Internet Retailer: Users find value in competitive market for web analytics tools, study says

Web analytics firms are facing an increasingly competitive market, with about 50 vendors and increasing expectations among customers for discounts of 20 percent or more, according to a Forrester Research study. Less than half of respondents rated the analytics project as highly successful, but more than two thirds said they got good value for the investment of money and time. Just under that proportion said they'd recommend their current vendor.

Hosted applications users paid monthly fees of about $7,400 - a discount of about 34 percent off of rate card. Companies buying a software license to host their own application paid an average of $74,500, a 20 percent discount. Forrester said the discounts were seen as needed because the category is increasingly an even playing field, with competitors quickly adding one another's feature sets.

Respondents indicated that hosted applications tended to be more of a hassle upfront, tagging each of the company's web pages, and their biggest ongoing challenge was the long processing time required to prepare data for reports. Software licensees said their biggest hassle was creating custom reports to fit their businesses.