Thoughts on Adobe’s Acquisition of Omniture
On Tuesday of this week, Adobe acquired the web analytics company Omniture (Nasdaq:OMTR) in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion.
Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture furthers its mission to revolutionize the way the world engages with ideas and information. By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, Adobe will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices.
This is one of the most exciting acquisitions I have witnessed in my career. My initial start in web development began with Macromedia Flash 6. It seems like just yesterday that Adobe picked up Macromedia back in April of 05.
When Adobe acquired Macromedia, they obtained a set of tools that were ideal for publishing and controlling content on the web. Since that acquisition, the world of web publishing has changed. A business’s web presence is no longer a credibility statement; it is a central hub for their marketing objectives, both on and offline. Combining the publishing power of Adobe’s current program suite with Omniture’s ability to measure online conversion and ROI will improve the workflow and integration between the design, technical and marketing levels of an organization.
What I would like to see Adobe offer now that they Omniture’s tools in their pocket:
- Improved Web Analytics for Flash – Flash has always been the black box in the browser when it comes to analytics. It would be great to see some integrated components or Actionscript libraries that allowed Internet Marketers to analyze user engagement for Flash interactions and content segments.
- SEO Assistance Within Dreamweaver – Many SEOs write their XHTML code in a tool like Dreamweaver and use outside programs such as Web CEO or SEO MOZ to score its SEO friendliness. Imagine if the scoring system was integrated and flagged your code with suggestions as you were writing it? Talk about workflow efficiency…
- Weighted Analytics – Generally analytics code is pasted at the bottom of your XHTML document. After a visitor hits the page, you are given a broad view of how they interacted with it (time on page, what they clicked, etc.) It would be beneficial to give certain page elements a weighted score for reporting purposes. For example, if a user spent 5 minutes viewing a product video, that could be flagged with more weight than clicking a generic link on the page.
This is truly a huge development in the realm of web content publishing, internet marketing and web analytics. It will be interesting to see how things develop and how industry competitors respond. Will Microsoft’s Expression Studio start to include similar features? We will have to wait and see.
