My brother, Reggie Harsongkram, also points out to me (as noted in your comments) that different reps from the same company often give conflicting or unknowledgable advice to questions asked by the attendees. Attendees often are on pressed time schedules and are trying to gather as much info as possible and then move on to the seminar or other event scheduled for that day. It is a bonus to find a vendor with a clear explanation, the willingness to focus on the questioner’s situation, and a thoroughly thought-out presentation that doesn’t seem like “fluff” (as stated in your blog).

Thanks for the article, very useful.

- Holly Harnsongkram Edwards & Reggie Harnsongkram … Culver City, CA

Having been on both sides of the aisle, I am very aware of the problems that each side has in communicating. From a vendor standpoint, I was equally struck by the ignorance of other competing vendors and their abilities. There also seemed to be a lack of actual real world application to many of the responses.

From a buyer standpoint, it always makes me laugh when I hear words that do not mean anything other than creating fluffy-sounding PR spin. Can we please just say what the product does? Give real world explanations and not some lofty ethereal aspirations to greatness. Save the promotional language and the “we’re the best!” cheerleading for the brochures – I’m not buying that – I’m looking for something that will make MY life easier.

Another aspect to that is to find out whom you are talking to and what they need – Obviously, that was not part of the exchange, but many of the responses would make any decision maker’s eyes glaze over . . .

I’d like to respond on behalf of Coremetrics. Firs of all, I’m sorry we missed you at eMetrics. We had great traffic at our booth and were really thrilled with the conference. And, by the way, Jane Paolucci our VP of Marketing, mentioned to me that she thoroughly enjoyed your session on “Creating a Data Driven Web Decision Making Culture.”

Unique: Coremetrics high-touch approach to working with clients ensures they derive value. We assign an account team that creates an agenda of activities (e.g. custom data pulls, ad hoc workshops) that map to the client’s business goals. The account team then works with that client over time to ensure they are understanding and acting on the data.

Unique feature: Coremetrics offers the industry’s only platform built from the ground up to capture and store all online customer and visitor click stream activity in a comprehensive LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profile. Because the data warehouse is native to our solution we allow for more flexible visitor-level segmentation and analysis and our clients are able to precisely target key visitor groups with highly relevant content and offers.

As you probably are aware, your colleagues at Quicken Loans use Coremetrics. We just launched a new release and have added new functionality that you may not be familiar with. We’d love the opportunity to update you on the current Coremetrics solution.

Thanks!

Elizabeth

Unique: Outsourcing company with a variety of business services that is useful to a company

Feature: Low cost solutions

We also have a business blog where we provide tips to bring in more repeat business. It is at http://www.globalintegra.com/blog

[EDIT: Avinash: David's company is Integra Global Solutions Corp and they provide bookkeeping, medical transcription and business outsourcing services.]

Imagine how the level tickels down to other far less specific events, where so much misinformation is actually given that we all spend so much time getting the facts straight again!

The vendors have a responsibility and they should take it more seriously as their lack in training internal people is actually one of the reasons, in my eyes, of why the evolution of Web Analytics is so slow.

During the WAA training day, prior to the eMetrics summit, I talked to several WA tools users. Amongst the discussions I had, at least 3 were switching vendors! and we are talking about from Omniture to WSS or vice-versa, to Coremtrics, etc. Not the smallest of players on the field and change between vendors is not that easy, due to the lack of standardisation.

As long as vendors keep on focussing on selling licenses - which they can as the market is still relatively unsaturated - this issue will not disappear overnight.

Ideally, they should also focus their objectives on life time value…

I know you are kidding but no “evil” involved.

I’ll agree with Dr. Turner and Mr. Schiffers above that it is, at best, a “interesting experiment”.

Thanks as always for your feedback.

-Avinash.

I have found it fascinating how all the answers seem to focus around what the vendors can technically do in their tools. None have taken the position of being unique by being a great partner to “your” organisation.

I wouldn’t be as blunt as Chris, but the reply referenced did read a lot like a “Yes Minister” episode with Sir Humphrey in full flood.

And agree with Steve. Amazing how many have the same unique functionality.

Very evil. :-)
- Steve

Unique Solution: Integrated Usability and Analytics platform, with ‘enterprise’ functionality available at an affordable pricing model. Unique data visualization, too…

Unique Feature: Hmmm… which one to pick? Probably the integrated A/B Testing suite.

Here’s Efficient Frontier’s U.V.P.:

“We’re the only firm applying portfolio trading applications from Wall St to the optimization of large paid search campaigns. This unique math approach coupled with the experience gained from managing more paid search spend than any firm on the planet gives our advertiser clients better returns from and control over search marketing than can be had elsewhere.”

Would like to add answers for European Vendor WebtraffIQ

Unique: We are industry leaders not followers; we have developed quite few industry firsts…

1.)First page tagging system 1995 and used by NASA
2.)First SMS alerts
3.)First Fraud application in conjunction with http://www.iwf.org.uk
4.)First terrestrial Television and Radio directed to Internet campaign with Halifax
5.)More to come

Feature: Brand Tracking and Vendor Agnostic consulting

It’s a great question, Avinash, and one that is a fundamental starting point to everyone considering upgrading their analytics tools.

Another fundamental question is, “what purpose does my website serve in contributing to the success of my business?”

That question, along with another, “Who in my organization has a stake in my online business succeeding?”

Omniture’s tools are designed for those who would answer that their web site is crucial to the success of their business and that many (especially non-technical) members of their organization hold a major stake in its ongoing success.

Those questions are characteristic of today’s e-business environment and its culture of meritocracy and vested, highly motivated employees.

Similarly, Omniture has developed its tools to be peerless in getting data quickly, directly and easily into the hands of all of the business stakeholders who use this crucial data daily, even hourly to drive the success of the companies they work for.

That is why Jupiter named Omniture as the analytics leader in involving the greatest number of business roles in successfully using web marketing and online performance data.

With Omniture, for instance, a CEO or VP of Marketing can monitor just 5-6 dashboards that are key to their online business to stay in touch and in control. A web developer can drill down into page-by-page internal placement performance using the industry’s only dynamic self-updating and content-caching overlay report, ClickMap (R).

Only with Omniture, can offline marketers easily upload disparate brick and mortar or direct postal mail data into realtime web reports and track the efficacy of their campaigns to the online business.

No company but Omniture offers the full depth and array of complex rules-based segmentation analysis delivered in a highly accessible intuitive interface to the largest number of business users in an organization.

Thanks you,

-=Doug Hansen

OMNITURE

My assumption was that if you are standing at a booth trying to convince the 560 people who attended the emetrics summit (or any other conference) that they should do business with you then you should be able to clearly articulate the answers to these extremely simple questions.

Company experts are not everywhere representing the company and hence companies should make sure that the people who stand in booths or in front of new customers can atleast parrot what the experts might say. To me (and the other 560 delegates) the person we speak with is “the vendor”.

Maybe it is time to bring back the Japanese early morning drills where each company employee has to stand up and in unison we all sing the company song! Three times a day. Every day. Even on weekends!!! :) :)

I second your suggestions, if there are any vendor experts reading this blog please feel free to provide your “expert answers”. :)

Thanks so much for your comment.

-Avinash.
PS: I will admit that if I were standing at the Clicktracks booth I would not ask Dr. Turner these two questions, he is way too smart!

Unique: Two things: well-designed reports that anyone can understand; and segmentation that anyone can set up and that appears in every report.

Feature: Our Click Fraud Report, which detects campaigns that are underperforming or suffering fraud “out of the box”.

It would be interesting to ask the same questions to two people from the same vendor, and see how different their answers were!