Alex's Blog

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

Just two weeks from now, August 18 to be exact, it will have been a year since I took the helm of Webtrends. I have to admit that there have been some changes in me personally over that period of time. I now have much larger bags under my eyes and I no longer giggle when my assistant answers the phone, “Alex Yoder’s office”. I ask myself, “What of substance has changed over the last year and is it all worth it?” I gotta say that the answer is unequivocally “YES”!

Think of August 2008. Webtrends just started on its fourth CEO in less than a year. In the two years prior, the company had gone through two CFO’s, three VP’s of Sales, three VP’s of Development, three CMO’s and the employee churn was almost 18% in one quarter. Ironically, burnt orange probably represented the mood of the place more than the brand. Webtrends, the onetime patriarch of the web analytics industry had been dwarfed by a blitzkrieg of colorful pie charts, marketing extravagance and empty promises.

What does one do when stepping into such auspicious and daunting circumstances? I hate to say it, but it ain’t rocket science—you go back to what got you there. For me, that’s the fundamental principles of honesty, integrity, clear and open communication and just hard work. It’s putting your customer out ahead of every other priority and making sure that the entire business is aligned behind that focus. It’s telling your customers bluntly that the software industry and web analytics itself is mature enough that they should expect more. They should expect solid, clean products. They should expect uptime, not downtime. They should expect great service and support backed by a sincere desire to help them get better.

It’s helping everyone understand that they have had a good day if they can answer yes to the question “Did I make this a better place for my peers to work and for my customers to do business?” Yes, yes, yes! It’s being willing to put yourself out there in front of and make commitments that you are going to keep.
We heard it! We hired a world-class user experience team that would fully integrate all aspects of the user experience and fundamentally change that approach. We hired experienced, trusted, diverse and talented executives and then I made a commitment to them—I will only consider myself successful in this position if we have the same people sitting at this table in two years. Suddenly, a lot of the very talented people who had left the organization started coming back—more energized than ever.

We focused on our strengths and where the industry is going, the demands that are being made on our current products and the customers that we have been the most successful retaining. We found that we have long been the most powerful solution in the space and have done nothing to help promote that notion. We felt strongly that true openness (technology, culture, values, community) is critical to the future of a successful technology company—the willingness to truly collaborate with our customers and community. We opened our doors to countless local interest groups and causes. We relaunched our brand and focused behind the pillars that we knew were important: Power, Elegance, Openness. Since we are the only truly hosted software solution in our space, we have long been known for our power. The flexibility and depth of insight that inherently comes with a hosted software solution has allowed us to attract and retain customers with the most sophisticated needs and who are typically on the higher-end of the marketing maturity lifecycle.

Our space has long been mired in the confusion of what to do with all of the data and how to leverage it to truly impact their digital businesses. While others focused on lollipop reporting, we hired experts from the agency world and volunteered their expertise to develop a vendor agnostic framework to help guide a broader understanding of what marketing maturity really looks like.

In April 2009 I stood in front of our customers, the press, analysts and our board and committed that we would deliver on our new user experience vision by the end of June 2009. At that same event, we were running paper prototyping with our customer base—none of the code had yet been written! I sat down with Jim Sterne immediately after my opening remarks and he said, “Alex, you realize that you just made a commitment that you now must deliver on? No one in technology does that”. I said, “Yep, and the entire organization is committed and standing behind that promise”.

Well, it’s been almost a year. We hired almost an entirely new executive team (all of which are still here), have the strongest sales organization in the nine years I’ve been around Webtrends, relaunched the brand, were the first to bring social measurement and web analytics together, have the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the Forrester Wave, have delivered on Openness via standards-based architecture as well as both inbound APIS and outbound API’s that are free to use, delivered the industry’s only visitor-centric data model in a hosted AND on premises solutions, were approved for the industry’s only first party cookie patent and THE patent to collect commerce data from a web page, released the new UX on time and in the process started to the whole new Webtrends revolution. Oh, I forgot, industry’s best MVT, site optimization and targeting platform to perfectly compliment our leading-edge ad director search optimization platform to the portfolio and we have nearly 7,500 customers that we’re excited to help take their web presence to the next level.

Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY!!!!

Welcome to the new Webtrends. Welcome to the revolution.