built on a high speed database that delivers log data in near real time, is Omniture’s
Discovery package the web analytics tool we’ve been waiting for, asks James Lawson?
W
ith understanding and influencing web- rather than just an input from SiteCatalyst, making
site visitor behaviour at the leading edge far more of a general BI tool than its on-demand sta-
of web marketing, ambitious marketers blemate.
increasingly desire more than just the canned reports As well as the vendor’s DataWarehouse package,
and aggregated data offered by many web analytics there are also a number of versions of Discover
tools. This is the need that Omniture’s Discover pack- OnDemand available with custom reports and visuali-
age is designed to satisfy. Built on a high-speed data- sation tools for different vertical sectors. Users here
base and with log data arriving in near-real time, it often work solely with non-web-sourced data sets, for
looks like the analysis tool that we’ve been waiting example taken from telecoms call information or
for. retail EPOS data sets.
The look and feel of Discover OnDemand will be
Corporate tool familiar to anyone who has looked at the latest gen-
Beyond its flagship SiteCatalyst web analytics pack- eration of BI tools. Navigation is via a selection of
age, Omniture now offers a suite of analytics pack- tabs along the top of the screen and users work with-
ages within its Online Business Optimization in a desktop area where new charts, graphs, tabular
Platform. Slightly confusingly, there are two Discover listing and so forth can quickly pulled in from tem-
products: OnDemand and OnPremise. To be clear, plates and dropped into the required position.
Discover OnDemand is a SaaS tool that offers more Underneath lies one of the product’s unique selling
advanced segmentation and visualisation functions points: a custom, highly-indexed database that is
when working with SiteCatalyst data only. Users must extremely quick and responsive. Though the products
also have SiteCatalyst available. are not equivalent, this sort of custom database will
Discover OnPremise, the package reviewed here, be familiar to anyone who has used tools like
can be installed in-house or hosted by the vendor as smartFocus or Alterian. It’s scalable at least up to tens
Discover OnPremise is
a managed service, and is developed from the Visual of terabytes, which should satisfy pretty much every-
one of two versions
available from Omniture
Sciences (previously WebSideStory) application that one, and it’s flexible too: you can alter the schema or
and can work with any
Omniture bought last year. add extra variables as needs dictate.
type of channel data,
rather than just an input
This also offers segmentation and visualisation Though non-standard databases like these may
from SiteCatalyst. tools, but can work with any type of channel data lessen the IT department’s enthusiasm for adopting
them, thankfully Discover does not require a load
stage to crunch new data into the required format.
Instead, it is able to pull in web analytics data auto-
matically in near-real time and make it available for
analysis almost immediately, though external extracts
from different channels will require, as usual, some
form of data preparation work and will arrive via a
batch load.
This means it can handle data from third-party web
analytics tools too but in batch mode; “trickle feed-
ing” data only works with SiteCatalyst.
There are no dedicated matching tools as standard
besides some limited “pattern matching” functions,
so any name and address-based matching would
require a lot of set-up or running elsewhere before
import. Batch loading is, as you would expect, a stan-
dard option.
There is a vast range of visualisation options and
metrics as standard: the Google Earth-like globe view
is particularly impressive and others include the clas-
34 Database Marketing December 2008 www.dmarket.co.uk
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44