Thanks for your post. I like your idea of managed marketing service platform given many organisations struggle with resourcing and driving insights.

In terms of the data feeds, my answer is, it depends on the scope of integration. We have integrated feeds from corporate applications for campaign tracking purposes. For instance, a lead is attributed to a marketing campaign, once the lead is closed-won offline, bringing back the dollar amount into the web analytics solution so ROI can be calculated.

The question I was raising in the article was more about you know the demographics, product holdings and would like to append behavioural data for targeting purposes. This would be challenging to achieve with feeds. You’d need a real time integration.

Hurol

Good point about the desire for an open architecture! May I ask, what is your impression of data feeds from hosted web analytics solutions? Some say they work fine, 9 out of 10 times. Some say they don’t work great at all. But with hosted analytics there isn’t really an alternative.

Now, one could choose a web analytics solution that can be installed on premises. And if the solution has an open architecture then that will make integrations with marketing systems easier. But maintaining a solution inhouse is not everybody’s cup of tea.

Maybe the ideal solution are either managed marketing services where specialists take care of it on behalf of marketers. Or pre-integrated on-demand suites. The latter can’t be best of breed though. But maybe that is an OK compromise.

Akin