WebTrends Scores with Engage 09
WebTrends Scores with Engage 09
WebTrends Engage 2009 in London has had a total success for the first day. Great venue, great attendance and some impressive presentations from WebTrends staff and clients.
An early start to get to the venue on time, everyone who commutes in London knows that they can never predict the right time to leave the house to get to an appointment on time albeit leaving hours and hours in advance. In my case it was unexpected roadworks and a diversion which may aswell have taken me onto the A2 and straight into Docklands! However, I made it to the Gloucester Road Millenium Hotel at 9.05 – thankfully things were running a touch late.
After bumping into some old colleagues from Barclaycard, some fellow consultants, friends from WebTrends and having the the customary coffee we were ushered into an auditorium where we were about to see what WebTrends had to offer now and in the coming months/years and I’ve got to say I’m massively impressed and looking forward to working with the new functionality that is coming up.
For example the new Analytics 9 which has done away with making things look fancy online and been built in a non-flash and used accepted standards so cutting and pasting is no longer the pain that it used to be. However, there is no need to do that anyway. Extraction from WebTrends directly into Microsoft Excel via ODBC, Rest API, Web Services really couldn’t be simpler. Admitadly the design of the dashboard and understanding what the reports need to say is very much down to the client and the consultant but, the information is available and seems so easy (althought it has yet to be tested).
It was encouraging to see Alex Yoder, WebTrends President and CEO, over here and give the inaugural presentation showing us how passionate WebTrends were about not use the numbers or should I say the ‘WHAT’, but also about the ‘WHY’. Their new Analytics 9 comes with RSS news feeds which you can link into giving you an insight into WHY something has happened. For example if you are a financial services provider and there is a spike in the traffic has it been because of a new promotion? Perhaps… however, wouldn’t it be great to say its because the Government is doing more cracking down on Fat Cat bonuses or the Bank of England has raised interest rates and people are wanting to know how this impacts the products.
There is also a unique feature which allows you you make notes on peaks and troughs on trends. This a fantastic feature that I’m surprised hasn’t being introduced before. The notes aren’t just personal and can be shared via reports or even an rss feed.
What about alerts? Your traffic falls by “x” percentage and then the WebTrends alert engine will tell you this via your chosen medium including RSS and Twitter. Now I’m not sure that I would want to announce too much information on a public broadcast system like twitter – unless it was “Company X’s traffic has increased 105% due to intiatives taken on social media”. That is something that you do want to announce to the world.
Currently, Tim Clement, Principal Consultant is talking about maturity models and governance in Web Analytics. Lets face it not many organisations have a defined process for implementing tags, reviewing figures and doing analytics. There is the WebTrends DM3 model which has been blogged about on the WebTrends blog (see related links) which is also very similar to a Gartner model (I’ll find information about this and get back to you later on this). Companies start wanting the basics and develop from there – improve the metrics, understand the customer journey, move away from ‘hits based knowledge’, bring in proper training, raise awareness of the figures, integrate offline data, integrate crm data.
Then you are creating a business culture that is based on information and can make business decisions driven from data and insight!
You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve taken quite a few photos and I’ll post them up on this blog – so beware of the drinkies tonight which are getting marketed well by Mike Baker from WebTrends.
Related Links:
WebTrends DM3 Maturity Model Blog Post
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Miles -
Thanks for the post and the coverage of some of the great things we are working on. Getting feedback, both good and bad is the fuel for our passion to work on delivering great solutions for our customers.
Just a quick clarification, the alerts via Twitter are direct tweets, so they only go to who you want them to (including only you) rather than a more public notification.
Cheers,
Casey
Casey – thanks for the clarification. Great presentation by the way. See you later today.