Recapping a Remarkable Year at Webtrends

One year ago today, I stepped into the role of Webtrends CEO and president with one primary goal: To reassert this company’s focus on the success of our customers. Twelve extremely busy months later, I’m writing to you to recap how we’ve delivered on this promise.

Some might point to the record profits we’ve recorded in recent quarters, despite the challenging economy, as the clearest indication that customers are realizing the value of Webtrends products and services. But I’m equally proud of our showing in The Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q3 2009 report, in which we received the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any vendor.

These outcomes can be directly tied the investments we’ve made in our core technology, along with new capabilities we’ve added to help you address changes in online marketing. Here’s a recap of some of these investments:

Extending our mission. The demands of digital marketing extend far beyond your web site. For this reason, we have broadened the focus of our company beyond web site analytics to helping you acquire customer intelligence (Forester’s Introduction to CI) that spans your online and offline investments. In April, we introduced Webtrends Social Measurement to help you track and participate on the blogs, video channels and the other online social media conversations that are increasingly shaping perceptions about your products and brands. Earlier this month, we announced the acquisition of what we consider to be the strongest testing and site optimization service available today. The rebranded service, Webtrends Optimize, will be available in the coming weeks.

Reasserting power. As we’ve expanded our mission, we’ve remained committed to Webtrends’ core differentiators – most notably, the power of our technology. Analytics 9, the newest version of our web analytics product, is built on Webtrends On Demand, a software as a service (SaaS) platform that can scale to meet virtually any spike in site activity without reporting delays or losing data.

Introducing elegance. With the release of Analytics 9 earlier this month, we’ve also turned what many considered to be Webtrends’ Achilles heel into one of our greatest strengths. The new Insight interface raises the bar on user experience for all analytics products. No longer do you have to click around to find what you’re after. It’s all there right in front of you. Click on any metric, the underlying data pops up. We assembled a very talented team of UX designers to create this highly intuitive way of interacting with your data. Look for more improvements in user experience throughout our products in the coming years.

Expanding openness. While others continue to maintain walls around your data (charging fees for you to access it and limiting your choice of outside service providers), we have extended our leadership in the area of openness. Earlier this year, we introduced a self-service access API that lets you get your data out of Webtrends and into other marketing programs and applications for easy integration and analysis. An industry first, we are not charging you to get access to your data via these APIs. You don’t pay a penny to access your data, which is the way it should be. Earlier this month, we introduced a similar collection API, which lets you send data from mobile applications, devices and other standards-based sources to Webtrends’ hosted collection service for processing and analysis alongside your web data.

Helping you assess your marketing maturity. For years, analytics and customer intelligence companies (us included) have developed increasingly sophisticated measurement and analysis tools without providing a roadmap for how or when to add these tools to your analytics arsenal. Webtrends’ new Digital Marketing Optimization team filled this void earlier this year with the release of the first vendor-agnostic framework for assessing measurement skills, staffing and best practices across all of your digital marketing channels. Check out the Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3). You can complete the assessment online and receive your scores for free.

There’s more I could share, like the terrific new campaign we recently launched that pulls back the covers and shows you how Webtrends and its partners work together to take on the toughest marketing challenges. But I think you get the picture: Webtrends is primed to help you achieve true enterprise-wide understanding of your customers like never before.

Alex Yoder,
President and CEO