Analytics 10 Part 5: Where are the new reports and cool new visualizations?

June 7th, 2011

Topics: About, Analytics, Testing, User Experience

This post is part of a series covering the launch of Analytics 10. You can see the entire series here.

Yeah, how can I see some cool viz, too?

Among the many nice things that appeared with Analytics 10, there are some great new visualizations for website profiles/spaces which pull together related data from several reports.  Examples are the expanded site dashboard and the new page dashboard (see pictures below).  New customers creating new website profiles/spaces or existing customers creating new profiles (with the updated site default report set) will see these visualizations automatically.

However, the underlying reports feeding these visualizations were not automatically added to existing profiles for the following reasons:

  • we wanted to provide customers with the ability to make this decision on a profile-by-profile basis
  • the content of some profiles with enormous volumes are carefully managed to ensure they continue to deliver reports on schedule

Further, we decided not to base the new viz on existing reports since customers’ profiles, being highly flexible and customizable, are not all guaranteed to have the same reports enabled.  Therefore, in order to make a fresh start and ensure consistency, we based the visualizations on new reports.

So, for a customer to take advantage of the new visualizations in existing profiles, here are the steps you would need to follow per profile.

Site Dashboard *


To enable the new features in the Site Dashboard, below the key metrics trend chart, enable these reports, all of which are identifiable by the fact that they appear with “Report Pack = Site” as you are editing a profile:

  1. Geo: Countries
  2. Search Phrases
  3. Search Engines
  4. Traffic Sources
  5. Pages   (also used by Page Dashboard)
  6. Pages: Exits

* Note that the Site Dashboard is actually an expansion of the current Insight Profile Dashboard.  If you don’t add these additional reports, then your Site Dashboard will look like a nice evolution of the Insight Profile Dashboard.

Page Dashboard **

To enable the Page Dashboard features, enable these reports, all of which are identifiable by the fact that they appear with “Report Pack = Site” as you are editing a profile:

  1. Pages   (also used by Site Space Dashboard)
  2. Pages: Next
  3. Traffic Sources: Entry Page
  4. Entry Pages: Countries
  5. Search Engines: Entry Pages
  6. Search Phrases: Entry Pages

** The Page Dashboard automatically includes real-time social metrics from Twitter, Facebook and bit.ly, as shown here.

Campaigns

Finally, the new Analytics 10 campaign “discovery” process is enhanced by, but does not absolutely require, these reports, all of which are identifiable by the fact that they appear with “Report Pack = Site” as you are editing a profile:

  1. Landing Page Discovery (this report is optional, and streamlines the Campaign Create process if the WT.mc_id parameter is in use)
  2. Conversion Page Discovery (this report is optional, and streamlines the Campaign Create process if either the WT.si_cs or WT.conv parameter is in use)
  3. Campaign IDs (this report is optional….it is not tied into the Campaign Create process)

UPDATED: Report Templates

You may need to take one more step to enable the added reports to be seen in Analytics 10.  If your profile does not already have a report template which auto-populates all custom reports, then you should edit the profile and add the report template called “Website (Analytics 10)”, as shown.

Custom Report Allocations

To enable you to more easily take full advantage of these new dashboards, Webtrends has recently increased the custom report allocations available to On Demand enterprise accounts.

If there are other features you’d like to see share your thoughts with us below or any of our social channels (Facebook, Twitter or in our User Forums)

  • http://Website Scott K

    Yes, pretty. Functional – not so much. As with insight.webtrends.com the simple fact that you have “windowed” my reports into a fixed width is simply annoying, and makes the experience very frustrating. At least with the “less pretty” yet “functional” ondemand.webtrends.com I can size my reports to fit my 24″ monitor and see all measures at one time versus having to scroll left and right to see only a couple columns at once. Yes, I guess can go into every report and try to rearrange the columns to hopefully get the ones I want to see at the same time right next to one another. But why force me to do that? Sadly, I’ll likely be staying in ondemand for a long as you guys let me.

  • http://Website Analyticsninja

    Thanks for the reply :-)
    I am just only seeing a dash instead of a score on the profile dashboard. I guess this belongs in the support forum, and not your great post. Also I tried adding a post

    Again keep the great features coming. :-)

  • http://www.webtrends.com Mike Swope

    Analytics Ninja, Thanks for the support and great questions! We feel we are going in the right direction and this first release of Analytics 10 is only the beginning. Here are some answers to your specific points.

    1. Excellent question. If you are concerned about the fact that you will be “charged” for using more custom reports, we have alleviated that concern by recently allocating a large number of additional custom reports to all accounts which are enabled for custom reports. So, that should be a non-issue. Technically speaking, we have long had the distinction between “standard” reports and “custom” reports. In these terms, the “custom” reports are any reports that were created using our powerful custom report configuration capability. For Webtrends, these are easier to manage going forward so you can expect to see any new reports developed to be added as “custom reports”.

    2. Regarding the next pages section of the new pages dashboard, this is an item that we will be looking into to expand its value.

    3. Regarding PostRank integration, can you elaborate on this? We are receiving the PostRank engagement score for many sites as well as the detailed PostRank Mentions report.

    4. Great input on the campaigns. Improvements to the campaign functionality is going to be an area of focus going forward, recognizing that the initial view in Analytics 10 is a foundation upon which we intend to expand, including your suggestions for multiple conversions and different types of conversions. And keep in mind that the lookup on Campaign ID is still available in the OnDemand Analytics 9 interface as before.

  • http://Website Analytics ninja

    First, Analytics 10 is awesome. Truly great and visionary, thanks!
    I have a few questions which are bugging me here almost 1 month after launch:

    1. Why did you add the 50+ new reports as custom reports instead of standard?
    2. Why did you make the next page section of the new pages dashboard so useless? When you click it, you’re taken to search reports and you really can only see the first few letters of your domain.
    3. When will the post rank integration actually work?
    4. Campaign IDs is mandatory in the campaign dashboard. Why not allow people to pick a column from their translation file? So many customers will just see campaign id numbers. And why only allow for one hit based conversion which cannot be a product sale? It could be awesome, if it was enhanced further. Right now it is real good looking but not really that helpful, unless you do not use a translation file and only have 1 conversion (non sales) to worry about, which is not visit based.

    Anyway, heads up for taking Webtrends in the right direction. I am certainly expecting this to truly outclass the competition in the near future!