SPSS Web Analytics Genesis

Yesterday SPSS started shipping its Predictive Web Analytics product to combine historical and predictive insights from Web activity. The product marks the first prepackaged solution combining SPSS and NetGenesis technology since SPSS acquired NetGenesis Corp. in December 2001. Predictive Web Analytics merges SPSS's data mining and predictive modeling solution, Clementine 7.0, with the NetGenesis 6.0 Web analytics platform to determine various metrics, such as who's coming onto the site; who's staying the longest; and who's coming back. By combining Clementine with NetGenesis, customers can benefit in four ways: segment visitors based on their behavior; detect content and product affinities; automatically identify significant paths taken through a Web site; and predict visitors' propensity to buy, view particular content, or churn. The combined solution enables companies to identify sales opportunities and improve customer satisfaction, SPSS stated in a release. "Historically the Web analytics space was plagued with inch-deep analysis, only providing the number of hits and page views to a site. Our Predictive Web Analytics product can look at recency, frequency, and duration, and learn what segments are coming to the site, what types of products they are purchasing, and the most popular paths that result in a certain type of behavior such as purchasing, online registration, or conversion," says Jay Henderson, senior product manager for Web Analytics at SPSS. With this information, Henderson adds, companies can predict what a Web visitor is going to do in the future. The results can then be used for email campaigns and personalized content on the Web site. The announcement comes one month after SPSS released NetGenesis 6.0; enabling businesses to analyze their Web sites, measure the effectiveness of content, online transactions, and marketing campaigns. The latest platform version marks an improvement over NetGenesis 5.5, released at the end of last summer, by providing increased scalability for larger data volumes and increased flexibility and accuracy, Henderson says. For customers (generally Global 2000 organizations) looking to upgrade to the Predictive Web Analytics solution, they will have to upgrade to NetGenesis 6.0, and then buy licenses for Clementine, as well as some services. Pricing starts $135,000 plus services, and scales based on the size and complexity of the deployment.