Unica Merges Online With Offline

Unica unveiled its Affinium NetInsight yesterday, the company's first Web-analytics solution, as part of its extensive Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) Affinium suite. Affinium NetInsight will be generally available this summer either as software or as an on-demand model, and can be sold separately or as a part of Unica's Affinium suite. NetInsight, in conjunction with other Affinium suite modules, will enable marketers to integrate Web analytics with other customer data across the enterprise, according to the company. Marketers will be able to automate marketing based on their Web and cross-channel knowledge to "close the loop across customer touch points," says Andrew Hally, senior director of segment management at Unica. For example, Hally says marketers can automate the end-to-end process for lead generation from pay-per-click advertising to lead capture and distribution. Or, they can tie offline purchases to search engine marketing to improve measurement and incorporate Web behavior into customer segmentation and profiles for improved targeting. Despite the Internet's increasing importance as a customer touch point, marketers have long grappled with combining demographic and transactional customer data with Web behavior. NetInsight is a product that addresses this need, says Bill Gassman, research director at Gartner. "Companies are beginning to utilize their Web channels strategically. Slowly but surely, companies are looking to integrate Web channel information with other channels, such as sales, support, and marketing. Companies need to synchronize customer segmentation and understand buyer behavior and purchasing information across all channels." Based off of technology from Unica's March 2006 acquisition of Web-analytics provider Sane Solutions, NetInsight uses an open and scalable Web data warehouse. Besides making the product easy to integrate with other marketing solutions, the open architecture will let end-users integrate NetInsight with traditional BI tools like Business Objects and SAS. "Marketers efforts to combine offline with online have been hampered because data is trapped in siloed, proprietary stores," Hally says. "That's why other Web analytic vendors like WebSideStory and Omniture have to add these warehouse products as a secondary solution because their primary solution can't do that. To become truly multichannel, you have to make the information open and accessible to all the other tools marketers use." Related articles: Unica Acquires MarketSoft SAS Buys a Build Out in the MRM Market WebSideStory Ups the Search Solution Ante

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