With little fanfare, ClickTracks' CEO John Marshall is leaving his post to pursue other opportunities. This perhaps isn't too surprising considering that ClickTracks was purchased in August by e-marketing roll-up company, J.L. Halsey. Marshall founded ClickTracks with Stephen Turner in 2000 and focused on analytics for the SMB market. In my research for The Web Analytics Report and subsequent chats, I found Marshall to be the most accessible web analytics vendor CEO in the market; someone who didn't mind explaining the finer points about ClickTracks data processing, storage, and query model -- as well as web analytics issues in general. He didn't just talk about product usability; he tried to guide the company to focus on user experience as a critical part of its feature set. This led to the development of a highly graphical interface and a well regarded visitor segmentation capability...features that still stand out.

There are no plans to replace Marshall, according to an e-mail I received from Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey's VP Corporate Communications. In line with their strategic plan to transition from a holding company toward a single, integrated firm, J.L. Halsey is moving away from CEOs/GMs of the acquired companies toward centralized functions, such as sales, marketing, engineering, support, product management, and HR.

Without Marshall's focus on innovation, it will be interesting to see how J.L. Halsey addresses the increasing competition from Google Analytics, as well as how it will integrate ClickTracks' with other J.L. Halsey companies such as CMS vendor HotBanana, email marketing vendors Lyris, EmailLabs, and SparkList.