Omniture Unifies Marketing Suite, Adds Video Analytics

Omniture, which provides tools for marketers to track their online campaigns, is announcing a set of product upgrades today. New versions of its flagship product SiteCatalyst and its search advertising product SearchCenter will be released.

In addition to improved user interfaces (apparently five years of usability testing went into the products’ redesigns), the products in Omniture’s suite of SaaS applications are now connected tightly by a unified wrapper. Basically this means that marketers can move more easily between the products to manage various aspects of their campaigns. The unification is not only on the front end; all the programs now run off the same database as well.

As far as functionality is concerned, the most important addition to SiteCatalyst is support for the tracking of video usage across the web. If you are a marketer who uses videos to spread your message, you can now use Omniture to track metrics like how long people are watching your videos, whether they tend to skip forward in them, the rate at which they drop off, and which particular features in the video players they use.

The same technology that can be used to track video usage can also be applied to Flash and Flex-based applications. Omniture representatives say that only a 2 byte SWF file added to a Flash application is needed to prepare that app for tracking. As with video, marketers can see which application features are being used most.