Omniture watched every page view and click on many of the largest retail websites in the country. Its SiteCatalyst service showed marketers where visitors came from, what they did and what they bought. Large retailers and media companies paid for it by subscription. In 2006 online sales were booming. Measuring them had become a job for serious software, and Omniture was ready to go public.

Two Founders in Utah

Josh James and John Pestana, two young Utah entrepreneurs, founded the company in 1996. Their bet was that businesses would want detailed, real-time data on their online customers. They would pay for it as a hosted service. Omniture won large clients and later added tools for testing and targeting. Customers paid by volume, so Omniture's revenue grew as their websites grew.

Now Adobe Analytics

Omniture priced its IPO at $6.50 a share in June 2006 on the Nasdaq. It grew quickly and bought rivals. The biggest was Visual Sciences, the company once called WebSideStory, in a deal worth about $394 million that closed in early 2008. In 2009 Adobe bought Omniture for about $1.8 billion. Its software became the core of Adobe's marketing business and lives on today as Adobe Analytics.

Cover: The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon Moves Towards Infinity, plate one from To Edgar Poe, Odilon Redon. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a great eye (seeing everything).