Coremetrics Puts a 2010 Face on Analytics

Web analytics provider Coremetrics overhauled its front-office system last year, and in 2010 it has rebuilt its back office system, hosting the platform on new technology that will make the analytics applications run faster. Users may not be able to tell that the technology is built any differently, but they might notice a faster Web application, and a brand new interface that is set to launch in June. Coremetrics Analytics 2010 is currently in Beta and was announced last week at the company's user conference. Coremetrics Chief Strategy Officer John Squire reports that customers rejoiced upon the announcement of new features, most of them cutting down on the time it takes analysts to do their jobs.  

The product management team within Coremetrics, which Squire refers to as "analytics anthropologists" visited customers before the new platform was developed to observe how Web analysts work everyday. One notable observation? The system was not compatible with the level of multi-tasking in which users desired.  "Clients were opening up so many menus --- we call it 'four handed piano playing'," Squire reports. "We realized there was a better way to make sense of a lot of analytics at once."

Workbooks
In helping an analyst multi-task, Coremetrics introduced Workbooks, which allow the user to work on several reports as once, and even group them according to use, or interest. Adding a new level of collaboration, the workbooks can be packaged up and sent in groups to other users. "It's a nice feature, says Forrester Senior Analyst Joe Stanhope, "especially for a company with many stakeholders."

Insights
Coremetrics has brought forth several new features that take burden off analysts. The Coremetrics system, for instance, reads a user's data and looks for anomalies. It then compares the data to Coremetrics wide range of metrics and offers recommendations on what marketers, for example, should stop investing in, or what products they should zero in on.

"It's the web analyst's job to figure these things out, but honestly there's so much data going around, and it's changing so fast, it's hard for people to look at everything and find outliers when they occur," Stanhope says. "This Insights product is a quick way to scan data fast and say, 'Look things popped up over night,' or 'This is unusual.'" The system makes useful recommendations of what do with that information.

Additionally, Squire says they brought forth a "beautiful feature" that will save users time -- and clicks. As a user is working on a report, the Coremetrics program "keeps persistence" and when the user comes back to the report, whether she has logged out or restarted her computer, her place will be saved and she will be directed to whatever she was working on.

"It's very sticky," Stanhope says of the new feature. "Web analysts work on a lot of things, they drill down, work on these reports, if you get shut down and have to drill back though, and it's really a pain."

Mobile
There's a tremendous amount of interest in how marketers can reach a consumer audience via mobile, Squire says. Coremetrics brought forth new technology and metrics for marketers running mobile campaigns. Additionally, the vendor released a new application -- free on the Apple AppStore -- for the iPad and iPhone. The Coremetrics mobile application is also compatible for Android and Blackberry devices.
Squire reports that at the company's user summit last week, there was tremendous interest around the iPad device. "It looked like Apple had sponsored our client summit," he says.

APIs
Coremetrics also improved its API pluggability, better suiting the application for use by third-party software applications, like an email marketing or data import tool.  "Having interactivity with other environments is becoming important," Stanhope notes. "Web analytics is becoming a part of a bigger ecosystem."

News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine.

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