I spoke with Mark Louck  from Visual Sciences  while I was at the MIXX Conference this afternoon; I viewed the Visual Sciences live Demo and got to ask Mark some very detailed and pointed questions about the Visual Sciences product and decided …..well, read on  and you’ll see what I decided about Visual Sciences.  Just follow my reasoning all the way though this post…it will be worth it.

Visual Sciences, in my opinion, is the best analytics package for a large corporation to run - no question of it.  The point of differentiation (as I pointed out to Mark) is something he told me: "with Visual Sciences you don’t have to tag any pages on the site - a Visual Sciences component will auto discover and categorize (by directory structure) every single page on the site for you without lifting a finger".  That’s a big statement - I accepted it as true as I have no reason not to.

If your running Web Analytics at a large corporation with a couple of million pages - you’d have to touch every single page of the site and put a Javascript tag on it for the analytics platform to pick up the the traffic activity on that page - except with Visual Sciences you would not need to (except for pages where you want to pick up the contents of a form that is being filled out - the main exception).  

Duh!!!!   Do you know how much money that would save ANY large site that’s moving to a new web analytics package? 

Millions of dollars - probably more than the 1 million dollars it costs to set up the Visual Sciences package for a large corporation in the first place (with just 15% per year in the years following the first one - and not including the cost of setting up your servers to run Visual Sciences).   There’s so many sign offs that are normally required in almost any large site - even with excellent page template distribution and in sync CMS systems - touching every page of a web site that has several million pages is one expensive proposition - one that people in charge get panic attacks just thinking about! 

It reminded me of when my old refrigerator died a while back - it was sucking up power and my electric bills were higher than they should have been.  I broke down and bought a new refrigerator and my electric bill went down by half and within a year I had my refrigerator paid for by the cost savings on my electric bill.  

The case of Visual Sciences makes a nice analogy to my refrigerator situation - you buy a much superior web analytics product that saves you more money than you’d have to spent to update all the pages of your large enterprise site.  In essence - for a large enterprise site - it can end up that Visual Sciences is actually FREE ……..that you will have more money in your pocket after one year than if you had spent the money on a competing web analytic product like Omniture or Coremetrics. 

Ok, so much for the cost of deploying Visual Sciences - what about the products analytics and web segmentation capabilities?

Visual Sciences has on the fly URL categorization that any analyst can use to organize parts of a site in a way that makes sense to the analyst and stakeholders and it can be done in real time.   Not only that - but any number of analysts can operate on the same database and make their own URL categorizations that don’t conflict with each other!!! cIt’s clear that Coremetrics can not even approach this level of processing power, nor does Omniture - though Omniture is a close second to Visual Sciences, based on what I have heard.

I wished for this on the fly, real time personal categorization, last year, after running into so many problems running advanced reports - but it’s clear that no other analytics product on the market today can touch Visual Sciences power to categorize data - the very essence of a high end analytics package.

On the the other hand, Visual Sciences is not a web analytics package most companies can afford to buy.  Mark Loucks had only a single page brochure to hand me - as i don’t have a lot of vocabulary to describe what I saw.  Just trust me - I pull data for large sites and I know very well the strengths and limitations of what is out on the market today…..Visual Sciences is the best Web Analytics platform money can buy - no question of it.

In fact, I asked Mark a question:  If Visual Sciences is so great..why don’t you have more clients that run it? 

Turns out that Mark had a reasonable answer;  Until early this year, when Visual Sciences was acquired by HBX - WebSideStory, the company had only one sales person.  After the acquisition - Visual Sciences now has 200 sales persons.

Yet many companies might still think hard on this purchase.  Let me assure you, based on what I saw today….Visual Sciences is the platform to buy - and, in my opinion, it’s the best fit for most corporations to run.  

What makes it possible for Visual Sciences to accomplish this lightening fast processing in real time?   A proprietary database back-end coupled with high end hardware clustering technology.  Most reports have only a couple of seconds delay for any measurement.  There’s no need for programs like "real time monitor" - all Visual Sciences data IS REAL TIME!!!!!!   Also, you can add other sets of data as a batch report (IE: matching up customers by IP Address to visits and purchases on a site - this can be done as a batch job overnight - or whenever you want to run it - asynchronously).

I think I have said enough - but there was much more I saw.  The whole point of Visual Sciences is that it makes collecting and processing data for high end reporting much easier, intuitive and visual than any other package on the market today (guess that is why it is called "Visual Sciences").  With Visual Sciences - you don’t need to spend much time collecting data and can now focus of what your stakeholders really want - ANALYSIS of the data.

Leave it that if you have worked on the kind of web analytics problems and sites I have - reading this will make perfect sense.