The Visitor Summary table, which appears in the Visitor Dashboard or the Overview Dashboard, is one of the most used features of WebTrends Analytics products. But it is also one that can lead to confusion, especially when your data users want to compare the numbers shown in this table with other “visitors” numbers shown elsewhere in their WebTrends reports. In particular, when they see that the numbers shown in this table do not match the ones shown in the New vs. Returning Visitors report, they inevitably ask, “Which number should I use? And why are they different?”

Visitors Who Visited More Than Once

The Visitor Summary table shows Unique Visitors numbers for all the web pages included in the profile based on the sessionization method in use. The most commonly used sessionization method  is a First Party Cookie (FPC), because it gives you the most accurate data short of requiring all your visitors to log in. If you are using a FPC, but the particular visitor’s browser rejects the cookie, then WebTrends will resort to using IP-User Agent for sessionization of that particular visit, and the visitor count will reflect that. If you are using IP-User Agent for sessionization by default, the Visitors number will be based on that, instead. But all of those visitor numbers, even those based on IP-User Agent instead of cookies, are included in the Visitor Summary table.

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My name is Mukesh; I’m the Director of Architecture here at WebTrends. The web analytics industry is still abuzz with the recent news of outages at a prominent SaaS vendor.   Even prior to that, Salesforce.com suffered a major shutdown and a prominent industry blogger perceived a SaaS backlash.  At WebTrends we have gone to great lengths to build our solutions to be robust & scalable with the goal of assuring our current and future customers unhindered access to their data. I am excited to take this opportunity to provide some insights into the unparalleled flexibility of our WebTrends SaaS architecture.

First, in contrast to most web analytics vendors which provide only SaaS solutions, WebTrends provides pure SaaS, pure Software, and Software/SaaS hybrid solutions. This S+S capability allows each customer to choose none, some, or all components for deployment on its premise, while leaving the others to be hosted by WebTrends On Demand. Thus, each customer can make its own tradeoff between control and cost, depending on its own current and future needs, instead of being forced into a specific approach by the web analytics vendor.

Second, customers who partially or fully use our SaaS solutions get significant benefits from some important design choices we have made in building up our hosted infrastructure. I’ll discuss one such choice in this post, and leave the others for future.

There are two extreme architectures for hosting applications for multiple customers. In a purely tiered architecture, each tier of machines is assigned to a specific task (like data collection) across all customers. In contrast, a purely pod architecture assigns a pod of machines to a specific customer for all its tasks. There are clear advantages in either case:

•    Tiered architecture provides more robust and responsive service in presence of traffic variability and machine failures. In particular, while a single machine failure in the pod architecture could completely bring down service to  a customer, such a failure  in the tiered architecture will typically have no impact on the service to any customer.
•    Tiered architecture may require more movement of data as processing moves from one tier to another.
•    Tiered architecture improves efficiency by allowing a different hardware configuration in each tier, which is customized to its specific task.

These two pure architectures can be mixed to create hybrids – a pod may be made larger (and even tiered) to serve multiple customers, and a data center may be split into a few mega pods, each tiered and serving a group of customers with a common SLA.

WebTrends has created a hybrid architecture for hosting SaaS applications: while Analytics On Demand is primarily tiered and Marketing Warehouse & Visitor Intelligence On Demand is primarily based on pods, each of them is itself a hybrid. The tremendous flexibility of this poly-hybrid architecture allows WebTrends to provide an optimal combination of service availability, performance, and value to each customer.

Stay tuned for more and  thank you for reading – please reply below with any questions or comments.

Hi – Julia Pond here! I’m excited to be here at WebTrends and working with all the customers as a member of the documentation team. The documentation team is exploring new methods of information management and delivery—specifically, a topic-based, rather than a book-based, architecture that will allow us to deliver the right type and amount of information to a variety of task contexts. Using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an XML standard, we will be deploying more information online, as well as exploring ways to develop custom guides (for verticals and specific engagements).

My role on the WebTrends documentation team includes incorporating these newer technologies and practices into documentation workflow, to optimize information delivery and save you time, developing product information that:

· Reflects and supports your tasks

· Is available in the task context in the type and amount you need (no more, no less)

Instead of collecting feedback on the documentation after a release, we’d like to involve you as much as we can (or you’d like)  in up-front information design and planning activities. By adopting a research-based methodology and getting your answers to questions such as:

· What were you thinking as you used the product to do that task?

· What information did you need and when?

· What words do you use to describe your work and artifacts?

· How do you categorize these words?

With this information, and an XML-based workflow, we can design and deliver small, tailored, and “mobile” pieces of information that support your tasks. This opens us up to other possibilities with XML that could include combining user content with product documentation. We hope to relegate PDF to a secondary format (available for those with the time and inclination to browse the library), focusing first on making information work for you.

If you are interested in participating in information design activities, please send me an email julia.pond@webtrends.com or comment below. Thanks!

At the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) early this month, Microsoft announced the beta availability of the Windows 7 operating system. Consumers wanting to test-drive the beta were able to download it beginning January 9th.

We know how important it is for our customers to understand platform usage so they can ensure an optimal experience for visitors to their site.  As of yesterday WebTrends  On Demand customers have the ability to report on Windows 7 as a platform. This will show you the percentage of traffic coming to your site from visitors using this new platform.

Software customers can add this capability to their installations by modifying their browsers.ini file as follows:

1. Add an entry at the end of the [Platforms] section.  For example:

Platform56=WIN_7

2.  Add the following, also in the [Platforms] section:

[WIN_7]
log1=WINDOWS NT 6.1
text=Windows 7

More information on Windows 7 can be found on Microsoft’s web site.

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

Let’s face it – classroom-based training is not the end-all be-all of corporate learning.  While I do believe that classrooms have their place in corporate training environments (especially when we’re learning the fundamentals of some new idea, skill, or technology), they are limited in their usefulness.  As adults, we’ve learned how to educate ourselves, and we do so on the fly, as needed for our work and our lives.

Classroom-based training, then, is only ever part of the solution.  We need refreshers, since we can’t remember everything we learned in the class.  We need additional information that the class did not provide.  And we need what is known in the industry as “just-in-time” training (which I really think is just-in-time education) that explains what we need to know when we need to know it.

At WebTrends, we provide a good amount of just-in-time education for our customers.  I’ve found, though, that many of the participants in my classes don’t know where to find it, so I thought I’d summarize what I think are some of our best offerings here.  And for those of you who are not WebTrends customers, I provide links to some excellent resources for you at the end of this post.

Learn as you Go Education for WebTrends Customers

As WebTrends customer you have access to the Customer Center.  The Customer Center provides online access to all our documentation, white papers, and web-based training modules.

I find that this information splits fairly neatly into two categories:  Technical know-how (that is, all the how-to stuff), and Optimization know-how (that is, all the what-should-we-do-and-why stuff).  Let me point you in the direction of some of my favorites in each category as well as some crossover documents. You will need to be logged in to WebTrends in order to access these files.

Technical Know-How Faves

1. All the Resources! – Honestly, the documentation you’ll find under Product Documentation is very useful and handily organized.  Obviously, the Administration User’s Guide (which can be downloaded as one great document or as separate chapters) is where any tech user wants to start, but there are a number of other good how-to documents there.  We have implementation guides for software and On Demand, an entire piece on SmartReports, and lots of other documents.  It’s worth getting familiar with what’s out there.
2. Complimentary Web-based Training – Quite a bit of our complimentary online training deals with how-to issues.  “Deploying the Tag,” for example, is  very helpful for those of you who are responsible for getting SDC set up on your web site.  There are also short flash videos about using various parameters correctly:  content group, campaign, scenario analysis, etc.  “Tracking Flash” is one that’s becoming more popular, and I expect many tech types will be checking it out in the near future.

Optimization Know-How Faves

1. WebTrends Guide to Web Analytics – This is by far the best starter how-to document we have for business users of WebTrends Analytics.  Available under Product Documentation, this guide provides information on how WebTrends Analytics works and how to use WebTrends to collect and analyze the data you need.  You can download the complete document from the Complete Document Library as well.
2. WebTrends Analytics Reports Users Guide – This document is the how-to guide that teaches business users to navigate the user interface, modify reports on the fly, and export reports.  It’s a great basic-level introduction to the Analytics tool.  You’ll find it in Product Documentation as well.
3. SmartView User’s Guide – If you’re not using SmartView or don’t know what it is, take the time to download this document.  It’s not long, and it’ll give you all the information you need to start using our site overlay reporting tool – something I honestly think no web analyst should be without!  Go to Product Documentation to find the document.
4. Complimentary Web-based Training – Under Training in the Customer Center, you’ll find a slew of complimentary web-based short educational offerings.  I recommend the first six under Setting Up WebTrends for Success for the business user of analytics who is not familiar with WebTrends and/or web analytics in general.  In all, watching these six flash items will take about half an hour and will give you a good overview of the web analytics world and WebTrends’ place in it.

Crossover Know-How Faves

1. WebTrends User Groups – If you have a support contract, you have access to our User Forums.  Take advantage of the expertise out there; ask a question and get a number of expert answers!  Looking through the past posts can also give you some good ideas about what you might want to track using WebTrends and how to set it up.
2. Tracking Conversion and Abandonment through Scenario Analysis – This document is, as of this writing, the most popular of our White Papers and Guides for good reason.  It explains our scenario analysis reports (which are complex but very useful!), walks you through reading one, and then explains how to set up the report on the administrator’s side.
3. How Do I Measure Campaign Success? – And this one is the second most popular of our White Papers and Guides, also for good reason.  It’s also a combination of “how do I do this” and “what’s the best way to do it,” so it’s useful for the business and tech users.

If you’re not a WebTrends customer, there are some good resources available on the web.  Most of the best materials I find are on blogs, like Occam’s Razor and Web Analytics Demystified.  Both have good search functions and tags and are worth reviewing, as are more than a dozen others out there.  I usually start with these two, though, since they do a good job of putting really technical information into layperson’s terms.  And if you’re interested in a WebTrends-specific blog, check out WebTrends Outsider, a blog put together by people using WebTrends Analytics.  It’s a great resource for seeing what other people are doing with the tool and why.

I hope these resources help you get some just-in-time education, and I’d love to hear about any other resources you use on a regular basis.

Hi folks.  My name is Jason Widup and I recently rejoined WebTrends with a colleague of mine (Brandon Ralls) to start a Digital Marketing Optimization practice within the WebTrends Client Services organization.  Some of you may remember both of us – I used to manage the Strategic Business Consulting practice at WebTrends from mid-2005 through mid-2006 and Brandon worked on my team during that time.  My first post is more like an article than a blog post.  I promise not all of my posts will be this long, but this topic is something that is near and dear to my heart.

Throughout my career in web analytics I have had the opportunity to work on web projects for some of the largest and most well-known websites in the world, and I’ve been able to do this from many different perspectives, including client-side, vendor-side, and advertising agency-side.  While I expected many of the websites to be slow in adopting some of the more advanced web analytics topics such as behavioral targeting, multivariate testing, and tagging, I didn’t expect for most of them to have the challenges with ongoing performance reporting and representation of data that they did.

These companies all struggled with most of the aspects related to putting together a dynamic and effective monthly report: extracting accurate data from their measurement tools, data organization and visualization, report formatting (including delivery vehicle), and analysis/insights/recommendations.  Most of them were decent with analysis; however, because everything else took so much longer than it should they didn’t have the proper amount of time to spend on analysis, so even that suffered.  Fortunately, the solution to this is relatively simple in explanation and not much more complex in execution: data quality, automation, and a consistent, accessible report format – what we call an Integrated Digital Marketing Scorecard.

At this point you’re probably making a decision as to whether or not you should read the rest of this article – so I’d like to give you a few reasons to continue reading.  While this topic has been written about and discussed quite a bit, I feel that it still has yet to sink in because I’m not seeing it take hold in the work that I do.  And while I don’t profess to be a true EXPERT at anything, I am an intelligent, logical, and creative thinker and like to think that I just get it (and I been practicing Web Analytics for 6 years).  And as previously noted, I’ve had the opportunity to do this type of work for lots of different websites from a multitude of perspectives – the most helpful being my time at a very large and well-known digital advertising agency.  Many of the lessons I learned I did while managing Measurement Operations at that agency.

To formally define the problem, analysts are spending a much larger % of their available time extracting and formatting report data and not enough time on the analysis, insights, and recommendations – where the true utility of the data comes into play as it is converted to decision-making information.  In my rough estimation analysts are spending about 75-80% of their time on the tactical reporting work and only about 25% of their time on the real analysis work.  In a perfect world this would be reversed – spending just 25% of their time on tactical work and 75% on analysis.

As mentioned, the solution that we have come up with to address these problems is what we call an Integrated Digital Marketing Scorecard (or IDMS).  “Integrated” because it is a single report that includes data from multiple data sources, “Digital Marketing” because it contains data from all online marketing and website measurement systems, and “Scorecard” because it is a visual display of key performance indicators on a single screen, providing user-driven comparison and progress metrics and used to make management decisions.

Let’s look at each of the problems individually, as well as how they are addressed with the IDMS…

Extracting accurate data from their measurement tools

At one point not too long ago in my Web Analytics career I was managing the monthly reporting for nearly 15 separate websites, all of which wanted their report as close to the beginning of the month as possible.  Each of the sites had their own set of complexities and issues: tagging problems, custom report issues, communication breakdowns with clients, etc.  There always seemed to be some issue with some data point each month that meant I could not fully automate my data extracts because I had to scrub the data in some way.  This is where Data Quality comes in.  At the core of any good, automated reporting solution is high quality data.  It can sometimes take a good amount of money and/or resources and certainly process changes to achieve the quality of data needed to support this style of reporting, but from experience I can say that it will pay for itself in time saving and decision making support.

In this role I was so incredibly busy during the first few weeks of the month that I chose to only partially automate my data extractions and pull the remainder of the data manually.  I justified this by telling myself that it would actually take longer to automate the query for a data point than to pull it manually.  I also failed to consistently document how I would manually derive a certain data point and would need to reconstruct it and compare it to the previous month’s number to make sure I did it correctly.  This was incredibly time consuming.  This speaks to the second component of the solution, automation.  The bottom line is that if the calculation of a data point can be done fully automated, always do it.  It will save time and reduce the occurrences of errors compared to pulling the data manually.  When we build an IDMS for a client our goal is for there to be as few steps as possible each month to update the data and populate all charts and graphs.  In many cases we’re able to get this down to 4 steps: select a new month, click button to run queries, validate new data, click button to update tables/charts/graphs.

Data organization and visualization

Analysts struggle to find the best way to organize, visualize, and present the information in their reports.  It is very rare that I’m impressed when an analyst shows me a report they authored that they feel is one of their best pieces of work (by the way, don’t bring an example report to an interview unless it looks like something you would see on TV – you know who you are).  It amazes me the lack of attention to detail that is pervasive across the industry.  Presentation of the report can, in some cases, determine its success or failure.  If you have bad data to report, at least make sure it is presented professionally.

There are a few guidelines we follow when organizing and visualizing the data in an IDMS:

• Organize the data in a tabular or navigational format so that the user can page through different sets of data while remaining on the same screen.
• Group similar data points together into the different tabs and have them follow some type of logical progression (i.e. Acquire-Convert-Retain)
• Show a minimal amount of data on a screen, but allow the viewer to interact with the report to show historical data and compare it against more recent data.
• Only show one or two data points on a graph that are related – don’t overcomplicate it with 3 dimensions and multiple metrics, etc.

Report formatting (including delivery vehicle)

It can take a very long time to manually update all of the charts and graphs and screenshots necessary for a given report, we get around this by extending the automation to include updating the charts and graphs in the IDMS, not just run the queries.  Most people don’t fully understand the formatting capabilities of Excel but there are a lot of fancy things that can be done with formatting and interactivity – especially in Excel 2007.  Have you ever heard of the camera function?  If not, Google it and I’m sure you’ll find a great use for it.

Speaking of Excel 2007, that is our preferred vehicle for delivering monthly reports.  It supports the tabular navigation previously discussed, all historical data can be included within the file in hidden sheets, the Scorecard can be made to look like a polished web application, and most importantly, it’s in Excel – something that everyone has access to. Alternatively, tools like Excelcius can be used to build this same type of functionality but publish it as an interactive Flash object embedded within a PDF file.  I also love the idea of delivering these via the web, but that would require some web development because as of yet there is still not an available tool that I know of that can WYSIWYG a Scorecard.

There are quite a few other report formatting topics that I could discuss, but to keep this relatively readable I’ll add just one more that truly sets the IDMS apart from other solutions – specific real estate is set aside in the Scorecard for the analysts’ insights, observations, and recommendations.  This section updates when the viewer pages through the different tabs in the Scorecard so that it corresponds with the data they are viewing.  This is where data is turned into information that can drive decisions – without this analysis a report is not incredibly useful for obvious reasons.

The best way to approach writing the commentary is to first understand the business questions that need to be answered every month.  The questions shouldn’t simply be worded versions of KPIs like “How many visitors came to the site this month compared to next month?” – they should be business questions like “Which media tactics drove the highest engagement with product content?”  These are the questions that will be answered in the analysis section every month, supported by the KPIs and data in the Scorecard.

If you made it through this article, THANKS FOR READING.  I sincerely hope that it was worth the time you spent reading it.  If you’d like to chat further about this topic or see some screenshots of our Integrated Digital Marketing Scorecard, please feel free to reach out to me via email at Jason.Widup@WebTrends.com.  Happy Analyzing!

*originally posted on IQ Workforce

Everyone is now well aware how much the Internet, social media and technology played a big role in the new Administration’s election. In my recent visit with our Government clients in D.C., I noticed a lot of excitement – and apprehension – about this new tech savvy Administration ability.  Almost everyone I spoke to referred to ‘gathering metrics for the Transition Team”. There seemed to be renewed interest in the web analytic programs and even more importantly – moving from gathering ‘Data’ to creating ‘Actionable’ reports.  Improving on line communication is coming of age.

While there are award winning web sites (SSA, USA.gov) many of the government web analytic programs I know have struggled to stay on top of their programs – most often because limited manpower, unavailable skill sets, budget and most famously confusion around OMB Federal Guidelines. Just getting basic stats is all many programs could get deployed. Yet with the renewed energy around ‘open communication ‘ and ‘moving into the 21st Century’ many agencies will probably be revisiting their web analytics programs for ways to improve.

So here are a few thoughts about optimizing your program:

Put the Horse before the Cart!!

• Determine the Key Performance Indicators for your web site before you start creating reports
• Understand the how to collect accurate data for your specific situation
• Create a strategy to get the most out of the data you collect
• Know what your end users audiences are and how they like to receive information.

Leverage WebTrends great flexibility and customize your program

• Create a relevant templates, dashboards and reports for your specific end users based on your KPI strategy – this will engage your end users and lead to successful adoption.
• Deploy – Review – Revise – Redeploy… Web Design and Web Analytics should be considered a ‘marriage’. One affects the other as new content is added to the website or as the appetite for advanced analytics increases.
• And as always, consider partnering with WebTrends Professional Services to get to value sooner.

If you’ve got any questions or topics you’d like to see addressed specific to the challenges (and successes) of government websites, please don’t hesitate to comment or reach out to me directly.

I had decided on the title “How Do You Measure Success” when brainstorming blog topics and had planned to do a post about KPI’s. It’s definitely a hot topic and before I even had started Brian Gallagher beat me to the punch with his post “A Recipe for Disaster – KPIs without a Measurement Strategy“. So I took the few tidbits I had prepared  and added them to his post (good team work huh?).  Of course now I can focus on what interests me even more – the answer to the title question.

I love the question, “How Do You Measure Success”. It is the very first question I ask my clients when I start working with them. How do they measure success, how does their company, department or the various teams within their organization measure success? Those answers provide the base that I use to build their metrics upon. It is common to hear, “more traffic”, “increased revenue” and “customer engagement” as some of the answers. Each gives us a place to start and we can go from there.

As a consultant it’s just as important for me to ask myself the same question as I start each new project, which I share at my initial meeting with the client. For me the measure of success as a consultant is when my actions, recommendations, support and expertise leads to a measure of success for my client. I want my answer to help set the bar for our working relationship because if I am not helping them to increase their ability to be successful then I am not living up to my own expectations.

I believe that when you are measuring for success you are setting yourself up to win. This is one of the reasons I had decided the question “How Do You Measure Success” would be a good title for a post about KPI’s, because KPI’s are just that – measurements used to quantify success. Success of course is the most positive measurement of results and that’s what executives, management and team leaders are looking for – results.

This is a great question to ask the various business users during the Business Requirements Gathering phase. The key point in analytics isn’t gathering the data. The key point of analytics is how we use the data we collected to make decisions. Nearly every analyst I speak with at one time during a conversation about analytics will make a point about wanting their business users to actually use the data to drive their decisions. Analysts don’t see the production of reports as a measurement of our success.

I’m going to be asking more people to answer that same question – my coworkers,  WebTrends customers, business contacts and other people within the industry. This will be a regular topic/on-going series and I look forward to sharing their responses with you.  Of course you can join in right now and  share your answer with us  “How Do You Measure Success?”