Omniture — a major paid tracker of real-time online traffic data — has for the past month been passing customers days-old and irrelevant visitor information. Its clients include high-profile sites like eBay, Wal-Mart, Forbes, Tribune Interactive, MiamiHerald.com and ESPN.com.
The firm's online software provides up-to-the-minute, detailed data on what users do on the sites of its paying customers. It positions itself as fast enough to enable webmasters to respond speedily — enabling them to push content to where it's most visible, or add highly desirable products to the homepage, within hours.
But according to Forbes, one of Omniture's clients, the service's numbers have been tardy at best since early December. Some figures were up to two days late.
While Omniture would not comment, ESPN.com and MiamiHerald.com confirmed witnessing similar setbacks.
The Tribune Co.'s digital component took Omniture up directly when it noticed figures for its sites were out of date through December. According to VP-Business Intelligence/Analytics Rob Patton, Omniture took 44 hours to resolve the problem over a three-day weekend. Patton griped that the firm broke its service-level agreement, "[violating] their commitment to update data in near-real time."
And the problem isn't merely local. Clients for AEP Convert — whose clients include British retailers like New Look, Jacques Vert and Edinburgh Woollen Mill — have suffered outages of over a day since December's beginning.
Omniture's lack of comment leaves little more than speculation as to why the bottlenecks may be occurring. Some suggest quick growth and aggressive acquisitions have overwhelmed its resources: since its IPO in '06, Omniture purchased a number of small firms, including site-search firm Mercado and analytics firm Visual Sciences.
The firm is slated to announce Q4 fiscal results on February 5, 2009, after market close. The period will comprise the quarter ending December 31st, 2008.
In December 2008, Omniture launched a measuring tool for iPhone apps, available via SiteCatalyst.
Update: Last week Omniture CEO Josh James issued a response to consumers regarding the delayed data issue.
According to the statement, Omniture issued a SiteCatalyst maintenance release on January 8, 2009, resulting in a data processing delay that "was not experienced" during its time in beta. The firm provided no explanation for delays in December, but acknowledged any current ones:
After several days of intensive engineering analysis, we identified and resolved the problem and began a series of roll-backs to address the root cause. Unfortunately, this resulted in several days of backlogged data that needs to be processed for the minority of customers affected. During this time, no customer data has been lost and complete data integrity has been maintained. However, some of our customers are experiencing a delay in the availability of data in their SiteCatalyst reports.
The company apologized for the inconvenience to customers suffering data laggage and assured clients "we are putting additional processes in place to help ensure the most rapid, accurate, and transparent communication."
Over the last few years, more and more web application and Software as a Service providers have introduced public health monitoring systems, including:
