Josh James can tell you who's visiting your Web site, whether — and what — they're buying and which ad campaigns are working.
When it comes to selling online, knowledge is power. And his company, Omniture (formerly MyComputer.com), says it can help drive sales by monitoring what's important to potential customers.
Omniture, based in Orem, certainly has an impressive list of clients. Think eBay, Microsoft, Gannett, HandSpring.
Omniture this month released SiteCatalyst, a completely hosted Web-analytics tool that lets marketing managers see in real-time all the factors that influence the success of their online business, including banner campaigns, radio ads, affiliate programs, customer loyalty, sales cycle and print media through flexible, in-depth reporting. It's not enough to just count visitors, James, company chief executive officer, said.
Site managers can see the referring sites, including keywords and search engines, click stream analysis, shopping cart activity and abandonment, registered and loyal customers compared to first-time visitors, and integration of other data sources, he said.
The company's new name comes from "omniscience" and "future," said James, who, with company president John Pestana, launched MyComputer while they were college buddies at Brigham Young University. The name change came about because they started in the small business space, "bootstrapping" everything, building their company on credit card debt and living on student loans. They started an enterprise division and it took off, so they sold the small-business section to Verisign in December. For the past 18 months, enterprise has been center stage, and they thought a new name would better reflect that.
They've "survived the holocaust," said James, but when those who made it through the "dot-gone" rollercoaster sit down to compare stories, Pestana and James will probably find they took the wildest ride.
They actually sold the company for $60 million a couple of years ago, James remembers with a smile. Sort of. It was a done deal, all signed and even Gov. Mike Leavitt came out to celebrate. Radio stations called them at 7 a.m. to find out how they were going to spend their millions, and James admits they did daydream a little about it. After all, they were 20-somethings. Seven separate things had to go wrong before the deal wouldn't go through, considered almost an impossibility.
Sure enough, all seven things happened, and they were left not only without a tidy profit but with a little embarrassment because of all the fuss that had been made. In the aftermath, the company that was supposed to buy them sank. MyComputer took a beating but kept afloat.
"Fortunately, we didn't spend our money the day before it closed," he said. "The worst thing was I wanted to buy my mom a new car. It didn't happen."
James and Pestana always had a business plan. They were conservative in how much money they tried to raise, and they raised it from strategic partners and private investors. A lot of dot-coms that didn't make it had raised a ton of venture capital money and couldn't sell for enough to cover their debt. Pestana and James, between them, kept more than half the company so they could run it the way they wanted.
They rode out the storm and have been cash-flow positive the past two quarters, while business is building.
That looks good to James, especially after twice having to lay off employees, a painful process because they run a friendly, close-knit shop. Today they have about 45 employees.
"One good thing that's come out of this (sale debacle)," James said. "A lot of people when we made the announcement said we were lucky and caught the right wave. Well, there's an element of luck in everything. The fact that we went through that, that people thought we were dead, and we pulled out and re-emerged will be satisfying, at least. It's not luck, but a lot of hard work on our employees' part. That's the satisfying thing."
Companies that hire Omniture get clear Web analysis. The company monitors visits and aggregates the information for the client. Omniture gets paid based on traffic, so it tries hard to drive it.
When Omniture looked at eBay's home page, for instance, and the traffic on it, it found that most people were clicking on "search" and the categories of items for sale and that was about it. The rest was visual noise. EBay optimized its front page, and traffic increased by thousands of bids each day.
More information is available online at www.omniture.com.
E-MAIL: lois@desnews.com