It’s that time of year – time for a review

Since ClickZ are kindly giving me Christmas Day off, this is my last column of the year. So, there’s only one thing for it and that’s to have a look back at 2007. No sooner than you know it, another year has gone by and you wonder whether we are any further forward in our quest to improve the performance of our digital marketing efforts.

Having given it a bit of thought, there are certain, somewhat random, things that have struck me about the last year. First of all there is the vendor consolidation that everyone has been talking about for some while. For us in Europe the year started with Omniture acquiring Instadia, followed closely by Touch Clarity. Some commentators have started to refer to Omniture as Omnivore as their acquisition appetite stretched to Offermatica and then onto Visual Sciences. On the one hand I think that consolidation is a good thing as it can lead to the best technologies being brought together. I was able to meet some of the senior team at Omniture at their Summit in London this year and I was impressed by their vision for the future. Not just the fact that they had one but also what is was. The potential downside of acquisition and integration, particularly of similar but competing systems, can be disruption. I hope that customers don’t lose momentum at a time when many are being to really drive value from their historical investments in data.

Another thing that struck me was the growth in non-transactional analytics. As the majority of websites don’t sell things, it seemed like an area that needed some attention. I kicked off the year giving it some thought and then followed up with some further columns. The conclusion I came to was that you can’t successfully measure the effectiveness of non-transactional websites just by staring at reports from a web analytics system. You need a broader set of tools than that. Since then WebTrends have made some contribution to the challenge by launching Score which enables value to be assigned to particular events or behaviours. Perhaps 2007 has also been the year when “engagement” has become all the rage. For me it’s still probably a term looking for a definition but no doubt that debate will continue.

Looking back at the article I wrote this time last year, I see I was foolish to make a couple of predictions for 2007 about the market in the UK. I said that we would see greater use of targeting and optimisation technologies and that we would see a greater focus on retention marketing and as a result “the need to have various marketing technologies speak to one another and for data on customer activity to be shared”.

I think there has been a greater adoption of targeting and optimisation technologies here in the UK. Both Optimost and Offermatica established offices here before their acquisitions. But I don’t think there has been quite the growth and adoption that I might have expected. No doubt there is a lot of activity and organisations are started to develop and implement systematic testing programmes but many organisations I know see it as something perhaps for 2008.

However, I think that my second prediction was a bit better. From the work that we have been doing this year I have seen organisations trying to get their head around how they make sense out of all their data and how do they get to the position of having a single view of the effectiveness of their marketing activity. We are at least in the planning stages with organisations beginning to ask the right types of questions like “How do attribute sales to different channels in a more sophisticated way than I do at the moment?” or “How do I understand the impact of my offline marketing activity on my online performance and vice-versa?” This type of joined up thinking requires joined up data and if I am to make any predictions for 2008, one would be that we will see more organisations planning and implementing data integration strategies.

The last think that struck me about the year was how the market has continued to diversify and grow. It feels difficult sometimes to keep on top of all the different aspects of online marketing performance measurement and optimisation, There’s now a huge range of disciplines in this industry from testing and optimisation to social media measurement to customer experience feedback and so on. This diversification is a trend that I will think will continue as well in 2008 and the challenges for practitioners, agencies, consultancies and indeed the industry itself in the form of the WAA will be to keep pace with the rate of change. If I am to make one prediction for the year 2008, it would be that I don’t think it’s going to be a dull one!

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