There are so many reasons to celebrate Webtrends Marketing Warehouse availability On Premise.  We’ve had a lot of success with our On Demand version over the last couple of years and wanted to better serve some unmet market needs with an On Premise version.  Here are just a few of the market needs that this product addresses.

• You choose: data mart or data warehouse – Our Marketing Warehouse product can be used in several ways to meet your organization’s needs.  You can use Marketing Warehouse as a data mart of online data to feed your enterprise data warehouse to benefit your organization as a whole.  You can also use it as your data warehouse for all you online data for your marketers.  Best of all, you can use it both ways!
• Deep integration – On Premise offers organizations ultimate flexibility in how they use their online data.  Having direct access to enriched online data means that the sky is the limit in how you want to integrate that data with other data and other marketing applications.  The goal is to drive insight to fuel actions with your customers and prospects.
• Ultimate control of the data – Whether its for privacy purposes, regulatory compliance, or  simply direct access to the data, having this level of control of this data behind your firewall is a huge benefit to many businesses.

Along with Marketing Warehouse, Webtrends Score is now available in On Premise as well.

Caution…proud Product Manager ramblings below.

I wanted to recognize the achievements of the Webtrends team who worked tirelessly to bring this product to market.  From developers writing code, to QA folks testing it, to Services folks ready to implement and support it, to Marketing promoting it, to Sales folks selling it.  A personal thanks to all of you who worked so hard to bring this product to market because you’re passionate about helping businesses strive for excellence.

“Me want cookies!”   This is what I hear many of my Government clients say – more specifically they want to understand cookies in relation to their web analytics.  I have come to call this the “Cookie Monster” issue since there is so much confusion.  So for my post here (and with many thanks to DJ) I thought Let’s start with dessert first!

Below I have listed from most accurate to less accurate the ways visitors are identified on-line:

1. Authenticated:  The technique by which access to Internet or intranet resources requires the user to enter a username and password as identification.  This is the only way to count visitors “across machines”, as no matter where they log in they are identified correctly.  Cookies are really just tracking unique computers!
2. Persistent Cookies :  A text file containing a random identification string that “lives” on the visitors computer.  Using the value stored in this cookie, WebTrends can identify if you’ve been to the site before and identify you as a “new” or “returning” visitor (but can’t tell anything else about you… it’s a random number after all!).  This is also used to provide “unique visitor” counts in WebTrends.
3. Session Cookies : A text file containing a random identification string that only remains in the computer’s memory for the length of the visit, or “session”.  It does not live on the machine after you navigate away from the site that set it, so there is no way to identify visitors that have been to the site before.
4. IP Address : Internet Protocol Address is used to identify a computer connect to the internet.  Since there are only so many IP addresses to go around, more often than not individual machines end up sharing the same IP address due to the use of proxy servers (used by large organizations like companies and universities), internet service providers or even home wireless routers.

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