Omniture Adds Recommendations to Product Suite

Omniture released a suite of marketing products that includes a product recommendation engine á la Amazon. The integrated offering also permits the inclusion of offline data sources, such as point of sale, and brings together for the first time several products the company picked up through its 2007 acquisitions of Visual Sciences, Offermatica, and Touch Clarity.

StubHub was among the clients to test Omniture Recommendations while the product was in beta. The concert and theater ticket seller used the new system to replace a manual process of recommendations. StubHub said it increased its average order value by 14 percent during the trial.

Eric Peterson, founder of consultancy practice Web Analytics Demystified, believes the recommendation engine is a direct response to competitor CoreMetrics’ Intelligent Offer product. “It’s good to see Omniture getting that level of functionality, powering recommendations, and putting Offermatica to effective use.” Offermatica, acquired by Omniture 18 months ago, specializes in site optimization through practices such as A/B testing.

Omniture’s optimization technology works with e-mail as well as Web sites. Once a portion of recipients has opened an e-mail the sender can evaluate the message, and if the creative needs to be changed, “You can then populate the other e-mails that haven’t been opened with another image. You can change what happens to the next 200,000 e-mails that get opened over the next hour,” said Omniture CEO and President Josh James.

The integration of Omniture’s various products into one marketing suite means customers will have a single log-in. “Instead of thinking about eight different products, it’s eight applications integrated into one product,” James said.

The product can incorporate offline data sources such as out-of-home, point-of-sale, and call centers. “Chief marketing officers are responsible for offline and online, getting data back from their organization,” said James. “Digital is dragging the rest of the world into a metrics driven [approach].”

Omniture alluded to the addition of the recommendation engine last month when it received an investment from WPP. The recommendation engine and other enhancements were announced at Omniture’s annual summit in Utah this week.