Omniture Announces SocialAnalytics
Omniture’s SocialAnalytics offering won’t be publicly available until summer of this year, but the early glimpses show big promise for the burgeoning field of SocialAnalytics. What makes this tool different from the many capable tools already out on the market is the tight integration of web analytics data with social brand or keyword mentions. This means that you can collect and analyze data from major social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (45 data social media sources in total) and perform web analytics style slicing and dicing on the results.
Yet, the beauty of this solution is that users can trend and analyze social metrics against any metric within the SiteCatalyst interface. Further, the SocialAnalytics offering allows users to correlate data from social media with SiteCatalyst metrics and even offers a percentage of statistical confidence. This exceeds what I’ve seen in any other social analytics offering currently on the market. To illustrate with a hypothetical example, the Omniture SocialAnalytics capabilities will allow you to imbed traditional SiteCatalyst campaign ID codes into a your social media marketing on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, which could all be monitored for activity within the SiteCatalyst interface. You could then trend the social data from campaigns and mentions against any metrics that you currently use within SiteCatalyst such as visitors or conversions. Thus, you could monitor the impact of your social marketing as a driver for website traffic and determine what percentage of that traffic actually purchased online as a result of the social campaign. The tool does this by making a correlation (versus actually pinning causation), but the statistical confidence will deliver assurance as to the validity of the correlation. This is magical. It actually enables users to quantify ROI from social marketing activities with a degree of statistical confidence. No one else has this that I’m aware of today.
Further, one of my pet peeves with today’s social analytics tools is the inability to create custom metrics. In most cases, you have to deal with the formulas and calculations that vendors deliver. The exception here is firms like Radian6 that allow users to weight factors for calculated metrics like Influence, whereby users do have some controls over their metrics. Yet, Omniture’s SocialAnalytics allows users carte blanche ability to create custom metrics and report on them within SiteCatalyst and even leverage in report builder and other Omniture functions. This is a revolutionary step in controlling the way that social is currently measured because it introduces a level of customization that was formerly absent.
While, it’s still early days and this was only my first glimpse at the product, you can probably tell that I’m bullish already. It’s currently in private beta for a few lucky Omniture customers who will undoubtedly bang away at it and help to shape the future of this product. However, there’s still a long way to go before this new tool is street legal, so most Omniture users will have to wait until the general release this summer. I’ll also say that this tool currently does not offer a wholesale replacement for Radian6 or other enterprise social analytics vendors on the market. The primary reason for this is that there is no engagement capability from the interface (i.e., can’t send Tweets or respond to Facebook comments directly). Additionally, there is no workflow built into the SocialAnalytics solution either. Thus, while social is about the interaction between a brand and its customers, Omniture is still leaving its clients to work that out using other means. They do however deliver some of the most robust analysis and reporting capabilities of anyone out there. If you’re looking to make sense of social media and measure the impact it has on your business operations; I suggest you give Omniture’s new SocialAnalytics tool a good look.
