Forrester is an extremely reputed company related with market research. It governs a lot of respect all over the world for its organizational values and research activities. Every now and then it comes out with a report that lists down the big 3 of online businesses. For any online organization wanting to go big, earning a listing in Forrester’s list is a huge image booster.

Sort-Out Criteria
When we have a closer look at the specific variables and criteria that are involved while preparing this list, we come to know that most of the organizations get filtered out for not satisfying the criteria. It appears that there are a number of providers that do not feature in this list even after being able to satisfy the enterprise level expectations. The criteria are divided into three categories: current offering, market presence and strategy. Certain variables that are counted as primary performance indicators are:

• How many clients are using the vendor for SEO as well as paid search?
• The usage of automated processes for the purpose of streamlining efficiency and search efforts is an important factor for organizations to improve their offerings.
• The annual revenues generated by the company should be above $1billion. This can be attributed to the fact that Forrester primarily focuses on subsets that form the largest segment of marketers. It is because of this fact that their research also focuses on similar kind of agencies.

These parameters laid down by Forrester makes you remember a movie called “Groundhog Day”. The movie has a scene in which the protagonist Bill Murray asks his girlfriend to list down all the things that she desires in her man. Against each parameter, Bill would say “me”. This can be likened to all the left out enterprises that are overlooked by Forrester for improper reasons. With due respect to Forrester’s evaluation procedure, it can be said that it requires an overhaul as these parameters are not perfect representations of an organizations efficiency and search offerings effectiveness.

Shortfalls
The methodology adopted by Forrester is that of measuring the short listed 7 companies against 72 parameters for the purpose of listing out the best 3 amongst them as far as search offerings are concerned. This strategy seems unfair as rather than evaluating 7 agencies for the purpose of setting apart 3 agencies, Forrester should give due credit to other enterprises by short listing these 3 companies from a larger sea of contenders. This would surely increase the efforts required by the research folks at Forrester as evaluating more number of companies would mean comparison of additional number of parameters. But, in all fairness to those companies who feel that they are being left out for improper measuring parameters, this effort is worth all the investment.

As can be comprehended, the parameters would yield different results for each year because the revenues and estimates that are used in the analysis are based on the enterprise’s health at a particular point in time. For the listing to become a true representative of all enterprise-level companies involved in search offerings, change in the analysis criteria is definitely required.

Tags: Criteria, Current Offering, Forrester, Groundhog Day, huge image booster, market presence, Shortfalls, Sort-Out Criteria, Strategy

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 2:57 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.