Coremetrics Redefines Web Analytics
with Summer Release of Coremetrics 2005

 

Coremetrics Delivers Industry's Most Accurate & Precise Analysis
of Online Business Performance

 

San Mateo, Calif. – June 7, 2005 – Coremetrics™, a leading provider of hosted Web analytics and precision marketing solutions, today announced the summer release of Coremetrics 2005. This release provides the industry's most accurate and precise analysis of online business performance by offering groundbreaking new functionality in three key areas: greatest accuracy in measuring online customer behavior; unprecedented flexibility in modeling actual site traffic; and integrated best practice metrics. In addition, Coremetrics 2005 provides usability enhancements for easier and faster reporting, improved trending, and new capabilities for reporting on form usability. All new features are designed to ensure that eCommerce managers, marketers, merchandisers, and site designers can quickly and easily extract maximum value from online behavioral data to achieve unprecedented ROI.

"The Web analytics market is at a crossroads—and the leaders will be determined by how effectively they help clients use their customer data to make better business decisions," said Joe Davis, president and CEO of Coremetrics. "While our competitors struggle to collect, store, and maintain individual customer information, we are focused on providing more precise views of customer behavior so that our clients can act quickly to generate rapid ROI. We will continue to focus on delivering embedded industry best practices as we build upon our legacy of providing the industry's most comprehensive view of behavioral data."

Coremetrics 2005 is the only Web analytics solution that offers pre-built integration with over 35 industry partners for targeted email marketing, rich media, search, and survey functionality. All the new features available in the summer release are designed to guide companies toward rapid ROI based on proven best practices and Coremetrics' expertise in vertical market segments.

Greatest Accuracy for Online Customer Behavior Measurement

eCommerce organizations are recognizing that almost 6% of online orders are rejected or cancelled because of suspicions of fraud (Cybersource 6th Annual Online Fraud Report, 2005), and financial services institutions frequently see rejections of applications due to insufficient credit. Further, cancellations are not captured by page tags or server logs, creating possible misrepresentation in Web analytics data for online merchants.

Coremetrics is committed to providing the greatest level of accuracy for its clients. With Coremetrics Transaction Reconciliation, Coremetrics moves beyond basic Web data capture by allowing eCommerce organizations to reconcile orders or applications that are cancelled or rejected in the back office with data submitted from the Web browser. Using Coremetrics Transaction Reconciliation, users can act on merchandising and transaction data with confidence and identify the product categories most heavily impacted by fraud, cancellations or rejections.

Emerging trends such as spyware adoption and consumer privacy concerns have also influenced accuracy and have increased the need to ensure that cookies used to identify visitors are minimally invasive in the customer's browser. Substantiating research from leading analysts, Coremetrics' research has shown that anonymous rates for clients leveraging third-party cookies to identify unique browsers can be as high as 20% and has an enormous impact on accuracy for a variety of metrics.

In response, Coremetrics has delivered the first solution to provide issuance of first-party cookies through a hosted domain and is the only solution in the industry to allow clients to upgrade from existing third-party tracking without any loss of historical customer profiles. Using first-party data collection, Coremetrics clients typically see anonymous rates below 1% of all visitor traffic.

Unprecedented Flexibility for Modeling Site Traffic

In this release, Coremetrics delivers unprecedented control and flexibility into the hands of the end-user with TruePath. Representing a revolutionary leap forward in customer path modeling and visualization, TruePath is an integrated visualization tool that provides comprehensive analysis of customer Web-browsing patterns and scenarios within a browser. Using TruePath, clients can model actual customer paths in real time as they browse their own Web sites. Unlike traditional Web analytics tools, which require predefinition of steps during implementation, TruePath allows marketers to flexibly group pages, define required and optional steps on the fly, and base path analysis on realistic customer scenarios and outcomes Coremetrics' TruePath allows organizations to better understand conversion patterns, optimize key site processes, and improve the customer experience.

In addition, Coremetrics enhances the flexibility of key event-tracking capabilities by leveraging user-defined scenarios to deliver site-wide conversion reporting on an unlimited number of success events. This feature, Key Paths, allows clients to define any arbitrary page, pages, or sequence of pages as a "key path." Clients can then easily identify how many people successfully landed on the page, viewed a product or detail page, and initiated an action, as well as how many people initiated this sequence but did not complete it.

Integrated Best Practice Metrics

Coremetrics allows clients to easily measure the key conversion points on their sites with its newly released Conversion Dashboards. Designed to deliver actionable analytics with best practice Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) out of the box, Conversion Dashboards allow clients to quickly assess bottlenecks in the key conversion steps and target key areas for improvement. More importantly, using the Conversion Dashboards, any eCommerce Manager can evaluate site performance against internal benchmarks and goals, manage resource investments, and make immediate comparisons to industry-wide benchmark data included in Coremetrics LIVEmark Index.

Announced earlier this year, the LIVEmark Index is the industry's most comprehensive benchmark for eBusiness performance, providing critical comparison data for site-wide key performance indicators across more than 150 leading retail brands, which collectively transact over $5.3 billion dollars annually.

Coremetrics' unparalleled depth of domain expertise is also brought to bear through pre-built analytical templates that deliver best practice report configurations out of the box throughout Coremetrics 2005. Industry-specific templates provide rapid insight without the need to either define critical events up-front during implementation or struggle with building out reports post-implementation. This allows organizations to focus on managing their businesses, not their Web analytics tool. Increased end-user flexibility also allows clients to add and remove metrics, as well as create new calculated metrics to tailor reporting templates to meet individual or role-based needs.

Additional New Features in Coremetrics 2005

Other features of this release include:

• Usability enhancements, such as more intuitive navigation and report layout, that improve adoption and ease of use for all users.
• Enhanced trending functionality, allowing for flexible selection of category- and item-level data for trending, smoothing, and comparison, as well as multi-view publishing of trend reports to users and groups.
• Improved form analysis, which enables companies to accurately and automatically assess the usability of on-site forms to help optimize application, registration, and checkout forms, reduce form field abandonment, and measure the value of investment in form personalization.
• Marketing enhancements that help clients understand marketing influences across different points in the customer life cycle. Clients can define unique conversion events, including email registrations, form completions, searches, or product views, for correlation to campaign response. Using this unique capability, marketers can move beyond marketing ROI calculations to measure campaign impact across distinct points in the conversion continuum.

Pricing and Availability

The summer release of Coremetrics 2005 will be available later this month. Existing clients will be automatically upgraded, with the ability to purchase TruePath, marketing enhancements, first-party data collection, and Transaction Reconciliation for an additional fee. Coremetrics also continues to offer Web-based and in-person training courses and strategic consulting services to help organizations realize the highest levels of ROI for their Web analytics and precision marketing solutions.

About Coremetrics

Coremetrics is a leading provider of hosted Web analytics, marketing and merchandising solutions. The company's flagship product, Coremetrics 2005, is the industry's only Web analytics platform that captures and stores all customer and visitor clickstream activity to build LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles that serve as the foundation for all successful e-business initiatives. With Coremetrics 2005, online marketers, IT managers, and e-commerce executives are able to attract and convert high-value visitors, increase customer lifetime value, and create a multichannel view of customer behavior. Coremetrics services over 400 unique brands online, including Bank of America, Columbia House, CompUSA, Eddie Bauer, Motorola, The Weather Channel, Victoria 's Secret, and Williams-Sonoma. Coremetrics is privately held with funding from Accel Partners and Highland Capital Partners, and is headquartered in San Mateo , California with offices across the U.S. and in London . To learn more about Coremetrics, visit www.coremetrics.com or call 877-721-CORE.

Coremetrics has strongly supported online privacy since its inception. To learn more, visit www.coremetrics.com/privacy .

###

Coremetrics is the trademark of Coremetrics, Inc. Any other marks used in this document are trademarks or registered trademarks of the manufacturers or marketers of the products with which the marks are associated.