A French love fest in London?
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It almost sounds surreal when you think about it: “roast beefs” embracing “frogs’” technology (not pun intended at all, I respect both countries, this is to underline how historically those two wonderful countries have perceived each other) but with the evolution of our industry – Omniture’s acquisition by Adobe and the tireless advancement of free tools such as Google Analytics – one should take note that some European web analytics players are showing viable alternatives.
They’ve been batting and winning, those French, and more specifically AT Internet.
Now, I’m not one to push a vendor over another. After all, when I proclaimed vendor independence some years back, people thought I was crazy!
However, some months ago, when analyzing market penetrations of web analytics tools in Europe’s 27 countries, they already stood out of the crowd, with an almost lock on their home market.
The French have historically been battling with smaller players coming from the audience measurement side – “mesure d’audience”, as they say -, which is still a commonly accepted perspective, and together with an even older historical legacy, the Minitel, web analytics seemed to have had difficulty to really take traction in this country famous for it’s cuisine.
Web Analytics Wednesdays – les mercredis des Web Analytics – organised by Julien Coquet and Nicolas Malo, with over 100 attendees October 14th last and with the launch of Jacques Warren’s book in French regarding Web Analytics- #1 in terms of sales on Amazon.fr in the categories of electronic commerce and management – co-authored by Nicolas Malo, it looks like the French are really getting their act together. A network of French, Canadian and Belgian bloggers also supported the launch of the book in order to get traction on the market.
And, with the launch of NX or AT Digital Workspace NX as dubbed by them and reviewed by Stéphane Hamel here, my suspicions are confirmed that AT is here to stay and has some interesting features that other vendors might take note of, none least of which server monitoring to make sure that if your conversion rates are suffering, it’s not because your website is slow or basically down! Sounds familiar?
AT is today taking it’s offering seriously beyond French borders, and according to other American contenders on the European market, do a pretty good job at defending their solution during vendor selections.
Now, AT is not the only European vendor out there as mature solutions are also emerging such as in Germany with Webtrekk, offering raw data and real time segmentation, getting traction on a market where privacy is of some importance, possibly hindering penetrations of free tools. And with a multitude of books available in German about Web Analytics, authored by prominent writers such as Marco Hassler, Frank Reese, Udo Möller and Michael Kröhn as well as Timo Aden, Germany is well prepared to adequately serve it’s market and hopefully go beyond as well.
While the French call web analytics more often than not mesure d’audience, the Germans usually dub it Web Performance or Web Controlling, pushing it closer to the financial perspective of digital communication measurement and ROI.
The Dutch of course, have been out there for quite a while with claimed European leader Nedstat on the vendor’s side and one of the most qualitative event dedicated to web analytics, running I think now in it’s 4th year.
Looking more to the east and up North, one should also take note of Finish vendor Snoobi as well as Eastern European based Gemius traffic, which is winning a couple of deals all over Eastern Europe and noticeably in Turkey and Poland, which is after all the 6th biggest Internet population on the European continent after the usual suspects: Germany, the UK, France, Spain and Italy.
While the two latter countries are still battling with competition from tools such as Nielsen’s Netratings – which can’t really be found anywhere else on the continent – one has to note that Spain was lagging behind when it came to web analytics literature in Castilian Spanish. Sergio Maldonado now amends this through the release of “Analitica Web, Medir para Triunfar”.
In the more traditional Shakespearean language, I couldn’t finish this post without mentioning Steven Jackson’s excellent “The Cult of Web Analytics“, which looks at how web analytics is ideally set-up within companies and in my humble opinion a must read for anyone serious about how to implement a long term web analytics strategy. And on the free tools side, Europeans have also substantially contributed to our sector’s literature with Dennis R. Mortensen’s “Yahoo! Web Analytics” book as well as Brian Clifton’s “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics“.
This is what I’ve listed so far as my little European based Web Analytics library. I’d love to hear your thoughts about any other European authored books about our industry that I might have forgotten to mention in Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Polish, … ? Or any European based vendors that are also pushing on our beloved continent as well as specific terminology related to your market. Don’t hesitate to drop me a line or comment below.
London hosts today a Web Analytics Wednesday on Tuesday at the usual Bluu Morgate, where AT Internet’s NX will be showcased and it’s not too late to participate. I’m sure it will be great event & enjoy!
Posted Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | 17 responses | Add a Comment | Share, Save or Email
