Why web analytics when there are so many tools out there – many available for free?  A few reasons:

First, our customers all have websites, but the they have a lot of trouble measuring their visitor data.  We found this when working on different aspects of advertising analytics, call center analytics and operational analytics, when those customers wanted to integrate their web data into complete customer analytics dashboards.

It’s because there is so much data generated by websites, but also because the data is different than most enterprise data.  Web data is “high cardinality” data, meaning there are many unique values – unique visitors, unique pages, unique visits.  This makes makes analysis difficult, expensive, slow, and sometimes impossible using existing web analytics or even data warehouse technologies.

Secondly, the leading tools, and even many of the newest ones, are built to measure pages and visits, but because of the intense data processing required, don’t do a very good job of associating activity with people. But, as visitors and customers interact with brands across an increasing array of websites, social media, and devices (and don’t forget offline) just measuring web pages isn’t enough.  Each visitor must be tracked separately to understand their behavior, their preferences and their relationship with the brand so their experience can be improved – what we all know as relationship marketing.

With that in mind, we decided to fill a need for very large customers (global brands, ecommerce sites, major publishers) that are advanced analytics users (so they can’t use free tools as they lack depth in data) that have reached system or visitor analysis limits with their current paid tools.

We leveraged the ground-breaking features that we launched in last Fall to create a visitor-centric web analytics system.   The primary feature is the unique user tracking, based on our exclusive High Cardinality Optimization technology.  This functionality enables VIA to track all aspects of unique users, and relate that back to unique user profiles (name and email if available, as well as interests, preferences, previous activity, demographics, etc.).  VIA is able to very efficiently measure a lot of information about a lot of unique items.

The VIA system can do unique user calculations in real-time (milliseconds) so web analysts and marketers can have an unprecedented view into recency, frequency, loyalty, campaign attribution, and also keep track of the specific stages a unique visitor or customer goes through over time.  This Customer Lifecycle functionality makes VIA truly different.

Additionally, because the underlying analytics database was designed to be a massively scalable, high performance system,  VIA can handle the largest datasets without failing, or taking a day to run reports, or limiting “long tail” reports.  VIA can measure hundreds of millions of unique users, billions and billions of events, page views and activities, and maintain hundreds of complex visitor segments.

This overview is a taste of things to come.  We’re extremely excited to welcome Visitor Insight & Analytics to the Truviso product family.