ClickTracks: Case Study on How to Kill a Great Brand?
Jun 15th, 2007 by Pedro Sostre
The analytics die-hards out there are probably already aware of the semi-recent (08/2006) acquisition of ClickTracks. Unlike my super-talented partner on this website, Jennifer Leclaire, I am not a journalist so I didn’t feel led to comment on that bit of news.
I did learn recently however that John Marshall is leaving his post as CEO of ClickTracks. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to John several times in the past few years. First as a customer, then as an author, and he has always struck me as one of the most intelligent and insightful persons in this complex analytics industry. I believe that he was largely responsible for the success of ClickTracks and I always looked forward to each release as I knew it would contain many improvements that pushed the analytics bar even further.
I am such a big fan that Jennifer and I used ClickTracks for many of the examples and devoted significant page time to the software in our recently released Web Analytics for Dummies. As a consultant, ClickTracks has always been my number one recommendation for businesses who want to understand their users and use analytics to their advantage. Now, that may need to change.
Since the acquisition, I’ve seen a couple of major changes at clicktracks.
- They redesigned the site. From a Conversion Design perspective, this redesign is horrible. They went with a light grey/black/blue color scheme and layout that is very bland and generic. Their trademark ‘BlueGuy’ visitor icons are completely gone from the homepage. Instead, they are replaced by some disturbing looking bird-like characters with hypnotic eyes that remind me of that mask from the movie Saw. Those crazy paper bag puppets from Fandango may have been marketing genius, but this idea is not.
- They raised the prices. One of the biggest selling points of ClickTracks was their low starting price point. Their entry level software app started somewhere around $300. That’s not a big financial decision for small and medium businesses to make when they are in the early stages of analytics. Then as they grow, their analytics budget and solutions could grow with them. For some reason, the powers that be at ClickTracks decided that they needed to bump the price up over 300%, meaning smaller businesses that want to try analytics now have to shell out about $1,000 just to get started with ClickTracks.
I’m not one to jump ship when a company is acquired but the signs don’t look good here. These changes are two big steps in the wrong direction and now that John has left, I don’t know if they have the know-how to turn it around.
Anyone else have any thoughts on this issue?
June 16th, 2007 at 1:10 am
Hi Pedro,
I’m Peter Biro - I’m the COO of the company that acquired ClickTracks and wanted to respond to your insightful post. First, I worked closely with John both during and since the acquisition and agree with your comments about his thoughtfulness and insight, especially into what is truly relevant for customers. We will continue to work with him even though he isn’t a full-time member of the team; I think after 6 years, he was ready for a change.
As for your comments on the website and pricing, yes, those have changed within the past 60 days. We actually waited quite a while to make any changes since we completed the deal last August since you don’t want to fix something that isn’t broken. But, since then a couple of things happened. First of all, the market environment changed. Despite the enthusiastic feedback on the low-priced “Analyzer” product, its sales had dropped off. As you can imagine, it is difficult to compete with free, which is what frequently happened at that end of the market. And, the instances of customers whose budgets grew alongside their familiarity with the tool were fewer than you might imagine.
A ~$1,000 price point is still an attractive software purchase for an SMB, and better still, is usually not something that a buyer is comparing against Google. From a development perspective, the team is small compared to larger analytics players, so having to develop and QA one fewer product is also a big benefit.
As for the site redesign, we did get feedback from our sales group and from some customers/prospects that the old site featured too many products and price points. So, we made a few changes including the color scheme and adding a visual that would stop people in their tracks (so to speak). This has been effective for us before, although I will be honest that you are not the first person to express a strong opinion about the execution. It is something we will watch closely, for sure.
Finally, I want to stress that the core team that worked alongside John at ClickTracks is intact. We continue to invest in the product both as a standalone analytics package, and as a fully integrated component of our broader set of solutions including email marketing and web content management. The ClickTracks team has taken their expertise in creating solutions to help marketers “work smarter, not harder” and under John’s guidance until his very recent departure, applied it to a couple of new opportunities that will expose the brand to a broader set of potential customers.
Finally, I very much appreciate the post and your feedback, and invite you to contact me directly.
June 16th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Peter- It’s encouraging to know that someone is listening, and your comments about analyzer sales being affected by industry changes are definitely points to be considered.
With regard to the redesign, we both know that keeping an eye on your KPIs will be the only true way to know whether the design helped or hurt your business. I hope you benchmarked your data from the old site
My post title was a question so I’d love to be able to post a followup after learning a bit more about the new leadership at ClickTracks. I still think it’s the best software in the industry when it comes to analyzing visitor segmentation and other points!