Why else, in today’s economy, would Adobe pay upwards of $2 billion for Omniture, a company with a market cap of less than $1.3 billion? The days of best-guess marketing and business investments are well and truly over. Companies are demanding quantifiable results from their marketing and other business investments, and want to be able to consistently use the insight they gain from their web analytics and other measurement tools to improve the performance of their web site, online campaigns and other marketing investments.

I want to congratulate Adobe and its CEO Shantanu Narayen for recognizing the importance of analytics and measurement, and wish them best of luck integrating Omniture into their organization and offerings.

Homogonous solutions don’t work in today heterogeneous business world.

Adobe has already signaled its intention (check out the graphic) to create a closed loop of closely knit content development, publishing and measurement tools for its customers, a large majority of whom reside on the creative side of marketing teams.

Approaches to marketing and other business matters differ from industry to industry. Even businesses in the same industry located on different ends of the same block are likely to assemble vastly different IT and marketing tools. In fact, it’s not uncommon for different teams within the same company to use different tools from multiple vendors. One-size-fits-all, single-vendor solutions simply don’t address such diverse needs. Open systems fueled by standards-based data integration will pave the road forward.

The value of independence and openness are also growing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other web analytics and measurement providers merge or get acquired by larger companies looking for a piece of an increasingly valuable pie. It’s a simple reality of business in an industry that offers in-demand services.

Omniture’s acquisition leaves Webtrends as the largest independent company in the analytics and measurement industry. Further consolidation would only magnify the importance of Webtrends’ independence, as well as our support for open standards. This approach is already paying off for Webtrends and our customers, who have rewarded us with several of the most profitable quarters in the company’s history over the past years.

As an independent company, Webtrends can continue to create solutions that bring analytics and measurement tools closer to the marketer. We also can continue to address the distinct needs of an increasingly diverse customer base by creating partnerships with other leading marketing services providers. Our support for standards-based data integration and no-fee data access APIs makes integration of our offerings with those of other service providers easy and cost effective.

The result: organizations can eliminate the online and offline information silos that have long stymied their efforts to gain true enterprise-wide insight into their customers and business trends.

Finally, I think one of the really exciting things that might become lost in the ensuing conversation from today’s news, is that our industry still has a long way to go. We have come a long way from simple web site analytics and slogging log files. But there’s so much further to go. Simply put, there is room for more. More innovation, more customers and their deserved satisfaction, and ultimately more economic growth. Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture means more.

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

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.

The Web Analytics Association has played an important role in uniting us in our craft and providing an outlet and resource for practitioners in our industry. Today, I am fortunate enough to have been voted in, by my fellow members, to join the group as a member of their board. I am honored to be in such good company. I’m looking forward to bringing energy and vision with me to the board. It’s been invigorating getting to meet some of the new and existing board members already such as Anil Batra, Jim Sterne and Seth Romanow. The outpouring of congratulations and support has been humbling.

I have a point of view that I’m bringing with me to my position. Currently we focus on vendors and analyst and practitioners as our target group, but I think we need to add ‘consumers’ of the information as well (e.g., marketers, C-levels, etc.). Issues like “what is a visitor?” need closure. I believe there is an identity issue that the industry needs to take on. To quote Jim Novo “we are an industry of tinkerers.” We have to break through the clutter and provide a clear value to customers. Make sense of the numbers. Get down to the point of it.

In the spirit of openness I want your help. I would like to reach out through this blog when appropriate to get your thoughts on issues.

Thank you to those who voted for me and congratulations to the other new members of the board.

Alex

Keeping this in mind I’ve learned a lot about online social campaign tactics from the current administration studying their general election campaign, from social tools to data collection and analysis, so thought I would put all of it to the test as the voting period for the Web Analytics Association 2009 Board of Directors Election is now open. And I am running!

Votes will be accepted from now until the close of the voting period, 7:59 PM ET, on Friday, April 10, 2009. And, you can cast your vote for me on their site. (login to the WAA site required, and you have to be a WAA member)

I have outlined some of my experience and thoughts around my nomination and the WAA in general already, which you can also find here. And, keep on the lookout for more campaign movement and news from the WebTrends camp in the coming week. I’ve got a direct line to White House so this should go well (I also have a good sense of humor) !

- Alex

The US government has an interesting relationship with technology. On the one hand, they have top secret projects that utilize the most advanced technology in the world. On the other hand, they can’t display dynamic content on their pages because of a law from the Clinton administration requiring web content to be archived.

I find this double standard fascinating when Americans largely claim we are a democracy that is powered by free speech, aka open communication. All of the talk about tracking and cookies seems as pointless as debating the use of mobile phones. Certainly, both may pose risks if not used properly, but both are absolutely essential tools in today’s world. Cookies are one of the few ways we can efficiently assess the needs online visitors and adjust web sites to their preferences.

We’re fine with the military having satellites that can read our license plates (and not find Bin Laden), but we’re worried about whether or not they know how we are using their websites and whether the same anonymous person comes back multiple times (this can be valuable information for improving the design of a website). The funny thing is that those who have the most information about each and every one of us sit in the private sector today Are any of you really aware of the detailed information that the ad agencies pick up on all of us every day and use to retarget further downstream? ISP’s are selling this data all over the net. You as advertisers pay additional fees to the networks to use your own customer’s data to retarget ads back to your customers. Google probably has more data on each of you than the FBI.

We’ve been having discussions about privacy and access to information in the consumer space for a while. Enterprises are down the road on this them as well. Now, thanks to the Obama administration, we’re embarking on a new debate about how privacy and information control play out in government.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Every four years since Clinton launched the first version of the White House’s website in 1994, people have beat the drum of privacy concerns. But, the Whitehouse.gov has traditionally lagged behind the unfolding edge of Internet technology, so the debate has been quieter in the past. Now, Obama can be our friend on Twitter and offers us content to make our own YouTube videos. As the gap closes between consumer social media and government adoption, people are suddenly realizing that we need to talk about what we want our online interaction with the government to look like. We need to reexamine issues of privacy and information control. We need to know what kind of relationship we want with the government and how do we want to communicate with them, as well as how we want them to communicate with others.

In an interview today, Mr. Kundra talked about their position on transparency and the challenges they face:

“There is a lot of data the federal government has and we need to make sure that all the data that is not private, or restricted for national security reasons, can be made public,” he said.

Mr. Kundra did not play down the challenge to the bureaucracy that will happen by inviting the public to comment on programs and point out areas of abuse. Someone, after all, will have to read all those public comments.

“A two-way interaction between the government and its citizens,” he said, “will require a massive transformation by the government, on the back end, to ensure the government can deal with this new reality.”

Along with that massive transformation comes a lot of national introspection.

The movement of data to insight and insight to action is the single biggest challenge facing the industry today. The abundance of data available to web analytics professionals is growing so quickly and from so many sources it is causing atrophy. Our opportunity as an industry is to embrace complexity in analytics, embrace emerging technologies through Web 2.0 tools available today and drive real value through action. It is an exciting time, opportunity is all around us, but is also a challenging time with the macro-economic climate. In the coming year, and through the recession into recovery, we need to make Web Analytics a the best ROI marketing platform.

I believe the WAA needs a more visible presence within each industry its members reside. Web Analytics experts are an intelligent community of leaders that, when channeled within the industries they reside, can build information networks of best practices and help drive industry specific value. Over the next two years, the WAA needs to continue to focus on the conversation around Web Analytics and where the industry is headed; how it will evolve and capitalize on the adjacent and emerging industries. In two years, I see the WAA as becoming the industries’ most resourceful organization to further the conversation about web analytics, education, and the community of professionals in the field.

A bit more about my qualifications:

Strong track record of customer success

Prior to my appointment as CEO, I spent the past seven years serving in key management positions at WebTrends, with my last role being vice president of sales, North America. During my tenure at WebTrends, I have successfully worked to expand the brand and deliver business value to global enterprises. My time at WebTrends tops off more than 20 years of global business experience spanning leadership roles across sales, marketing and operations. Additionally, I also served as vice president of sales for Touch Clarity, a behavioral targeting company.

Established point of view on the analytics from over a decade of experience

A strong voice has been created in the marketplace for the web analytics community and I would like this opportunity to work with the WAA and see the organization continue to grow through thought leaders and industry luminaries. My track record includes a high-level of dedication to this industry and I will share my level of expertise and knowledge to further expand the voice of the Web Analytics Association. I am very excited for the opportunity to work with esteemed individuals in this space and further contribute to the strong organization already in place. I plan to work with the Board to continue to develop best practices for the community and have conversations around these topics.

Background in sales, which is unique from many board members at the moment

I will bring an authentic customer centric focus to the organization. I’m not just a pure analytics and numbers person, but have many, many years in sales with a track record of delivering customer success. Additionally, I have very strong relationships with a number of the preeminent Fortune 500 companies. It is my intention to bring my vision of providing WAA members with information and resources that will continue the positive conversations in the web analytics community.

I’m excited for the opportunity to be a member of the WAA Board and welcome your comments and questions.

Alex