Global Thoughtz from Finland

Thank you Lars for getting me involved in Global Thoughtz Scandinavia. As they say: "We searched the globe for the brightest bloggers who have a passion for online marketing"...Well, I agree the passion but I totally leave rest of the responsibility to Manoj Jasra who carefully evaluated the blogger. : ) My first post at Global Thoughtz was about search engines in Finland, completing the same topic in this blog earlier. I hope to get some support and more accurate statistics on this one from Dennis in the future.

One of my team mates asked me to write about hockey. Here it is, analysis for our team G-force: This season we simple suck and we're not going to make the playoffs! Only one win, 7 losses and 2 ties with 5 games remaining. Unfortunately, in our hobby league, that's pretty much all the statistics we get, so I don't have to analyse saving or shooting percentages etc. I don't even know how many goals I have scored (not many though). Maybe the information is somewhere but if you're interested, take a look at Eurohockey's stats - a piece from my hockey career.

IndexTools may break through in Finland

I couldn't agree more with Satama's Steve Jackson about IndexTools. Some of the Naviatech's customers know IndexTools as Navia Data, but this is about to change pretty soon. IndexTools has announced that they will introduce Marketing Optimization Framework which will be based on a new version, Web Analytics 10. I had a chance to preview it last week and I have to say, I was very impressed. There will be more functionality such as external data source integration - a function which will truly lead web analytics towards business intelligence.

Especially the new system has a very good usability. And as Steve said, it's very flexible. In my opinion, this is very important because not only professional web analysts use it, but also the end customers. Nowadays I'm consulting more and more marketers, even executives, to use web analytics systems. And when they learn more about KPIs and see the figures (benefits), they will expand the SEM or web analytics project and the budget as well. It's important for web analytics vendors to offer the consulting services too.

IndexTools' success won't come by itself as they have only couple of partners in Finland at the moment. They have to do more marketing to become more visible and gain more market share. IndexTools has excellent chance, e.g . with the new product Rubix. Customers will find out pretty soon that Google Analytics or Snoobi won't offer functionality they need. Omniture/Visual Sciences is very good, but the licence fees are quite expensive and solutions more suitable for big corporates. IndexTools' aggressive pricing suits well for Finnish markets where over 90 % of the companies are small and medium sized. And with the whole package, IndexTools is very competitive also in fullfilling the needs of the bigger customers.