Today marks the official Fall Release of Analytics 9. The biggest story to tell about this release is the real-time engine that now powers Insight. Also exciting is that if you’ve been wanting a native experience for Analytics 9 on the iPhone, now there’s an app for that. There are workflow enhancements from features like Alerts, Notes, and updates to our RSS overlay capability. And, Justin Garrity and the UX team have also poured some more of their design love into this already beautiful interface to make an even tighter user experience. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new from the second release of Analytics 9.

Real Time Analytics

I sat through some of the technical briefing around what went into creating an enterprise class real-time engine for analytics, and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I understood half of it. What I did understand was that I can now see traffic stats up to the minute. Product tells me we’re quoting refreshed data every 5 minutes, but I’ve been seeing sub two minute refreshes during Beta.

The real-time data gave rise to a 24 Hour view. This view is particularly interesting for high traffic sites, such as publishers. Now you can see when traffic is spiking and when it’s not. You’ll know immediately if you have a hot article that you should shift to promoting or if you need to rally the troops to keep trying. The view looks like this:

iPhone App

Insight has been mobile-friendly since it’s initial release because of our adherence to web standards. But, there was strong demand for an optimized iPhone experience. If you’re interested, get notified when the iPhone app for Webtrends Analytics 9 is available. It looks like this:

Alerts

Thanks to the real-time engine, Webtrends Analytics 9 now offers Alerts. Alerts come to you in several ways: As notifications when you login to Insight, as an email, as a text message, a Twitter direct message or as an RSS feed. They are easy to create and edit with a draggable slider bar that alerts you when traffic exceeds or does not exceed your desired threshold.

Because Alerts can be delivered as an RSS feed, there’s a whole world of possibilities that can be done with them. Alerts could trigger a search engine ad buys. Alerts can be added to the RSS overlay view. They could be used to create a feed of the most popular posts on your blog. I’m excited to see the innovative uses people will develop with an RSS feed of alerts.

Notes

When we first released the RSS overlay view, we got a lot of requests from our customers to be able to add their own notes as flags on this view, which is exactly what Notes does. Like Alerts, Notes are available via RSS. So, not only can you view Notes within Insight, but you can share them out with the rest of your team and other stakeholders. Again, excited to see what innovations people come up with for RSS feeds of Notes.

RSS Overlay Enhancements

One thing people wanted to be able to do was to use secure RSS feeds on the Overlay view. People wanted to be able to do things like pull in their offline marketing calendar milestones from Basecamp, which required authentication. It’s pretty cool to be able to correlate offline campaign releases with onsite traffic!

Another nice addition is that Insight now supports multiple RSS overlays. This feature makes it easier to see your blog feed, Twitter feed, offline marketing calendar, and more all at the same time.

Tightening up

In addition to the new features, the Fall Release of Analytics 9 got some visual enhancements as well. Scrubbing across the timeline is easier to track visually because the detailed data is presented in a frame with a fixed location. The dimension column is now locked in the Report View of Insight when you scroll data to the left. Help is now integrated within the app. Tabs gave way to cleaner looking buttons. The date is closer to the report data. The compare checkbox is integrated with the date. It feels even tighter now in the app environment. See it below:

Availability

Analytics 9 Fall Release is already deployed and customers have receiving the goodness! Real time is available now for customers that participated in the Preview/Beta release over the past month. It will be a phased provisioning to the remainder of our customer base over the next few weeks. Current customers are receiving the capability at no charge for the remainder of their current contract. For additional details about pricing and availability, please contact your sales rep.

There are only 18 days left to submit your thought-provoking session idea for Webtrends’ Engage 2010!

November 16, 2009 is the last day to send us your fresh ideas on getting the most out of enterprise customer intelligence. We’re especially excited to receive strategies, case studies, and notable trends related to the following areas:

• Social media
• Site optimization
• Mobile data
• Offline integration of data

Got a clever idea in mind? Want to share your ingenious new view on the old ways of doing? Great! We can’t wait to see it! But there’s one more thing to consider: Webtrends’ Engage 2010 offers three days packed with interactive sessions, so you’ll need to choose from the following types of presentation delivery formats:

• Sprints: Ignite-style presentations (5 minute PowerPoint presentations with a total of 20 slides that rotate automatically after 15 seconds)
• Breakout Sessions: Hour-long, timely, relevant, and intriguing presentations
• Workshops: Hands-on and interactive sessions with no PowerPoint and no agenda
• Flex Sessions: Small round-table discussions guided by industry leaders

You can read more about the session types on Webtrends’ Engage 2010 blog. The video at right is an example of the Ignite presentation style.

Webtrends’ Engage 2010 is three days of interesting forward-thinking and interactive discussions on enterprise customer intelligence. As an unconventional conference, it’s designed to encourage the sharing of ideas and solutions between attendees and presenters.

Held this year Februrary 1-4, 2010  in beautiful New Orleans, LA, Engage 2010 is a chance to both learn and teach the latest in best practices for digital marketing. In addition to having an opportunity to show off your ideas and knowledge, valuable networking opportunities with industry leaders and experts abound!

Keep in mind, if you are submitting a topic, sales pitches and product plugs will not be accepted. Session presenters chosen will be notified by November 30, 2009. The clock is ticking! Send us your presentation idea and type of format, and present at Engage 2010!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Widemile, here’s a quick, simplified introduction:  Widemile was a Seattle based, technology marketing company, working at developing the best optimization technology on the market, called Widemile Optimize.  If you’ve heard of a/b testing and multivariate testing, that’s what our technology does and that’s what my expertise is in.

As of July 30th, Widemile has become a part of Webtrends.  This is an important day to all of us at Widemile because we now have the support of an amazing company to further our success.  Together, we will be able to achieve much more, much quicker.

Although optimization is a very young industry, the innovation to come will change online marketing in big ways.  Earlier today, I was looking through the Webtrends data from the testing we are doing in The Open Campaign.  Just that small taste of the future reaffirmed that this is the beginning of something great.

Additionally, I am very excited to for the opportunity to educate the Webtrends audience and other marketers about optimization.  Working as an Optimization Analyst at Widemile, I have learned from many successes and failures and hope to nuture a community of sophisticated learning and discussion around optimization.  Continuing from my blogging at Widemile, please keep an eye out for my new blog on the Webtrends domain.

All of us in Seattle look forward to helping Webtrends take online marketing to the next step.  Congratulations and thanks to everyone who helped make this happen.

We are proud to announce that the ink has dried on a definitive agreement to acquire Widemile, which adds world-class multivariate testing and site optimization to our arsenal of customer intelligence technologies and services. The combination produces an unmatched analytics and optimization platform giving our customers an even greater advantage in the marketplace. For us, this deal reinforces our company’s momentum under the helm of our CEO Alex Yoder and further solidifies our position as the leading enterprise customer intelligence company.

“Webtrends now offers the most open, elegant and powerful analytics and optimization platform available anywhere.  Our customers want to further leverage the rich data set available with Webtrends Analytics, and Widemile’s capabilities provide a natural path to help our customers achieve better performance and improved ROI,” said Alex Yoder, Webtrends CEO.

Designed by optimization experts, Widemile’s platform provides the capabilities marketers need most, including intuitive wizards, real–time reporting and analysis, advanced visitor segmentation, full service and best practices services and training. Widemile’s third–generation, on–demand multivariate testing and site optimization platform is best known for its industry leading ease of use, algorithms and architecture, and reporting capabilities.

According to Forrester Research, “All too often, multivariate and A/B tests are performed as a means to identify problems and address issues, rather than a method to create better pages from the start.”  Marketers have been hesitant to use and deploy multivariate testing and targeting solutions, which have been traditionally difficult to use, time consuming, and resource intensive.  In response to the needs of the market, Widemile has built a platform that is both comprehensive in it capability and easy to setup and use in its operation.  Adding this functionality to the existing Webtrends platform further extends the core objective that customer behavior must be tested, interpreted, optimized, and measured to provide customer intelligence professionals with the ability make their businesses more successful.

“The Widemile and Webtrends offerings fit naturally to address the macro challenges and opportunities facing our customers in the coming years,” said Robert Bergquist, Widemile CEO and President.  “The combination is a best-in class integrated web analytics and optimization platform allowing users to plan online marketing programs with the assurance that built-in testing, targeting, and optimization solutions will maximize conversion rates.”

We’re on a mission to provide best-in-class enterprise customer intelligence applications capable of testing, monitoring and measuring all aspects of your online visitor’s interactions with your brand. 15 years ago we created the web analytics market and forever changed the marketing world by giving the online space its ultimate trump card: measurement. Fast forward to present day and the customer data landscape has grown significantly, especially over the past decade. We’ve made some big moves under the leadership of our CEO to prepare for the customer data driven future. Forrester recognized our efforts in their latest Wave Report saying,

Webtrends has undergone the biggest transformation of all vendors evaluated in the past year, with the restructuring of its entire management team and refocused efforts on Web analytics and its concept of openness. The result is a company united in delivering leading enterprise-class capabilities, which it does with exemplary metrics, dimensions, and correlations. The company scored high marks because of its ability to create unlimited custom and calculated metrics, as well as the capacity to perform unlimited correlations. Reference clients expressed high levels of satisfaction overall, with extreme satisfaction in responsiveness/support, application reliability, and value. Webtrends continues to develop its extensibility through expansion of data exchange, accessibility options, and a strong partner program.

Last Friday we launched an ad campaign on the MAX posing the question “Should cyclists pay a road tax?” We tracked a significant amount of conversation in a short period of time. In fact, it was much more conversation than we had anticipated and agreed with Thom Schoenborn it would be better to get results out sooner. So, in addition to our October rewrap of the MAX, we would also like to provide an update now.

Clarifications

Before we get too far, we’d like to clarify a few points:

• We do not promote the idea that cyclists do not already pay taxes. Our question is “Should cyclists pay a road tax?”, which is not about whether or not cyclists do currently.
• We do not support a dichotomy between bikes and cars. From the beginning we identified multiple stakeholders in this conversation and think narrowing the conversation to bikes and cars is unproductive.
• The volume of conversation around this topic reinforces the fact that it’s an important discussion for the Portland community. As we are cyclists, drivers, and riders we care about the outcome of the discussion and feel that the insights we can provide with our tools will help drive consensus.

The conversation space

Using Webtrends Social Measurement we were able to track this conversation’s 918 comments across 13 sources. As our first update, we wanted to share the list of sources where the conversations have taken place so far:

Sources (sorted by comment volume)

• KATU, Bike ad plastered on MAX train causes a stir (407 comments)
• BikePortland, Editorial: Marketing campaign asks the wrong question (147 comments)
• Twitter (123 tweets)
• OregonLive, New full-train MAX ad asks: Should cyclists pay road tax? (118 comments)
• BikePortland, A look at TriMet’s role in MAX ad campaign flap (53 comments)
• OregonLive, (34 comments)
• TransitSleuth, Should Bicyclists Pay a Road Tax? Measured and Tallied (20 comments)
• Zero Times Any Number, Portland Webtrends and their need for attention (6 comments)
• Portlandize, Should “cyclists” pay road tax? (5 comments)
• PopArt, Portland Bike and Marketing Freak Out (4 comments)
• Blogtown, MAX Stunt Collides with Cycling Community (1 comment)
• BTA, Bicyclists pay taxes too (0 comments)
• I’m in your water, Portland Local Media Roundup! (0 comments)

Reporting

Starting today, we will continue to share updates on this blog. Our final report will contain the following:

• Summary – This will be a roll up of all conversation providing a high-level briefing.
• Timeline – This will show the conversation sources as they unfolded over time.
• Sources – Each source of the conversation will have a unique summary of their contributions. For each source we’re going to provide a tag cloud of that source’s conversation, the talking points from that source listed by volume, number of comments, number of unique commenters, and sentiment of that source.

Tomorrow we will publish an overview of the comments broken out into the following sentiment: those who support the amount of taxes paid now, those who want less, and those who want more.

Yesterday’s post talked about the updated WAA Term and Definitions (3 more than 2007 – total of 29) for 2009. New this year is an “Ask Your Vendor” area which is highlighted below. A PDF verison of the complete compliance and questions is available for download.

Ask Your Vendor responses:

Are Flash and other Rich Internet Application advances considered to be page views by default?

Flash and other Rich Internet Application advances are NOT considered page views by default, however, users can customize these events to all count page views, if they so choose. Flash and other Rich Internet Application advances are considered diff types of events.

Does the analyst have the option to count data captured by an event tag as a “page” if desired?

Yes.

Does the tool know about errors (status codes in the 400’s, 500’s) by default, or only if a special error page is created and instrumented?

WebTrends Analytics does know about errors if a special error page is created and instrumented.

If activity consists only of non-page activity, is it counted as a visit?

Yes.

What is your default timeout?

30 minutes.

Are visits cut-off after any length of time?

No.

If you resume activity after a timeout, how is that handled?

If the activity resumes less than 30 minutes from previous activity, then it’s considered part of the same visit; otherwise it’s considered a new visit.

Site activity –> (2 hours) –> Resume site activity. How many visits is this?

2 visits.

If two visits, what is the referrer of the second visit?

No Referrer / Direct Traffic.

Does the tool count a new session on external referrer?

No.

Google search –> Your site –> Yahoo search –> Your site. How many visits is this? What is(are) the visit referrer(s)?

1 Visit, referrer = Google.

What technologies are used by your tool to calculate unique visitors?

Compound sessionization techniques is descending order of priority: authenticated logon, persistent cookie, session cookie, session ID, IP+agent, each of which can be enabled/disabled at the users discretion.

By default, are persistent cookies used to count unique visitors? 3rd party?

No. 1st party? Yes.

Authenticated user cookie?

Yes. Preferred approach is for the customer to provide their own 1st-party cookie. In lieu of that, WebTrends utilizing its own cookie in the standard tag that is issued from the customer’s domain, thus also making it 1st party. 1st- party cookie tracking is also used for cross-domain activity where a 3rd-party cookie is used only for replicating user IDs across the 1st-party cookies.

How are unique visitors counted if cookies are blocked or not logged?

WebTrends can track session cookies or revert back to unique IP address.

Are estimated visitors from blocked cookies included in your unique visitors counts?

Not by default, though customers can create this calculation themselves or via a Services offering.

Given the functionalities of your tool, are there situations that would cause one visitor to be counted multiple times: Counted via authenticated + unauthenticated? When a maximum amount of data that can be stored around a cookie or database key is reached? Other situations?

The only instances in which the same visitor may be counted twice are 1) if the visitor deletes the tracking cookie or 2) if the visitor is using 2 different machines to visit the site. All forms of visitor tracking in WebTrends are de-duped against each other to avoid double counting of visitors under normal circumstances.

Are cookie-based estimates adjusted to account for cookie deletion?

Cookie-based estimates are not adjusted to account for cookie deletion, by default. WebTrends provides a feature to calculate estimated visitor counts themselves or via a Services offering.

“Zero Duration” Visits – Ask your vendor if they include “zero duration” visits in visit duration measurements. Some vendors will include it in the calculation while others don’t.

No.

Visit Duration Delimiters – Are timestamps for page views the only ones used in the visit duration calculation, or are timestamps for other activities (errors, events, etc.) considered?

Time stamps for all activities are considered for visit duration. If you go from page to page on a website, play video, pause video, have not clicked on page in 30 minutes, but have been active, the visit continues. If video is tagged with marker points, then the visit would continue.

Are mail servers (e.g. mail.google.com) excluded from the default search engine definitions?

Yes. Specific list of places that are listed as search engine exclude mail servers.

Are internal referrers, such as might be recorded when a visitor resumes activity after a time-out, exposed in the tool and included in aggregate measurements?

Yes. There is an administrative function for creating a list of internal referrers for this purpose

If Page Exit Ratio is exposed in the tool, what metric is used as the denominator?

The denominator is Total Number of Page Views (see question # 22 in Terms/Definitions section/doc).

Are any conversion metrics configured by default for particular site types? What activities do they measure?

Yes. Any page, action or event on a website may be considered a conversion, either via a tag parameter or via a URL-based definition Several pre-defined conversion metrics are provided, including shopping cart checkouts, purchases and registrations.

If any conversion rate metrics are configured by default, are they based on visits or on visitors?

By default conversion Events and Visits. Visitors can also be calculated.

One of the challenges Webtrends staff and customers share is navigating through reams of information, both current and legacy. With many hundreds of book pages and help topics, sometimes searching for a simple concept or a feature explanation can turn into a crazy scavenger hunt through old printed manuals, saved PDFs, online customer center, and online help.

Which information has the highest value, and what terms, groupings, and search methods make the most sense for different kinds of users? What’s the best way to ensure information is accessible, relevant, and easy to explore? Even Webtrends insiders and industry experts don’t always agree on the answers to these questions. In the end, the real test of documentation usability is whether our customers can find the information they need to generate and understand analytics measurements.

Our Information Development team, formerly Documentation, has been more aggressively collecting information about how the information we publish gets used, understood, reused, transmitted….even crumpled up and discarded.  The investigation methods (which Julia talked about in a prior post) we’ve been using include card sorting (to help create a mental model of the terms and categories customers use to organize information), improved documentation tagging for better usage stats, and direct customer input.

At our Engage event in April we ran through some card sorting alongside our paper prototyping group. A few of you readers may have had the chance to attend the group or  fill out our survey at event. If you haven’t, please take a few minutes to tell us about how you use Webtrends information.

If you are interested in participating in usability testing at our location, online or just have a question - you can contact us at documentation@webtrends.com or comment here. We’re always eager to hear from you.

In the previous two articles*, I introduced the newly redesigned Webtrends custom tracking-code creation tool called Tag Builder and then provided some background into the user centered design methodology, Paper Prototyping, used to construct the flow of the application. In this post, I will highlight the most significant design improvements that defined the new look of Tag Builder and influence products to come.

1. Palette

The most noticeable change with the new Tag Builder is the monochromatic color palette. It is sparse, simple, and gets right to the point. As we push the design of Webtrends applications forward, we are intent on establishing a professional, concise, and highly engineered look and feel. Think German automobile. Think professional photography equipment. Webtrends products are professional products. The palette of charcoal, magnesium, and white dominate the design while hints of litho blue and stop sign red reveal themselves on hover states and error messaging. Color is still there, just reserved for when it is effective.

Color palettes (before and after)

In an addition to Tag Builder, you may have also noticed that the brand identity for Webtrends received a facelift. The webtrends.com website reflects this and is being rolled out across all of our marketing materials. The new wordmark is modern. The new palette, is complimentary to Tag Builder. Both are heavily monochromatic but the modern blue and warm grays have a much stronger presence with the outbound marketing while the product reserves its use of color for important indicators and highlights. This sophistication in coordination is like the outfits of a well dressed Hollywood couple attending the Oscars. Tag Builder was released before the branding update was revealed and so you will see future refinements to product design to reflect alignment.

2. Grid

The grid has received a lot of attention in the web design community in the past couple of years (thanks to pioneers like Khoi Vinh at the New York Times). The grid has been used for decades to organize typographical information in print so that blocks of type define the geometry and patterns of the design. This allows for the elimination of ornamental design clutter and reduces design to its essential elements. The new Tag Builder uses a 960 based grid and this allowed us to simplify the design dramatically. It may seem a bit open at first with excess whitespace, but as soon as you interact with Tag Builder, you’ll notice that the whitespace gives way to hover help text that no longer requires a click just to get the basic concept of each fieldset.

Tag Builder and the grid

3. Language

Because the previous Tag Builder required this additional click to access any help, the field labels ended up being sentence like in places and overly descriptive. This created a wordy design that left the user with a lack of confidence and uncertainty as it required more comprehension even for basic fields. The new labels are short and conversational in tone. This is easier to comprehend and it leads to a more confident user. For instance, a certain label read, “Single first-party cookie (use one first-party cookie across the primary and each subdomain: Cookie domain attribute.” In the new interface it now reads, “The site domain you want to track,” followed by the entry field. When the user hovers over the field, hover help appears and provides the user with an opportunity to confirm their assumptions as well as providing a link if the user wishes to explore the topic in depth. In addition to improving the readability of the labels and hover help, we also improved the error messaging for improperly filled out fields. The language short, concise, and straight to the point.

4. Indicator Dots

One of the most troublesome design challenges we faced with the new Tag Builder was how to clearly communicate completed fields when only one tab was visible at a time. We solved this challenge with a unique solution that we named, “indicator dots.” We noticed in the prototyping tests that users would click through the tabs a few times just as a driver in a car trying to make a left hand turn onto a busy street swings their head back and forth. With the indicator dots, now they at least knew which tabs that had completed some information in. This challenge grew as we realized that there was no clear way to message the user if they had improperly filled out a field on one tab when clicking the “Build Tag” button. So, we also leveraged the indicator dots to turn red when there is a field error on a tab. In the end, the indicator dots communicate to the user three things; how many choices are there on a tab, how many were filled out, and which fields contain errors when submitting the form.

Indicator dots

5. Confirmation

A related challenge to the indicator dots was the lack of any confirmation before the user clicked the “Build Tag” submit button. The previous version of Tag Builder directly triggered the “download” function of the browser when this was clicked. This worked ok in Internet Explorer but in Firefox and Safari, the download function didn’t allow the user to name the file. We realized we needed a confirmation page that condensed the information related to that particular tag setup on one screen paired with the option to name the zip package.

Confirmation page

Summary

We made many additional improvements with Tag Builder and I hope if you are a user, you have noticed an improved workflow. In the next article, I’ll walk through the changes we made regarding the web standards architecture.

I’d love to hear your feedback (thoughts, comments, questions, or critiques) on this new design direction.

*When I set out to write this five part series, I didn’t intend for it to be as drawn out. A new baby and product design improvements beyond Tag Builder are keeping me quite busy.

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.

More than a month ago we started the search for a communications company that could integrate, and make stronger, our vision of PR, AR, and Social communication being a single effort. Our marketing goals, much like our customers, are focused on growing our business and delighting our customers using Digital Marketing, Traditional Marketing, Sales, PR, AR, and Social communications collaboratively. Of course, like our customers, we want to do so objectively with data. We wanted to work with a team that, collectively, understood the rules of the traditional communication world, but had experience with new media and share the same passion for turning data into insight that we do.

Today, we are extremely pleased to share today that we’ve concluded our search and selected our new communications partner Voce Communications.

About Voce

Voce is a 50+ person firm with offices in San Francisco and Sunnyvale with people in Orlando, Portland, and Ketchum. They cut their teeth in PR and have since added AR, social media, and more comm skills. The deciding factors for us was their knowledge of the tech space, impressive skills in social media, use of technology, and passion for data. Voce has successfully grown the bottom line for companies like NetApp and using their integrated communications approach, and we’re looking to benefit from their experience.

About our plans

We have some exciting plans we’re rolling out including increased executive participation in our our local  community here in Portland, social media (extending our support and sales team into Twitter as an example), and a few big ideas that we’ll share as they develop.

Stay tuned,

Jascha

@kaykas