Unica upgrades product and forms alliance

Unica today announced the launch of its Internet Marketing Alliance Program. New partners include 24/7 Real Media, Efficient Frontier, Did-it and Performics. This move will allow Unica users to double check their own and third party advertising efforts. It is a move that Websidestory and Omniture already did.

 Here are the key advantages that Unica announced:

Accurate measurement on- and off-line: By tracking response and conversion data from across channels, the integrated solution will provide more complete measurement of the influence and return on investment of search and other online marketing initiatives. For example, it will automatically attribute relevant purchases of known visitors made via a call center, sales representative or store to the original search activity. This ability to measure the offline impact will enhance online search planning and strategies.

Unified reporting: Most marketers today must juggle multiple, disparate applications and reporting systems to estimate advertising spend and results and reconcile conflicting reports. Unica’s integrated solution provides a unified view of the marketing data needed to effectively plan, execute and analyze branding, acquisition and retention programs.

Addressability: Traditionally, search marketing is not targeted by customer segment or multi-channel response attribution. By leveraging customer value and segment information managed by Affinium, search marketers can drive keyword strategies to acquire more high value customers and increase marketing spend effectiveness for each target segment.

Scalability and Flexibility: Most integrated search and web analytics solutions can’t scale to meet the needs of high-volume search marketers. With Unica’s internet marketing alliance, search marketers with thousands of keywords benefit from the expertise and scalability of best-of-breed search solutions without sacrificing integration with web analytics. In addition, they have the benefits of Unica’s scalable analytics solution with the power to analyze hundreds of millions of page views, rapidly assess KPIs, and easily dig deeper with unique drill-anywhere(TM), trend-anything(TM) capabilities.

Bloganalytics

Feedburner recently bought Blogbeat, a very advanced blog analytics solution and announced that Blogbeat will be integrated in Feedburner. Today I checked my old Feedburner accounts and was wondering what Blogbeat will bring in this relationship

 Feedburner’s current features:

Dashboard which is a regular dashboard showing subscribers and reach.

Subscribers which records web browsers, Feed readers and agrregator

Live Hits which provides an 24 hour overview (kind of like the rush hour feature)

Item Use which records the search items

Uncommon uses which show references that could be a neat little news filter somebody wrote, a blog somebody assembled from feeds, or even blog spam

FeedBurner manages hundreds of thousands of feeds and in doing so, we’ve catalogued thousands of common places where feeds are referenced throughout the Web.

Blogbeat features:

Blog summary (dashboard)
Recent Visitors
Recently viewed posts
Recent referrers
Recent searches (kewyords engine)
Visitors by Day
Time of Day
Day of Week
Visitor Demographics (Browser, Languages, Operating System, screen resoulitios)
User labeling

If you compare both services it is clear that Feedburner will gain momentum and will be the leading force of bloganalytics.  It will be interesting to see how other bloganalytics and webanalytics vendors react to Feedburners new release, which will happen by end of this year.

Top 10 General News Sites by Unique Visitors

Comscore announced an analysis of consumer activity at general news sites in June 2006. More than
54 percent of all U.S. Internet users visited sites in the General News category in June 2006, demonstrating consumers’ reliance on the Web as a source for news information.

 US:

                                                                
                                                        Jun-06                Reach
    Total Internet: Total Audience          172,907                 N/A
    General News                                 94,070                100%
    Yahoo! News                                  31,186                 33%
    MSNBC                                          23,393                 25%
    AOL News                                      20,405                 22%
    CNN                                              19,891                 21%
    Internet Broadcasting                      9,518                 10%
    The New York Times Brand               8,593                  9%
    Tribune Newspapers                         8,456                  9%
    Knight Ridder Digital                         7,585                  8%
    ABCNEWS DIGITAL                          7,533                  8%
    USATODAY Sites                              7,252                  8%
 Worldwide:

                                                         
                                                         Jun-06                Reach
    Total Internet: Total Audience          712,976                 N/A
    General News                                319,964                100%
    Yahoo! News                                  76,245                 24%
    CNN                                              30,413                 10%
    MSNBC                                          28,557                  9%
    163.COM News                                28,484                  9%
    QQ.COM News                                 26,178                  8%
    SINA News                                     25,810                  8%
    AOL News                                      23,901                  7%
    The New York Times Brand              13,068                  4%
    BBC UKFS News (excl. home page)   11,949                  4%
    TOM.COM News                               10,016                  3%
What astonishes me is that Yahoo! News, MSN News and AOL News rank this high. I believe these three News sites are mostly driven by the massive Email accounts and should be measured differently. If I remember right MSN Hotmail and the others redirect you to their news site once you logged out of your account. It doesn’t really mean that anybody reads theses News. An Eyetracking study would be very interesting regarding these sites.