Eric T. Peterson is calling it a “unique method to explore visitor engagement.”

Gartner’s Bill Gassman is convinced that businesses need analysis tools that offer a thorough view of every customer, knowing who they are and what they have done, no matter what the channel.

Both web analytics gurus are speaking of WebTrends latest offering: WebTrends Marketing Lab 2, an integrated suite of business solutions that optimize site performance, build customer engagement and drive more effective and targeted marketing.

The suite includes WebTrends Score, a patented technology that improves the way marketers quantify visitor engagement and measure the value and interests of customers, and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence, a full-featured, multi-dimensional reporting and analysis solution for enterprise organizations that require deep visitor and marketing intelligence.

After reviewing WebTrends Score, Jim Sterne, founding president of Web Analytics Association and director of eMetrics Summit said, “not only is this on the money, this is the money.”

I agree with Eric, Bill and Jim. What say you? I’d love to hear from some folks who are using or are planning to use these new features.

As news of Michael Jackson’s death began to spread last Thursday, the crush of people flocking to the Web for information overloaded several Web sites and services, causing AOL’s instant messaging service, news sites, Twitter and Wikipedia to buckle under the strain.

But just how much traffic are we talking about? Compete, a Web analytics firm based in Boston, crunched some numbers and came up with a few data points to help illustrate the surge.

It found that there were 9.98 million queries for the terms “Michael” and “Jackson” across the top 25 search engines and news and social media sites in the week ended June 27. Compete said that was more than 24 times the number of queries for information using the terms “Iran” and “election” during the week before.

Google, which said that its systems initially interpreted the spike in searches as an attack, fielded the most requests, handling 61 percent of the queries.

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