Adobe-Omniture: Every Metric You Need (And Plenty You Don't?)

Adobe Systems recently announced that it will acquire web-analytics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion in equity.  The industry is abuzz because it almost certainly means analytics features are soon to be embedded in Flash, AIR and Flex to form what Adobe President-CEO Shantanu Narayen called an "end-to-end platform."

But is it possible that the merger's main effect on the digital display industry will be superficial?  Could it be that the platform will merely make metrics sexy for a finite time while at the same time bloating the data reporting far beyond what is actually useful to the self-service advertiser?

Omniture's core business is in eCommerce, and it isn't cheap to be their customer.  $30K a year buys you a huge amount of analytics.  I just don't know if rafting down rivers of marginally useful data makes sense for most in this industry.

Campaign management should be easy.  The way I see it, there are six metrics that are must-haves:

Unique Visitors
Repeat Visitors
Bounce Rate (how many come to the page and leave immediately)
Top Exit Pages
Top Referrers
Time Spent On Site

These are the vital signs of any display campaign.  Your campaign reporting needs to tell you who came, who came back, how long they stayed, who sent them, and how they left your site - in an orderly fashion or in a headlong rush for the door.

Something tells me Omniture's longstanding orientation and culture will cause the value proposition of the joint effort with Adobe to be too easily diluted by too much data - most of which will fall by the wayside even as the industry pays full price for it.

Spreadsheet after spreadsheet of marginally important metrics are great for research projects and data mining, but are they the best for bread-and-butter display campaign management?  Or are they just a fad in the making in an industry that has chased a fad or two in its time?