Online Marketing eased by vendors

IT vendors queue up to ease web marketing woes

Online marketers were given new tools designed to make their campaigns more effective, with the launch of the latest version of Coremetrics' namesake web analytics technology and Digital River's new MarketStudio toolset.

Coremetrics 2007 features a Real Time Monitoring application that allows users to track activities such as time-dependent special offers and make changes to them according to their performance, said the firm's regional vice-president, Frank Lombos.

"Typically, analytics are intended to guide marketing decisions made days or weeks later, but this is a real-time dashboard [showing you] what's happening on your site," he explained.

The Coremetrics suite also includes an Intelligent Offer tool, which allows firms to automate cross-promotional activities, in a similar way to Amazon's pioneering "also bought" feature. It lets marketing managers set their preferences for this by basing their Intelligent Offer on number of sales or the buying behaviour of the customer, for example.

Coremetrics also announced closer integration with IBM's WebSphere Commerce e-commerce platform, so that its product now ships as the default analytics tool within WebSphere.

"IBM's [offering] is typically focused on content sites, portals and intranets, so we've widened the offering and the range of opportunities open to us, and it adds credibility to the product," said Lombos.

Meanwhile, e-commerce outsourcing provider Digital River's new MarketStudio toolset gives marketers the ability to monitor and report on the performance of their online activities, from a single dashboard.

"Some clients prefer the hands-on approach and want to get into the system and do marketing activities themselves," explained the firm's vice-president for Europe, John Strosahl. "So we've integrated [various tools] with a dashboard so they can optimise their marketing activities."

MarketStudio will give users access to the firm's web analytics, email delivery, bid management and affiliate technologies, added Digital River's senior product manager, Pete Olson.

"The other benefit is that because we own, control and manage the toolsets, we can provide more accurate, detailed data to give the chief marketing officer more confidence in the decisions he makes," he explained.

Sarah Burnett of analyst firm Butler Group welcomed the features in both offerings, but said their success or failure would be governed by ease-of-use.

"This is an area still recovering from the dot-com crash and the marketing function is still a bit resistant to technology," she explained. "Because there's now a potential for growth, there will be big competition getting into this market for both companies."