With little fanfare, ClickTracks’ CEO John Marshall is leaving his post to pursue other opportunities. This perhaps isn’t too surprising considering that ClickTracks was purchased in August by e-marketing roll-up company, J.L. Halsey. Marshall founded ClickTracks with Stephen Turner in 2000 and focused on analytics for the SMB market. In my research for The Web Analytics Report and subsequent chats, I found Marshall to be the most accessible web analytics vendor CEO in the market; someone who didn’t mind explaining the finer points about ClickTracks data processing, storage, and query model — as well as web analytics issues in general. He didn’t just talk about product usability; he tried to guide the company to focus on user experience as a critical part of its feature set. This led to the development of a highly graphical interface and a well regarded visitor segmentation capability…….

And it looks like John was on tour in 2003 (with Jim Sterne). I first met John (and Jim) at the Nielsen Norman Group event in New York in March 2003. Unlike Avinash, I didn’t save my name tag :) However, since then I’ve seen and shown “Bob’s Fruitsite” many times.

John - all the best and I look forward to learning more about your new ventures.

June

Like many, since I first met John in Santa Barbara in 2003, I have been impressed by his friendly manner, enthusiasm, knowledge and sense of humour. His unique perspective on our industry is always refreshing as evidenced by the chat we had when we last caught up in London.

http://www.applied-insights.co.uk/news/2006/10/04/blogchat-with-john-marshall/

Neil

> We can meet in a seedy donut shop, and armed
> with laptop I’ll pitch you without mercy.

Which, of course, he did not.

Coffee and a donut took about three hours and only 10 minutes of that was a demo. The rest was pure, shared enthusiasm for an industry that was pretty much Enterprise Only and John had an idea about how to change that.

Since then, I too have been charmed, delighted, informed, inspired and generally impressed by Mr. Marshall.

Will he be missed? I don’t plan on allowing that to happen. Some people are too good to lose track of. John - consider yourself cookied.

I began my own, so far, brief journey into the world of web analytics because of a blog post written by Rand Fishkin offering a Free Link bait Idea. This post by Rand resulted in our launching a major web analytics survey, and culminated in our 2007 Web Analytics Shootout Interim Report.

Very early in that journey, I found myself at SES Chicago, and I walked up to the booth at Clicktracks. Standing out in front of the booth was a tall man wearing a suit. Shortly I found myself discussing web analytics with him, and he was incredibly open and friendly. The man, of course, was John Marshall, CEO of Clicktracks. [...]

I will be damned! John is the without doubt the most friendly person in the industry. However; I am most sure we will see him again in another venture …, and John, if you do another start-up – make sure to add us to your initial “calling list”! :-)

Cheers
Dennis

N.B.
Thanks Aurelie! :-)

Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools
My Web Analytics Blog

On our side, I know René has been bothering me for ever with his “anything by anything” report, ever since his first conversation with John.
He has helped raise the bar in terms of what is possible or should be possible through the use of less cost effective vendors.

Also note that except for Dennis from Indextools, John is/was the only vendor actually paying attention during the Emetrics summits. One couldn’t state enough what you can learn at these great gatherings!

In any case, all the best to you John, don’t become a stranger and take good care!

I was at the London Emetrics, wandering around also trying to avoid eye-contact with vendors. In my case this was because I thought I would be wasting their time as I wasn’t in the market for a new system (the irony is that within weeks I find that I am). Meanwhile every delegate I spoke to seemed to be from some big multi-national, while the mail-order sites I work on typically see about 10,000 visits a day when things are going well. I was starting to feel like a fish out of water.

There I was, waiting in the line for lunch, beginning to wonder whether I was really in a relevant place, when John came up and introduced himself. I’m a Clicktracks user and had attended some of his online seminars, but I don’t think we’d even exchanged emails directly at this point. So maybe he just spotted the name badge. Or perhaps you, Avinash, had pointed him in my direction?

Anyway, John sat me down and spent his lunchtime chatting with me about analytics in general. He grinned at the message on my ‘Making Customer Experience Count’ card and pointed it out to Jim Sterne. I was the one who brought the conversation round to Clicktracks by asking about the general line of development in the future. This was not just some vendor spiel opportunity. I learnt a lot and meeting John was one of the major plus points of the conference for me. It’s always fascinating to talk to someone who knows their stuff and is prepared to share in an open and generous way.

And, talking of generous, he also split the bill with you for that rather large gathering on the final day of the conference, of course.

All in all, a very good bloke. I hope that he’s sticking around the industry, even if not as part of Clicktracks, and I certainly wish him well whatever he does next.

It will be interesting to hear what he’s up to.

I enjoyed reading your story of how some things came to be.