Web Optimization Blog

Two big announcements in the past few days:

Coremetrics
Coremetrics just secured $60MM in new funding, then followed that up with an announcement that they will begin releasing benchmark data collected from their ~300 clients. Their announcement follows Google’s announcement about releasing benchmark data. Some interesting stats from Coremetrics:

• 22.41% of visitors left retail sites after viewing one page
• 51.65% got as far as a product page
• Conversions from Direct Load Traffic - 47.89% of traffic and 67.35% of sales came from visitors who typed in the retailer’s URL or clicked on a bookmark. The typical conversion rate was 3.29%
• Conversions Where Site Search Was Used - 14.84% of consumers used site search during their visits - conversion rate 5.60%
• The shopping cart abandonment rate was 68.42%.

Here’s the link to the Coremetrics Benchmark page.

Yahoo! and IndexTools
Second Yahoo! announced its purchase of IndexTools - start at Bob Page’s blog post to get the industry take on what this means. Plenty of pundits have weighed in on what this means, and most of them are linked from Bob’s post. The one post worth listing here is Eric Enge’s 10 Cool Things you can Do with IndexTools. If you’re not familiar with them, this post gives some info about the solution and its reporting capabilities.

Eric Peterson suggests that “this (acquisition) is potentially the permanent game changer”. So here we are - three giants - MSN, Yahoo! and Google:

• each providing search results,
• each selling ads,
• each with mass volumes of email account holders and other member-specific areas,
• all of which result in vast volumes of data about what people do online.

Before this acquision, two of the three had web analytics capabilities, and now they all have it.

On a related note, last week I ran across a blog that Avinash wrote over a year ago - Five Ecosystem Challenges for Web Practitioners - still as relevant today as when it was written. In it he talks about the fact that web analytics is not a silo - web visitor data is tightly related to the “upstream” (tv, magazine, newspaper, radio ads), and the “downstream” (phone sales, retail outlets, other sites).

We’re all watching to see what’s going to happen to the large pure-play companies - WebTrends, Omnture, Coremetrics - each with its own expansion strategy, and the multitude of smaller players and even new entrants into the space.

UPDATE - 4/15: Dennis Mortensen posted to his blog today that Yahoo! is making IndexTools free to all existing partners and client if they accept Yahoo!’s Standard Agreement.