Like most conference goers, I don’t find myself going out of my way to stop by too many booths. I’ve been on both sides of boothing (manning a booth being of the hardest most exhausting jobs I've ever done), and it’s pretty thankless all the way around.
If you want information, you usually can’t get it from the booth. And if you want to talk to qualified buyers, you usually don’t find them at your booth.
But I while at eMetrics I did seek out the ObservePoint booth since their tool had come up in several client conversations and I’d been talking with them a bit.
ObservePoint is the baby of Robert Seolas and John Pestana (an Omniture founder) and they’ve built a SaaS product targeted to the Web Analytics governance market. They provide three services right now: up-time monitoring, transaction monitoring, and, most interesting, site auditing.
The site audit program is pretty sweet. Since it’s based on a SaaS model, it’s almost shockingly easy to get setup and started. The tool does a nice job of presenting back the information from a site scan in a way that makes it easy to digest and use. Particularly powerful is the ability to see the changes between your last two audits. With the capability to setup, trigger and monitor regular scans, ObservePoint provides the best framework for ongoing measurement governance that I’ve seen.
There are still a few holes in the system (duplicate URLS aren’t easy to find, contains logic isn’t available, you can’t pivot on a variable only on a page, it can’t be targeted into transactional or secure areas or used for automated testing), but it’s already in first release a very nice product – and it’s something that this market can really use.
When we at Semphonic do Omniture Site Audits, we stress the need for a blend of automation, manual research and even senior consulting to do the job right. Automation provides the essential information about tag presence and configuration that is nearly impossible (or very expensive) to capture by hand - especially for larger sites. In addition, automation is the only practical solution for most ongoing governance since you can't constantly be running manual audits. On the other hand, ObservePoint doesn't change the basic mix - you still need someone who can understand what the site is supposed to be capturing and what the improvement opportunities really are - but it makes the automation piece faster, easier and potentially more robust than it's ever been before.
If you need to monitor tag presence and configuration on thousands of URLs and your site isn’t “outside-the-box” of what a spider will handle, ObservePoint is a product you should check out.
ObservePoint is very interesting and I had a great chat with the team while attending eMetrics. While WASP (http://WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com) doesn't have the scaling and "corporate" appeal of ObservePoint, WASP offers a different perspective and works with secured websites (intranets, extranets) as well as transactions, offers an instantaneous view (instead of waiting for crawl results, or when in the process of implementing the tags and you don't want to push to production right away) and is a lot cheaper :)
I also had a talk with Maxamine a while back and the outcome of our conversation was essentially: we try to address the same challenge from different perspectives, and we don't address the same market (i.e. Fortune 1000 vs long tail). There is clearly room for both products.
From this perspective, I think one would largely benefit from WASP for quick, on-the-spot checks, and Observpoint for large scale site audits (over 10,000 pages).
Stéphane Hamel
http://immeria.net
http://WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com
Posted by: Stéphane Hamel | May 17, 2009 at 03:35 PM
Thanks for mentioning ObservePoint SiteAudit, Gary.
To get more information on SiteAudit, visit http://www.observepoint.com/info/site_audit.
If you're interested in a free preliminary scan of your site, please contact us at sales@observepoint.com.
Posted by: Michelle Farr | May 20, 2009 at 12:24 PM