Keylime Updates Web Analytics Tool

Amid a host of moves by new and established rivals in the hot Web analytics space, Keylime Software has released a number of enhancements to its flagship product, designed to deepen tracking and to better facilitate work with agencies.

The five-year old, Carlsbad, Calif.-based company this week rolled out LimeLight 2.0, which makes heavy use of Web services to link to other sources of data and to output analysis — obviating the need for cutting and pasting into Microsoft Excel.

The tool also features a new analytics module that assesses the return on investment from online advertising campaigns, by tracking impressions on third-party sites, post-impression visits and conversions. That’s something of a differentiator among competitors in the space, since it’s much more common to calculate ROI from clicks, rather than impressions.

Using XML, Keylime’s system can share that data with the client’s other on- and offline marketing applications, such as email or ad campaign management systems, or a Siebel or SAP implementation.

The company on Wednesday also unveiled its LimeCommerce offering, which is targeted toward catalogers and e-tailers and offers advanced tools for measuring online sales activities.

The moves come on the heels of a number of major developments in the online analytics space. Last month, WebSideStory received a patent for its ASP site visitor tracking process (which Keylime says doesn’t apply to it, due to the different ways the firms use cookies) while NetIQ released a major update to its WebTrends Reporting Center software.

DoubleClick also announced its foray into the analytics space with SiteAdvance. The New York-based company is planning to launch its online advertising tracking add-on during fourth quarter.

Keylime concedes that it’s a crowded market, but the firm, which counts Adobe , Hewlett-Packard and Capitol One among its clients, points to its impression-to-purchase tracking and data integration features as key differentiators.

The sector’s various players “all do a lot of similar things,” said President and Chief Executive Steve Mitgang. “But we allow our customers to understand any of the visitors segments against any of the drivers.”

“And it’s not for everybody,” he added, “but another place we shine is cross-channel data….[such as] if you really want to understand clickstream behavior as it relates to offline sales, customer service, and to [create] broad customer profiles … like through integrating with call center data from Siebel, and see what different patterns emerge.”