Omniture buys web analytics firm, upgrades discovery tool

Omniture will pay around $51.5m in cash for London-based and privately held Touch Clarity. The exact purchase price is dependent on Touch Clarity meeting certain performance targets this year.

The transaction is expected to close no later than the first quarter and factors in an additional $8.5m in assumed vested stock options.

All 50 of Touch Clarity’s engineering, clients services, sales and marketing staff located at offices in London and Boston, Massachusetts are expected to be bought on board. The majority will continue to be based in London.

Touch Clarity’s software, which is delivered as software-as-a-service, uses predictive modeling, data mining and machine learning technologies to automate traditionally manual ways of using web analytics insights to better target online customers with relevant content and promotional offers.

‘We were looking for game changing ways to leverage our platform to help automate the actionability of the online optimizations that online marketers should take, said Chris Parkin, senior director of products and services at Orem-Utah-based Omniture.

[Touch Clarity] are years ahead of competition because its software is real-time and operates on mathematical real-time algorithms that are self-learning.

Parkin said that the technology differs from other behavioral targeting products on the market that are generally rules-driven.

They require a person to think about which rules to apply under certain conditions. That’s difficult to maintain in highly dynamic and high-scale environments that we’re typically supporting.

Parkin added that Touch Clarity’s software is complementary to SiteCatalyst, since they are both typically purchased by the same buyer. He pointed out that integration with Omniture’s SiteCatalyst product line shouldn’t be a problem since Touch Clarity was the first application partner to enroll in Omniture’s Open Transaction Framework which provides a standard way to collect website activity data using Omniture’s Universal Tag scheme.

That’ll slipstream deployment into our existing Tag infrastructure and will require no retagging effort from our customers.

Touch Clarity has 35 customers mainly in the UK, including HSBC, BT, and Lloyds TSB, but only shares a couple with Omniture — AOL and Lastminute.com.

Parkin therefore see’s plenty of greenfield opportunity for cross selling on both sides, particularly into Omniture’s 2,000-strong customer base.

The acquisition follows a month after Omniture acquired another European web analytics firm, Denmark-based Instadia A/S.

Separately, Omniture also upgraded its Discover visual analytics tool which effectively delivers a business user interface for surfing millions of unique customer transactions stored in Omniture’s web analytics data warehouse.

Discover uses a variety of visualization techniques for customer segmentation and real-time behavioral analysis. It lets users drill down from SiteCatalyst’s high-level, aggregate reports to the granular behavioral clickstream data of individual website visitors and present it as business visualizations.

Discover 2.0 now includes several new capabilities including: unlimited segmentations, a feature that compare multiple predefined or custom-built customer segments on the fly; a multidimensional site analysis tool that visually depicts multiple website navigation dimensions like color, size, position and movement; fallout analysis, to assess the effectiveness of online processes; and pathing analysis to analyze the possible range of navigation options available to online users.

An interesting new feature is virtual focus groups that allow users to identify unique visitor preferences that can be replayed as sessions and captured as new customer segments.

These new capabilities give online marketers more analytic momentum to go into our system and explore granular data to identify hidden business value and uncover new profitable customer segments, Parkin explained.

Omniture is launching Discover 2.0 at a special event in New York today.

The upgrade follows a busy couple of months for Omniture on the product-front. Last December it launched its new Genesis product to help customers and partners customize and integrate with the SiteCatalyst platform.

As a result of the Touch Clarity transaction Omniture lowered its financial outlook and now expects to record a wider net loss in its first quarter of around 10 to 11 cents per share. The company had previously forecast a loss of between 4 to 5 cents per share. Analysts had pegged earnings of a cent per share on $26.7m revenue.

For the full year Omniture now expects a net loss of 32 to 36 cents a share on revenue of $130m to $132m. That revises a previous forecast of a loss of 13 to 15 cents a share on revenue of $128m to $130m.

Shares of Omniture fell 4% yesterday on Nasdaq following the revised outlook to $14.35. The stock has traded from $5.60 to $17.74 in the past 12 months.