Learn How the Webtrends and Teradata Integration Solution Paints the Whole Picture

There is little doubt of how highly critical the importance of integrating online and enterprise data is. It is necessary to analyze both types of data in order to get the whole picture in a customer’s buying habits and satisfaction, and to improve conversion rates. Knowing when a customer connects with sales staff, knowing which direct mailings and catalogs the customer received, and knowing if the customer is chatting in social networks about the company or its products – all of these are tiny pieces to the whole picture. Unifying this information helps a company fine-tune their marketing strategies, reduce their marketing costs, and helps gives the customer a more personalized shopping experience and an incentive to purchase again.

This is a marvelous idea in theory, but very challenging to achieve in practice. Unless, that is, a company is using Webtrends’ enriched online data and Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI) solution, a partnership that is part of Webtrends’ Open Exchange program.

On December 2, 2009, in a live, interactive webinar, guest speaker John Lovett, a Senior Analyst for Forrester Research, Inc., will discuss why bringing online and enterprise data together is crucial. Next, Webtrends and Teradata will demonstrate their collaborated efforts solution of integrating online and enterprise data, and then will facilitate a question and answer session at the end.

Sign up today for the Integrating Online and Enterprise Data webinar and learn more about Webtrends’ enriched online data and Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI) solution for painting the whole picture to your customer’s purchasing experience.

Integrating Online and Enterprise Data Webinar
December 2, 2009
10am PDT / 1pm EDT

One of the fantastic parts of my job at Webtrends is having the opportunity to work with our partners via the Webtrends Open Exchange .  We want to combine the strength of our platform with the strength of our partner’s to provide real solutions.

Many of you saw our press release about integrating with WebSphere Portal earlier this year. Webtrends services a significant portion of the WebSphere Portal install base and have for many years.  I would credit the flexibility of both solutions for making that so.  Ever since the initial release in 2001, WebSphere Portal has become one of the main enterprise web portal software platforms of choice.  The Java platform is easy to deploy and maintain for all types of organizations. My team has worked with WebSphere Portal customers to implement JavaScript based data collection and log file based methods.

When we first began the integration project, we did a review of challenges that portal users might face when trying to implement analytics reporting.  The items that bubbled to the top were:

• Uncertainty regarding best practices for deploying code.
• Inability to deploy code quickly, with low development costs
• Difficultly creating business ready, actionable reporting, without long design cycles
• Ability to analyze the log files that WSP produces

In short, people need a repeatable solution that is easy to implement, creating immediate business value.  Based on this feedback, we worked with IBM to create a better way to implement both solutions together using the SmartSource Data Collector JavaScript methodology and another for just reporting on log files.

Let’s talk about the JavaScript version first:

• So exactly how much development is required? Very little.  The solution requires JSP and JavaScript code that is plug and play.  The code required is contained in the solution.  All your developer needs to do is apply it to your WebSphere Portal themes.
• How rich is the data? Using this methodology we can collect data on pages, portlets, site navigation (using the site breadcrumbs), users by name, document tracking and all of the standard reports you expect out of Webtrends Analytics.  This also includes creating user readable versions of URLs for customer not using site mappings to simply the URL strings.  An example of this might be changing a URL like: http://www.ibm.com/wps/portal/!ut/p/kcxml/04_Sj9SPykssy to http://www.ibm.com/My Website/The Main Area/News and Views/, which is much easier to read and analyze.

Now, the Site Analyzer log file solution (Webtrends Software customer only):

• So exactly how much development is required? None.  You simply need to analyze the Site Analyzer log files WebSphere Portal creates.
• How rich is the data? The log files offer different but powerful data.  You can report on authenticated users, pages, portlets, administrative commands, page customizer and user management.

When can I get this and how much does it cost? The solution is available now.  You can take the white paper and start your implementation right away.  Best of all, this solution is completely free to use.  However, if you’d like assistance or need custom work Webtrends Solution Services can help you to find the right fit for you.

Download the Implementation Whitepaper

All of these reports, they are available using the classic Webtrends interface, the sleek new Analytics 9 interface or can be pulled directly using our REST API.  The API supports JSON, XML, Excel, etc.  This data can be pulled directly into a WebSphere Portlet in a matter of minutes.

Webtrends will be at the IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 October 12 -15 2009 held this year in San Diego, California.  I’m happy to say I’ll be discussing this solution in more depth October 13^th.  The Webtrends team will be at Booth #18 during the event providing demos, discussing the WebSphere Portal platform and our partnership with IBM.  Come by and say hi.  I’d love to meet every one of you.

Keep in mind this white paper is just one step in this integration.  Webtrends continues to work with the WebSphere Portal team to optimize ease of deployment and reporting.  If you’re excited about the project now, just wait.

See you in San Diego!

I am very pleased to announce the launch of a market-leading data collection capability for Webtrends. The addition of this API to our capabilities is another example of why Webtrends is the most powerful, open and elegant solution in the industry.

Keeping with our commitment to gather your feedback and deliver the most relevant of tools, we are making this new capability available in Beta for all of our customers and partners to use now.  Please help us help you by getting involved today. Push the limits! Get creative! Then let us know where we can improve on the capabilities. We will continue to evolve the API. Anything that connects to the internet is fair game.

As you, our customers, continue to expand your online presence beyond your web sites, it is our responsibility to grow our own measurement capabilities ahead of your evolving needs. Our data collection API is a critical addition to your arsenal of tools for collecting new data. The primary purpose for the API is to track behavior across various media that access the internet where traditional site tagging isn’t possible or an optimal fit.

Interested in more details? A full overview is available on our Developer Network. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, comments, or to explore opportunities to leverage this exciting new capability.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is a great platform for an organization that needs to roll out an intranet with very little effort because MOSS offers an easy way to organize content based on a company’s organization model.

However, what many companies found was while it was easy to implement the website, trying to get accurate analytics on a MOSS portal was difficult, if not impossible.  Log file analytics yielded inaccurate results and advanced JavaScript tracking was nearly impossible for most organizations due to the complexity of the SharePoint code.  If your organization did not have a C# programmer with SharePoint Portal experience, you were out of luck.

After hearing this concern again and again, we decided there had to be a better way and we were going to find it. The current analytics experience was difficult and frustrating – this was unacceptable.  With this goal in mind, my colleague Michael Love and I researched the issue and came up with a simple solution: directly interact with the SharePoint Portal template structure.  The data is already there on the page; let’s use it.  Just as the Webtrends SmartSource Data Collector code pulls data like refers automatically, this altered code allows us to pull details about the portal experience automatically from the SharePoint templates.

So exactly how much development is required?  This is the best part; the effort involved in implementing the code is minimal.  No C# coding required.  No major template modifications are required.  Your developers should be able to apply the code and get you up and running in minutes.  Webtrends will provide you with the code you need to apply to MOSS 2007 to make this work.  Webtrends will do the rest.  We’ll set up the reporting and help you test the data output.

How rich is the data?  Using this methodology we can collect data on Content Areas, overall site traffic based on a Breadcrumb drilldown report, document tracking, Webpart views, onsite search results (including found vs. not found) and all of the standard reports you expect out of Webtrends Analytics.

The document reporting is probably my favorite functionality.  We can build a report that will track document interaction within a document library including check-outs, downloads, emails directly from SharePoint and a number of other options.  The best part is you get you pick the standard document interactions you want to track.  User level reporting is also available.  If you have an external list of departments that users belong to, we can create a report that will allow you to see activity based on departments.

How do I get it? If you are interested in this offering – touch base with your account manager for implementation details and pricing.

This is just the first step.  Webtrends is serious about getting you the data you need and giving you direct access to you.  Many of you saw our press release about integrating with WebSphere Portal.  The integration will be equally easy, giving step by step guidance on how to track your WebSphere Portal with minimal effort.

It’s time to make things easy!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is a great platform for an organization that needs to roll out an intranet with very little effort because MOSS offers an easy way to organize content based on a company’s organization model.

However, what many companies found was while it was easy to implement the website, trying to get accurate analytics on a MOSS portal was difficult, if not impossible.  Log file analytics yielded inaccurate results and advanced JavaScript tracking was nearly impossible for most organizations due to the complexity of the SharePoint code.  If your organization did not have a C# programmer with SharePoint Portal experience, you were out of luck.

After hearing this concern again and again, we decided there had to be a better way and we were going to find it. The current analytics experience was difficult and frustrating – this was unacceptable.  With this goal in mind, my colleague Michael Love and I researched the issue and came up with a simple solution: directly interact with the SharePoint Portal template structure.  The data is already there on the page; let’s use it.  Just as the Webtrends SmartSource Data Collector code pulls data like refers automatically, this altered code allows us to pull details about the portal experience automatically from the SharePoint templates.

So exactly how much development is required?  This is the best part; the effort involved in implementing the code is minimal.  No C# coding required.  No major template modifications are required.  Your developers should be able to apply the code and get you up and running in minutes.  Webtrends will provide you with the code you need to apply to MOSS 2007 to make this work.  Webtrends will do the rest.  We’ll set up the reporting and help you test the data output.

How rich is the data?  Using this methodology we can collect data on Content Areas, overall site traffic based on a Breadcrumb drilldown report, document tracking, Webpart views, onsite search results (including found vs. not found) and all of the standard reports you expect out of Webtrends Analytics.

The document reporting is probably my favorite functionality.  We can build a report that will track document interaction within a document library including check-outs, downloads, emails directly from SharePoint and a number of other options.  The best part is you get you pick the standard document interactions you want to track.  User level reporting is also available.  If you have an external list of departments that users belong to, we can create a report that will allow you to see activity based on departments.

How do I get it? If you are interested in this offering – touch base with your account manager for implementation details and pricing.

This is just the first step.  Webtrends is serious about getting you the data you need and giving you direct access to you.  Many of you saw our press release about integrating with WebSphere Portal.  The integration will be equally easy, giving step by step guidance on how to track your WebSphere Portal with minimal effort.

It’s time to make things easy!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is a great platform for an organization that needs to roll out an intranet with very little effort because MOSS offers an easy way to organize content based on a company’s organization model.

However, what many companies found was while it was easy to implement the website, trying to get accurate analytics on a MOSS portal was difficult, if not impossible.  Log file analytics yielded inaccurate results and advanced JavaScript tracking was nearly impossible for most organizations due to the complexity of the SharePoint code.  If your organization did not have a C# programmer with SharePoint Portal experience, you were out of luck.

After hearing this concern again and again, we decided there had to be a better way and we were going to find it. The current analytics experience was difficult and frustrating – this was unacceptable.  With this goal in mind, my colleague Michael Love and I researched the issue and came up with a simple solution: directly interact with the SharePoint Portal template structure.  The data is already there on the page; let’s use it.  Just as the Webtrends SmartSource Data Collector code pulls data like refers automatically, this altered code allows us to pull details about the portal experience automatically from the SharePoint templates.

So exactly how much development is required?  This is the best part; the effort involved in implementing the code is minimal.  No C# coding required.  No major template modifications are required.  Your developers should be able to apply the code and get you up and running in minutes.  Webtrends will provide you with the code you need to apply to MOSS 2007 to make this work.  Webtrends will do the rest.  We’ll set up the reporting and help you test the data output.

How rich is the data?  Using this methodology we can collect data on Content Areas, overall site traffic based on a Breadcrumb drilldown report, document tracking, Webpart views, onsite search results (including found vs. not found) and all of the standard reports you expect out of Webtrends Analytics.

The document reporting is probably my favorite functionality.  We can build a report that will track document interaction within a document library including check-outs, downloads, emails directly from SharePoint and a number of other options.  The best part is you get you pick the standard document interactions you want to track.  User level reporting is also available.  If you have an external list of departments that users belong to, we can create a report that will allow you to see activity based on departments.

How do I get it? If you are interested in this offering – touch base with your account manager for implementation details and pricing.

This is just the first step.  Webtrends is serious about getting you the data you need and giving you direct access to you.  Many of you saw our press release about integrating with WebSphere Portal.  The integration will be equally easy, giving step by step guidance on how to track your WebSphere Portal with minimal effort.

It’s time to make things easy!

The analytics world is abuzz about the new changes to Google Search coming this week. No need for concern as these changes won’t interfere with any of your Webtrends products.

Just two months ago many of us thought we saw smoke rising from what looked like Google’s new design for their search results display page. The initial concerns rooted in the fact that new page, built in Ajax, completely annihilated referrer information that all of us online analytics providers rely on to identify the source of organic traffic to a web site. The ramifications would have been huge, but it turned out that they were just doing some testing.

Yesterday, Brett Crosby, group product manager with Google Analytics provided us with a very considerate preview of the changes coming in his blog . Thanks Brett!

Key excerpt describing the nature of the changes:

Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages.

Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term “flowers”, for example, would be something like this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The key difference between these two urls is that instead of “/search?” the URL contains a “/url?”. If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the “/search?” portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click.

What does this mean if you use Webtrends Analytics?

• All the insight we provide about the Google engine, phrases and search type remain completely unaffected by this change.

• We provide a number of different views of the referrer, including domain – google.com, site – www.google.com, and page- www.google.com/finance. The only difference will be the introduction of a new Google page in your referring pages data. So now you may see both www.google.com/url and www.google.com/search.

• Other WebTrends products (Ad Director and Marketing Warehouse) are not affected by this change.

Is there gold in the stream of query parameters?

We are panning through this new information to see what additional insight Google is sending you. Check out what others are saying about this. But you don’t need to wait for us to publish new reports before being able to take advantage of this data. If it is in a parameter, you can build a report on it today.

Let us know what you would like to see or what you have customized yourself. We’re always working hard to improve your experience with Webtrends and keep you abreast of industry trends. 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.

Sentiment comes up more and more in the conversation about social media measurement as the demand for insight in this arena increases. What savvy marketer doesn’t want to understand the sentiment of their audience? With the rise of social media, the voice of the consumer has more venues to be heard than ever before. Marketers have had to rely on highly sampled attitudinal response, largely collected through direct survey and other traditional market research tactics, so the promise of broader sentiment measurement is highly appealing.

The problem is that no one has solved the problem of sentiment, which is compounded by the fact that many vendors are claiming to have sentiment (Forrester Wave: Listening platforms). We wanted to provide some clarity around sentiment and explain what we know to be accurate.

At the moment there are two emerging approaches to determining sentiment: humans and natural language processing (NLP). Let’s take a closer look at the two.

Human Power Sentiment
Because automating sentiment analysis is a difficult problem to solve, some vendors are using people to determine sentiment. Many use the service Mechanical Turk, which is an API that connects to people. The name comes from the 18th century chess-playing automaton  “The Turk”. An example, if you wanted to know if a comment was positive, negative, or neutral (establish sentiment) you would send that comment to a Turker who gets paid per request to decide the comment’s sentiment. To ensure accuracy, three Turkers are asked to assess the comment.

The inherent problem here is that the process doesn’t scale. Large volumes of data can only be sampled. Analysis also isn’t real time and delays can be in terms of days. To scale, more bodies need to be thrown into the analysis. Since three Turkers are paid per request, the cost becomes prohibitive to deal with high volume.

Algorithmic Sentiment
Natural language processing is the algorithmic approach to text analysis that doesn’t have the cost and scaling problems of human powered sentiment. Companies like Google are working on this problem, but they still haven’t cracked the A.I. nut to accurately map text to the author’s sentiment. Currently NLP technologies fail to accurately decipher the sarcasm, slang, and irony that we so frequently push out in our blogs, tweets, and pithy status updates.

Don’t get us wrong, we love the idea of sentiment analysis! We’re eager to hear more about progress made in this area, let us know when you hear about it.  We look forward to this maturing into something that will help all of us marketers better understand and communicate with our customers. We’re following sentiment technologies closely because we want to incorporate the technology into our solutions. For now, we’re not employing automated sentiment because the human powered approach doesn’t scale, and the algorithmic approaches are as unreliable as voice recognition. If companies are promising you features that depend on automated sentiment, be sure to ask them probing questions about their approach so you don’t get sold on vaporware.

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We are 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.

Not too long ago, I asked a former colleague to give me his view on the implementation of a measurement tool.  While I had partially expected a response related to the technical implementation, his response aligned with an important truth–implementations are only as important as their inherent backbone–a measurement strategy.

With that I would like to introduce Martin Cook, a Performance Measurement Consultant for EMC Conchango. Based out of London, England Martin has a deep background in measuring online behavior and helping organizations understand the benefit in producing sound measurement strategies as a basis for all digital investments.  Implementations and the software used are merely tools – while some are better than others none of them will do the job without proper application.

Next week at Engage we will be discussing implementations in my workshop, Planning for Success:  Implementation Strategies.  While the content will be focused around how WebTrends can be implemented on your website, I’d like to think of this idea of measurement strategy and ROI during our workshop discussions.

Why are measurement strategies so important?

Measurement strategies enable us to measure performance against business goals and justify the business case.

In this day and age how many clients still do not know how their online offering is performing? Especially in the current economic climate, it’s vitally important to understand your company’s performance against its goals and what is working well and more importantly what can work harder! Without this knowledge it can and has proved catastrophic to many businesses throughout the world. If your organisation is even the slightest bit slack at establishing an effective measurement strategy, your competition will be more agile at reacting in these times and capitalising on opportunities. We need to look beyond the credit crunch and economic downturn to focus on the opportunities that will arise, upon the upturn.

(more…)

Flash tracking as with AJAX is done through calls to dcsMultiTrack. However because a Flash applet file (.swf) is embedded into a page as a self contained object this means we must use a different method to make calls to other elements such as the logging script within the page.

We can use any event in Flash to trigger a dcsMultiTrack call; video completions, slide views, loading percentage indicators, clicks, drags, drops and more. The most common or at least traditional method for calling dcsMultiTrack within Flash uses the getURL function:

on(release){
getURL(”javascript:dcsMultiTrack(’parameter1′,’value1′,’parameter2′,’value2′);”);
}

This code would be added to each button that needs to be tracked. If you’re smart you won’t want to rewrite the multiTrack onto every event handler call for every button across your site. It makes sense as with did with AJAX to use a more modular approach. Taking the getURL method above and placing the call into its own ActionScript function, then calls to the event handlers can also be passed along with parameters to this function.

function trackEvent(value1,value2){
getURL(”javascript:dcsMultiTrack(’parameter1′,’”+value1+”‘,’parameter2′, ‘”+value1+”‘);”);
}

An alternate to getURL is the externalInterface method:
import flash.external.ExternalInterface;

function trackEvent(value1,value2):Void
{
If (ExternalInterface.available)
{
ExternalInterface.call(”dcsMultiTrack”,’Parameter1′,value1,’parameter2′,valu e2);
}
}

Where scalability may be a factor the externalInterface method is the best probably the best choice. In addition to being scalable, externalInterface is the new “best practice” method for page/Flash object interactions. It allows data to be passed in and out of the Flash object (a getURL is a static one-way command). Because of the added flexibility, this method will allow new interactions to happen as they are developed.

Should the externalinterface method be attached to all event handlers enabling you to collect information on any and every interaction? Or prehaps limited only to duistinct content loads/views within the applet? And what should you be passing as parameters? Why not join us to discuss this at Engage 2009 in our Workgroup. Look forward to seeing you there.