The true custom reporting flexibility available in WebTrends Analytics allows our customers the ability to report upon a number of different initiatives via the unique combinations of dimensions, measures, and filters. By providing a robust set of options at not just the dimension and filter level, but the measure level as well, it is possible to truly customize what is tracked and reported to your user base. My intention over my first few blog posts will be to provide a number of simple techniques that can be utilized and combined for such initiatives at your firm.

To use a real world example, I am going to focus upon tracking marketing efforts on social media/networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, and del.icio.us. As these and other similar sites have become a popular and cost effective way to market to both potential and existing customers, the ability to report upon the results of those efforts has become increasingly important.

In this post, I will cover the creation of a relatively simple report that uses a single dimension of Visit Duration. Prior to designing the report, we will construct a number of custom measures that will group our various Web 2.0 Campaigns into different buckets that we can then report on (in this case we will just look at Twitter and Facebook). These individual Campaigns could of course always be broken out to focus upon attribution, but the real goal of this basic example is to instead highlight some of the available flexibility when it comes to customized measures, the use of which can be quite beneficial when it comes to segmentation and high-level reporting for various user groups.

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Last month, we updated WebTrends On Demand with a new version:  Analytics 8.6.  We improved the ways you can access and use your data in the applications you use everyday.  Hopefully you’ve experienced our new “Connect” feature.  If you haven’t seen it in action yet, you can find it on the left-hand toolbar when you log into your On Demand account.  Connect provides centralized access to the many methods of data exchange within WebTrends Analytics, including SmartReports for Microsoft Excel, the ODBC driver, Lookup tables, the WebServices API, and the Analytics Report Exporter. There is a What’s New document that provides more details for you and can be attached to an email for your data hungry colleagues as well.

During this update we also made a terminology change to our licensing agreement and terms of service.  We are now using the term “Server Calls”  to refer to the unit of measurement for billing purposes.  The change to “server calls” was made to more accurately reflect tracking of visitor actions in formats like Flash, Ajax, and other web technologies.  As we continue to expand our functionality in these areas and as new web format become widely adopted the change from “Page Views” has become industry standard. 

On Demand customers can find Terms of Service by  logging into WebTrends On Demand and clicking on “Accounts” in the upper-right part of the browser screen. The “Terms of Service” link on the top-right of the Accounts screen.

And now…. news for our software customers: While Analytics 8.6 is an On Demand release, we provided something for you too! Now available for download is a Browsers and Keywords updater.  This installer program can update the browsers.ini and keywords.ini files in your WebTrends Analytics software installation.  These files are used to generate data as it relates to browsers, platforms, mobile devices, and spiders.  Ensuring these files are up to date is important as traffic from mobile devices increases on your site.  Please note that no licensing changes were made for software, the above terminology information is only subject to On Demand.

Whether you are a software or On Demand customer, we’re working hard to improve your experience with WebTrends.  Let us know how we’re doing – provide feedback from within the product, comment on our blog, user forums, or contact any of us directly. We’re listening.

If you’re an analyst this might sound familiar. You get a call at the eleventh hour, usually around 5 PM on a Friday:

You: Oh, hi Bill. What’s up?

Bill: We have a site (or campaign or web app…) launching over the weekend and we need to have reports on it to deliver to the executive committee on Monday afternoon. You knew about the launch didn’t you?

You: …groan….[remembering last month's weekend-long report creation marathon] Do you have any information on what kinds of data the executive team is looking for?

Bill: Ah, you know, whatever you can get together easily. They mentioned something about wanting demographic information on all their visitors and being able to compare that against the sales region data.

Oh, and I guess they have some sort of AJAX app that runs some interactive content which you can then subscribe to or forward to MySpace or LinkedIn and stuff like that. They’re all charged up about it and it cost a pretty penny, so you know they’ll want some stats on that too.

You: …groan….[realizing it's going to be another long weekend]

This fictional scenario would be a lot funnier, if it didn’t happen so often. Not many analysts have the luxury of working in an environment where everyone is kept in the loop about upcoming web initiatives and where requirements for report data are always defined well in advance. Sometimes the web development project simply moved so quickly towards the go live date that there wasn’t time to define reporting requirements or perhaps the people who needed the data assumed it was something the analyst might already have available. Whatever the cause, web analytics data was an afterthought to the development process and you are left working over the weekend…again.

If this situation seems all too familiar, this blog post is for you. By looking at other business processes — and how they are managed — you can learn how to get out from behind the Q-ball and in front of the curve. In short, you can manage analytics as a service, just like others provided by your organization.

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As we approach the end of the year, I’ve worked with some of our clients to review the digital initiatives and measurement efforts they’ve launched over the past 12 months (with both success and failure). I am a firm believer in streamlining process and efficiency which is probably why I am involved in the web analytics industry. One of the issues that stands out across the board is the lack of a measurement strategy. While most organizations understand the need for online measurement — it seems little time is spent understanding why or how they will measure it. Instead, they just start measuring everything which leads to the inevitable question:

“Okay, so what do all of these numbers mean?”

The topic that always follows and is extremely popular in the realm of web analytics are key performance indicators, or KPIs. While they certainly have their place in not just web analytics but all metric based initiatives, they are very often used as a solution to the problem rather than a tool.I am often asked what “good KPIs” are and my response is always the same. Good KPIs are simply the correct KPIs that are actionable and easy to understand.

To prevent unactionable and confusing inefficiencies caused by KPIs, I would urge everyone to begin (or take a step back) by asking yourselves a simple question:

What is the main purpose for measuring our digital activity?

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A few months ago there was an analytics community-wide discussion, some might say an epiphany,  regarding average visit duration (also called average visit length or, sometimes, average time on site, depending on the source) as a relevant measurement for understanding engagement. Certainly, visit duration seemed far more relevant than plain ole’ visits or views. As a result, a lot of people asked (and still are asking), “So how do you determine average visit duration?”

This begs the question, “What is visit duration, anyway?” The WAA definition is:

“The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the time stamp of the last activity in the session minus the time stamp of the first activity of the session.”

Average Visit Duration is different from Average Time Viewed, although the two are related. Average Time Viewed is specific to a particular page or object that was viewed during the visit — we’ll cover that in a future blog post. For now, back to the original question.

How does WebTrends calculate Average Visit Duration?

The first thing to understand is that our Average Visit Duration metric–which appears in the Visit Summary table of the Overview Dashboard–is calculated based on the time between the first hit and the last hit of the visit. The time between these two points is the Visit Duration and all non-zero Visit Durations are averaged to produce the metric in our Visit Summary table. Average Visit Duration is not dependent on the number of hits or page views, rather it is dependent on the time between hits.

Naturally, if a user only visits a single page, it may not be possible to determine the length of time the visitor spent on the site. Something has to occur to fire off the Java Script or to initiate another request from the web server (if you are using log files) and that’s usually a click to go to another page. WebTrends treats these as a zero-length visit and removes them from the calculation of Average Visit Duration. The rationale behind this is that, since we don’t know the exact duration of these single-page visits, it would be better to remove them entirely from the metric, than to guess and add additional uncertainty.

We’ll talk about what happens with these zero-length visits–the ones whose duration we don’t know–in a moment. But, first, an example.

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That is the topic for what is being billed as  ”Web Analytics Solutions Showdown” at the NCDM Show next week. You’ll find Barry answering that question for WebTrends, along with John Squire from Coremetrics, and David Kirschner from Omniture. NCDM or the National Center for Database Marketing is co-sponsored by Direct Magazine (Chief Marketer Network) and the Direct Marketing Association. Jim Novo will be moderating this panel which seeks to answer the questions “What is online engagement? How can it be measured? How can you tell when engagement is weakening?”

So if you find yourself in Florida for the show, please stop by and visit us at booth #204. We can share with you the latest in online marketing solutions to optimize marketing campaigns and customer engagement. And while you’re at the conference you’ll also learn about the latest online and offline analytical approaches, multichannel marketing strategies and technology solutions that will take your database marketing to greater heights.

As Jim puts it “If you’re a web analyst interested in what happens in BI from a Marketing perspective, this show is for you.” Hope to see you there!

We are excited to have SEO pioneer and expert Shari Thurow as a guest blogger this week. She shares with our readers a preview of her upcoming panel discussion at SES, in Chicago next week.  Our Ad Director team will be in attendance, so please come by booth #405 to explore automated SEM optimization (self-learning) over bid management.

Many thanks to Shari sharing her insights and putting together this post!

The way search engines view duplicate content is not the same way that the average search engine optimization (SEO) professional views duplicate content. The typical way search professionals view duplicate content is a percentage value, such as, “These two Web pages have 65% similar content and 35% unique content. If I change one page’s content so that there is only 64% similarity, search engines will not consider these pages to be duplicates.”

As tempting and easy as it is to make this simple calculation, it is not accurate one. Search engines do not calculate duplicate content with such a simple equation. Many beginner and expert SEO practitioners alike are not aware of the various duplicate content filters that search engines have at all three points (crawler, indexer, query processor) of the search engine process, some of which I will be discussing at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies Conference.

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When I was asked to join the WebTrends blog, I was excited but also a little nervous.  The level of expertise within this particular author-crowd is extensive and while I’ve been in the industry for a decade, I’ve only been with the company since June!  What could I possibly have to add to their insights and their knowledge? Fear not – I got my answer this past week.

I was teaching an Understanding Reports class to a group of people who had not had any WebTrends training, even though the company had implemented our analytics product more than three years ago.  As I walked them through some of their reports, explaining how the data was collected and what it could be used to do, I heard “Oh, Wow!” from people on the phone many times.  The one comment that stood out above all others:  “I’ve wanted that information for over a year, and it’s been here all along. I never knew what to ask for!”

I hear these kinds of comments all the time in my classes for marketing and business professionals.  The people in my classes are marketing and/or web experts with a wealth of experience and knowledge in their respective fields.  However, their companies don’t get the full value of that expertise until they know where to find the analytics data they need or simply how to ask for the data they need (sometimes it’s even who to ask!).  That’s what training can do for them, and what hopefully I can do here – add value by helping them put their knowledge and experience to use with the tools we provide.

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