Spider power

“As maturity with Web analytics grows, sophisticated marketers will use data and customer intelligence to establish an ecosystem for marketing optimization. With Web analytics data as the foundation, marketers will formulate automated presentation methods that deliver relevant content and messaging to consumers in dynamic fashion. This presentation layer will contain self-learning algorithms and manage a process for ongoing evaluation and refinement. But ultimately, this optimization ecosystem will share knowledge across an entire organization.”

That’s what Forrester’s John Lovett and his team wrote about the Web analytics market, and just take a quick glance at the chart at the bottom of page 1. The forecasts point to a market of nearly $1 billion in a few short years. For certain, direct marketers account for much of the spending, but it will be interesting to watch how those “self-learning algorithms” affect the business-to-business and the business-to-employee constituencies.

Appinions is one that piqued my interest (but by no means are we endorsing or promoting the software), which offers a platform that enables a view of the opinions influencers are expressing across the Web, social media and blogs.

Appinions has customers using configurable, opinion-based applications based on content extraction and aggregation. It currently targets two markets: publishers and media companies on the Web, as well as brand managers, advertisers, marketers and other research organizations.

Iterations of “sentiment analysis” software have been behind marketing campaigns of all stripes for more than half a decade, and the software will continue to evolve to serve specific market niches. It’s going to be interesting to watch how analytics vendors penetrate the enterprise.