Every three years, Forrester Research conducts industry’s most thorough study on analyzing digital or web analytics tools providers in the market. Forrester’s evaluates top enterprise grade digital analytics vendors on 75-point criteria and articulates the findings in their popular Wave report in three high-level categories:

Current offering: What are the current features set and capabilities around data handling; metrics, dimensions, and correlations; reporting and analysis; application usability and administration; integration; and service and support? How does the vendor stand when compared to other vendors in the shortlist?

Strategy: This category focuses on the strength of the vendors current and future corporate and product strategy. Digital landscape is changing fast and only the vendor with strong strategy and vision can stand the test of time.

Market presence: The purpose of this category is to evaluate the vendors share of the digital analytics market. Vendors with larger client base are generally most interested in keeping their customers happy by aligning dedicated account management resources towards the analytics products. Bigger vendors can also allocate development resources to further enhance their analytics product capabilities.

The evaluation is done using four different data sources for higher accuracy of the results:

Vendor surveys: A survey is conducted across all the vendors on their capabilities. The survey response serves as the foundation of the evaluation and scoring model.

Product demos: The vendors are given a couple of different digital customer engagement scenarios and are asked to demo their products capabilities aligned to the scenarios.

Customer reference calls: Forrester also conducts calls with vendor’s customer to gauge the satisfaction level of their customers and get direct feedback.

Customer reference online survey: Lastly, a survey is conducted across vendor’s customer base to get a detailed view of customer’s opinion. Customer response is a key input to the scoring model as it allows Forrester to apply a sanity check to vendor response.

If you have not been involved in one of these analyst research reports or waves, then let me tell you these are highly detailed and process driven projects. These research agencies pay extreme attention to accuracy to keep the reports free from errors. I have had an opportunity to lead quite a few of these, and I highly recommend downloading and reviewing the reports if you are evaluating digital vendors or are in an RFP process.

The report can be purchased from Forrester’s website for $2,495 but is available for no-cost download to my blog subscribers who are also customers of digital analytics.

You can download the report directly from Forrester’s site by clicking the download button: