Over the past year there has been a lot to talk about in the analytics industry. WebTrends partnership with Maven, Google Analytics 2.0, and even Microsoft tossing its hat in the ring with Gatineau. But despite all the media coverage, platform upgrades, and consolidation, there are still very few online resources available that offer deeper insight into capabilities beyond pure feature sets.

Sure - there’s a lot of marketing information available from all the vendors, but as the feature sets of popular analytics tools become more and more ubiquitous across platforms, it becomes increasingly difficult to find any discernible differences between analytics packages.

For this reason, when choosing a new analytics package or evaluating one that’s in use, it’s critical to examine the entire analytics engagement. From the first sales call to the first report run, we want to know about the things that marketing materials don’t tell you.

So, we’d like to present a series of articles that talk about the analytics engagement from start to finish - a sort of 360° evaluation of the entire analytics process. The focus for these articles will be on HBX, the enterprise-level analytics offering from Visual Sciences.

The purpose of the 360° evaluation is neither to proclaim the virtues of or discredit the value of HBX. Though we frequently recommend HBX to some of our clients, we also recommend and use tools like Google Analytics or Deepmetrix for others.

Instead, the goal is to break through the marketing hype and offer an objective valuation - from both a strategic and tactical perspective - of one of the more popular enterprise web analytics packages available today. We’ll open the door to the nagging question of free vs. paid analytics. We’ll explore the implementation process, and we’ll even offer a few HowTo’s to keep it from getting too boring. Thanks for reading - stay tuned…