IAR Bits and Bytes

RealMedia Europe Rolls Out Analytics

RealMedia Europe announced on Thursday the availability of Open Insight, a new Web analytics tool.

The 24/7 Real Media division said Open Insight would give customers a real-time tool for measuring and analyzing their Web traffic. The analytics tool is aimed at marketers, giving them the ability to do behavior segmentation and click-stream analysis on their own.

The company will sell the product alongside its Open AdStream ad-serving platform. Open Insight will be offered both as a hosted solution and software.

Parent company 24/7 Real Media gained an analytics product in January with the purchase of Insight First. Re-christened Open Insight, the analytics tool competes in a crowded analytics market, with rival DoubleClick boasting its own analytics offering, SiteAdvance, and those from established vendors like NetIQ’s WebTrends and WebSideStory’s HitBox.

Earlier this month, 24/7 Real Media announced a deal for LifetimeTV.com to use both Open AdStream and Open Insight.

Click Z Co-Founder Forms New Venture

Click Z co-founder Andy Bourland has purchased online marketing blog MarketingFix and email discussion list provider Adventive. Bourland said he will combine the two ventures into a single brand, Up2Speed, offering a blog and email newsletters dedicated to the online marketing space.

Bourland, who, along with his co-founder Anne Handley, sold Click Z to the parent company of this site, Jupitermedia, in Sept. 2000, plans to launch Up2Speed on Tuesday.

Up2Speed will combine Adventive’s marketing-related email discussion groups, such as I-Sales and I-Copywriter, with Marketfix’s blog that links to stories affecting the online advertising industry. John Audette formed Adventive in 1995 and currently has about 50,000 subscribers. MarketingFix, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer, begun just over seven months ago by Rick Bruner and a quartet of marketing consultants.

NetCreations: E-Mail Click-Through Rates Rising

NetCreations said earlier this week that it has seen rising performance for its third-party email lists, despite the hullabaloo over spam drowning out email marketing.

The company said its PostMasterDirect service recorded a 60 percent increase in the average click-through rate for its lists. In the second quarter, click through rates have averaged 5.1 percent, up from 4.4 percent in the first quarter and 3.2 percent in fourth quarter 2002.

The bit of good news follows up on DoubleClick’s first-quarter email report that found open rates rising 8 percent and click-through rates up 11 percent.