Omniture claim that their recent acquisition of Touch Clarity for $60m provides a Game Changing Combination to their clients. An interesting observation and perhaps a true one.
What is critical about this acquisition is that it moves Omniture from only touching their clients businesses, to actually touching their clients customers. It has long been clear that web analytics is becoming far more a behavioural science as the sophistication of analytics tools has increased (perhaps even replacing usability testing in some cases), but a move into content production/management as a byproduct of the analysis is a significant step forward.
The synergies between Omniture and Touch Clarity appear to be:
- Shared use of technology to segment users
- Some large shared clients (like AOL) and some clients which TC have now that Omniture would love to have
- Marketing led reason for existence backed by strong technology development
- Leveraging content targeting technology improvements brought about by ROI measures for campaigns
What does this type of development hold for internet in the longer term? Perhaps if we extend this combination of measurement, segmentation, personalisation, behavioural targeting and content production as far as it will go, we will see a wildly different means of web usage.
Forget typing your chosen keywords into Google ? Google will already know everything about your behavior, your purchasing preferences, your browsing and publication preferences and be able to present you with personalized homepage content (perhaps in the form of a search result) relating to the day of the week, the sites that you recently purchased from (or at least the types of sites that you visited), and the type of ?segment? that your behavior fits. In fact we may be allowing sites to provide this as a service rather than having to search ourselves.
Perhaps this combination of personalization and measurement is the start of the end of search as we know it?
Deja tu comentario