Omniture Gets Closer to Partners

Omniture Genesis launched with 30 “accredited application partners” spanning disciplines like ad serving, behavioral targeting, e-mail marketing and search marketing. Some of the partners had begun integrating their products with Omniture over the past few years, and stepping up those efforts in the past year, according to Chris Parkin, senior director of product management at Omniture.

“The previous integration work can be seen as a foundation to this,” Parkin told ClickZ. “Many of those implementations required professional services on both sides. With Genesis, it’s a plug-and-play interface that enables marketers to automatically integrate between marketing applications, not IT.”

The partner relationships extend beyond offering an API, or asking partners to create development projects on their own, Parkin said. Instead, Omniture has worked closely with the partners, and even co-funded the development involved. In addition, the relationship includes two-way sharing of data, so Omniture and its partners each benefit from the optimization learnings of clients.

In many cases, the integration includes some default cross-channel marketing dashboards that customers can use, such as pre-defined remarketing data sets to be used with e-mail application partners, such as ones that are triggered when a certain product is viewed or added to a cart.

In the past, integration was API-based, requiring heavy involvement from a marketer’s IT department to put in place. Many times, it was necessary to engage a professional services firm to complete the integration. As marketers are working to provide more customization to users, they are relying on more applications from more partners, which makes it even more necessary for this kind of service to simplify the process, Parkin said.

“We’ve taken our deep infrastructure and put a ‘user experience wrapper’ around it, allowing marketers to take a step back from the underlying technical processes involved,” he said.

To highlight the integration of applications, Omniture will also include a product showcase within its product to let customers know which partners are in its accreditation program. The idea is to provide Omniture customers with a shortlist of partners that have already done the heavy lifting for integration, so those customers looking for a new partner in other marketing disciplines can more easily find one that will work well with Omniture.

Other analytics vendors have programs in place that integrate partners’ marketing applications into their products. WebSideStory launched its Stream API program more than two years ago, and Coremetrics has been tying up with e-mail vendors for just as long.

Parkin said that both of those providers are using API-level integration, which requires heavy IT involvement. He said Omniture’s partner list is broader than Coremetrics’ and that the data only flows one way with WebSideStory.

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