Social Mode

Here’s another “not really anything helpful” product release from Omniture and the “metrics industry”.

Omniture is extending its SiteCatalyst measurement tool to native iPhone applications, enabling developers and marketers to gain insight on how users are interacting with their iPhone apps, based on real-time information. This should allow them not only to improve the user experience based on analytics, but also make adjustement necessary to generate more revenue by enhancing ad clicks, purchasing and increasing page views.

Having implemented Omniture some 50 or 60 times (against my judgement, and sometimes will (not that I have any)!), I can tell you definitively nothing omniture provides is unique nor worth the cash.

You’ve always been able to track native iPhone apps. Here are the many ways

• For mostly non-networked apps, simply write a tracker function that dumps data to the app data storage and occassionally send that data back to a remote server
• Using google Analytics, create a URL scheme and “ping” those URLS on various events in the app that then fire off the google analytics
• Create your own tracking system using URLs
• Create your own tracking using custom “pixel” calls
• ….

The reason I always steer clear of Omniture is that once you’re into a naming convention and particular set up, it’s damn near impossible to change it.  Generally you’re trapped with legacy data, reports and business rules unless you want to redo the whole damn thing.

Tis far better to generalize the data warehouse and create a reporting layer that works for what you need at that time.  Even Google Analytics is easier to abstract that omniture.

Omniture is the big dog and people will continue to get sucked into it for lack of knowing anything else.   Most business intelligence folks who work primarily on the web will have the most experience with Omniture, thus assuring it always gets the nod.  It’s basically the same contigencies that kept Microsoft Office in the lead for so long.  You can teach an old dog new tricks (software), it just takes a really long time (or a really big disruptor).

Who will be the big disruptor in analytics?  Will anyone come up with something substantially better than Omniture and Google Analytics (you can’t compete on price, cause one of them is free!)?