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Experian, a global information solutions company has announced tha acquisition of HitWise, a major web statistics company for approximately $240 million.

Experian needed HitWise because most of their clients continued to allocate more money towards online advertisement, and hence were demanding some sort of marketing intelligence data from Experian for a while now. Prior to this Experian provided offline research services and email distribution to its clients. The acquisition will enable Experian clients to carry out more targeted online mass marketing campaigns.

With growing competition Market analysis and research is becoming ever more important. The increased spendings in online advertisements has also spur the need for better targeting tools, specially the ones that allow companies to track user attention and hence modify and re design their ad campaigns. This has resulted in increased activity in the web analytics market with Google buying Trendalyzer, Quantcast raising $5.7 million in first round of funding, comScore filing for an IPO, and Clicktale launching Heatmaps to provide content owners with an understanding of which portions of the site received most attention from users. With the increasing amount of time people are spending online, the advertisers drive to reach eyeballs is hitting Internet as well. All these activities are just symptoms of this change, and more is yet to come.

Update: Marshal Kirkpatrick has a really interesting post highlighting the role of blogosphere in this acquisition. They truly raised their profile by leveraging social media, specially by coming up with important statistics at key junctures, sometimes by telling us that Photobucket rules online photo storage space and others by informing us that Bebo is bigger than MySpace in UK.

In every story there are lessons to be learned, did you noted down yours from this one?

ClickTale , an online user activity tracking service has announced the launch of ClickTale Heatmaps. The service provides a colorful overlay of your website to display the where user activity was concentrated, what they clicked, how far they scrolled. This will definitely be a helpful tool in re arranging your content and place ad in the hottest spots.

ClickTale has four heatmaps: the attention heatmap displays how much time users spent on that portion of the page, the “total time” heatmap analyze the total time all visitors viewed that portion of the page, the visitor heatmap displays the percentage of all visitors that looked at every area of the page, and finally the pageviews heatmap that shows the pageviews on every area of the page. Other features include the ability to discount logs that remain in active for a certain time period, which could be set from 20-60 seconds or turned off entirely.

CrazyEgg is a similar service. Google recently acquired trendalyzer an analytics service, where as previously they bought Urchin a web analytics service and offered it for free to the general public as Google Analytics. I personally think that ClickTale is a really lucrative acquisition target for Google. They might like to buy this service and offer it for free to web publishers to use and increase AdSense click through rates. Just a 1% increase in Adsense click through rates might increase Google´s revenues by many multiples. Another possible Google acquisition could be Clickfacts a service that lets you track Click fraud. Clickfacts is yet another YCombinator funded company.

Read: Mashable and CenterNetworks

ComScore, a major web analytics firm filed a $86.25 million IPO today. Credit Suisse and Desutsche Bank Securities will serve as the underwriters for the company which will be traded on Nasday under a ticker symbol of SCOR. The company has raised a total of $92 million in VC funding from Accel Partners, JPMorgan, Institutional Venture Partners, Lehman Brothers, Adams Street Partners, Topspin Partners, Flatiron Partners, vSpring Capital, Devine InterVentures and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

ComScore had revenues of $66.3 million in 2006 and made a profit of $5.6 million. The company claims to have 2 million users of its installed software. It was founded in 1999 and is based in Reston, Virginia.

Competitors include HitWise and the infamous Alexa.

Xobni, a startup that wants to sort out your inbox and generate useful stats for you, has raised $4.6M in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures.

Xobni is one of its kind analytics service targeting email market and is doing pioneering work in the identification of pseudospam, and email prioritization. Xobni tracks time spent writing emails, how quickly you respond to emails, When to contact a busy person, When you receive most emails, How much time you spend reading emails and so on. Xobni recieved seed funding from Y Combinator and we covered it in Y Combinator funded companies.

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Quantcast, a San Francisco based web analytics firm has raised $5.7 Million from The Founder´s Fund and Revolution Ventures in Series A Funding.

Quantcast is a free service that allows publishers to get demographic data on their readers. Quantcast estimates the gender, age, household income audience composition, share of visits, estimated monthly unique visitors and other such statistics. All this data is then funneled into the company´s “Mass Inference” algorithm to compute the likely demography of the site.

Other such services include comScore, Hitwise, Alexa and Compete.

Google has just announced that they have acquired Trendalyzer software, created by Sweden based analytics firm Gapminder.

Trendalyzer “unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations”. It is yet to be known where Google intends to use Trendalyzer, but speculations are that it will be used to augment Google Analytics. The Trendalyzer team will be leaving for Mountain View, where they will be working on improvements and scaling of the product, which Google might launch for free to the rest of us. Trendalyzer could be of more value than just spicing up Google Analytics as it can improve any function or application in which data might be better visualized.