Coremetrics offers money back guarantee for Omniture customers (with a couple of white lies)

Joe Davis over at Coremetrics published a video blog article yesterday offering Omniture customers a 100% money back guarantee with free implementation and consulting for Omniture customers who are concerned about the Adobe relationship to sign with Coremetrics. It’s a common tactics, I recall Webtrends offering a similar deal to WebSideStory customers when Omniture acquired them.

This is a fair deal, and with the strength of the Coremetrics platform is something worth considering, perhaps more so if your digital strategy is focussed on eCommerce, media based aqcuisition and email driven relationship marketing (for me, these are the strengths of the Coremetrics platform) with the following services. However, selecting and choosing any digital vendor (CMS, analytics, adserver, email) is something that should be considered very carefully and driven by business requirements not whims. Coremetrics are hoping customers are worried about Adobe:

The recent $1.8 billion acquisition of Omniture by Adobe has no doubt created uncertainty about the future of your analytics.

So, here’s Joe Davis describing the Coremetrics money-back deal in a nice infomercial style:

Unfortunately there is misinformation in the video

As I said above, Coremetrics is a great platform - so when I saw some claims in the video that seemed a little incorrect I think it’s worth leveling the playing field. Here are the claims:

1. Coremetrics is the only vendor to offer a simplified, universal approach to tagging

Universal tagging is a hot topic, and I think given the number of recent discussions around the subject theres increasing consensus amongst consultants and vendors that the tagging process needs to change. With this in mind I expect lots of change in the coming 6 months, but to draw immediate comparisons here - only last week did Unica announce their new “Interactive Marketing” suite, which amongst other services offers a ‘fast and flexible integration with Unica Softtags’.

This sounds remarkably similar to a simplified universal approach?

2. Coremetrics is the only vendor to offer benchmarking against competitors

Everyone wants benchmarking right? It’s the first question I usually get asked on a new engagement - how do we compare with our competitors. For most digital analysts, especially in the US, there are plenty of resources available for competitor analysis - companies such as Compete (being integrated with Omniture), Quantcast (recently integrated with Webtrends) and Comscore offer panel and pixel based competitive research. Google goes a step further (though I’m not convinced this is a useful features) to offer a benchmarking service though a data sharing opt-in process.

3. Coremetrics is the only vendor to offer lifetime profiles of your customers

This is an interesting one, as far as I am aware all the analytics vendors (except Google Analytics) offer a data import service:

• Yahoo Web Analytics offers (unsupported) a feature called “EDS” (External Data Sources)
• Omniture offers DB VISTA in Site Catalyst, or full CRM/ Database integration with Omniture Insight 
• Webtrends offers Visitor Intelligence.

In Conclusion

Why not talk about the truly innovative features of Coremetrics, including the powerful campaign attribution features (discussed in the recent Forrester article on Media Attribution) that none of the other competitors offer (ok, Yahoo offers a form of basic attribution analysis) where Coremetrics was described:

Coremetrics has an impressive road map and a track record of delivering on its promises, so look for an increasingly sophisticated offering in the near term.

If the Coremetrics offer sounds tempting for your business, please make sure you fully evaluate the Coremetrics solution, and ensure that it is your own research on your own requirements from which you benchmark performance and capabilities and not based on sales / marketing materials from the vendors.