Get connected, get networking, get contacts

The free and popular social network for the next Webtrends Engage 2010 enterprise customer intelligence conference has set sail, and it’s powered by CrowdVine!

CrowdVine is an easy-to-use social network for conferences, and simply the best way get a jump start on networking with the folks who will be learning and teaching alongside you next February in New Orleans. It’s kind of like a virtual pre-mingling event! And, if you register for Engage 2010 before November 30, you’ll save $100 off the regular conference fee. What a great incentive to start connecting with other attendees prior to arrival!

Creating an account on the network takes just a couple of minutes. After registering for Engage 2010 and creating a profile on the conference social network , you’ll upload a “real you” photo to help your fellow Engage attendees put a face to your name when they meet you in person. The network’s uncomplicated interface makes it very easy to integrate your social web streams and data feeds into your profile – such as Twitter, RSS, Facebook, and Flickr – so other conference-bound folks can learn more about you.

Once you’ve got an account set up, browse the profiles and start networking. You  can “friend” your colleagues, add notes to your profile, respond to other people’s notes, and send anyone in the Engage 2010 network a message. Even presenters will have profiles! You can also click the link “want to meet” for anyone you’d like to introduce yourself to at the conference. There’s no need to wait until February start meeting the people who will attend the conference with you!

The Engage 2010 conference calendar also helps you plan which sessions you want to attend, all of which are jam-packed with ideas on getting the most out of your customer intelligence information. Use the network to keep track of which sessions you’re most interested in, learn more about who is presenting it, and see who else is planning on attending, too.

At last year’s Engage conference almost 800 connections were created on the social networking site. This is an average of four connections for every person. Whoa!

Don’t miss out on the chance to spend time getting to know your fellow attendees, plan your session schedule, and interact with presenters in the weeks before the conference. And remember, register for Engage 2010 before November 30 and you’ll save $100 off the regular conference fee. Go, on! Do it now!

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

This past week I joined a panel of retail experts at the ExactTarget Connections ’09: Success is By Design and spoke on behalf of our mutual customer Motorcycles USA (MUSA), ranked #223 in the Internet Retailer’s Top 500. They’re a pure-play ecommerce business selling motorcycle gear, apparel and accessories here in Oregon.  In order to successfully continue to grow their revenue year over year during a down market in the motorcycle industry and our overall tough economic conditions, MUSA has focused on dedicated customer relationship management, including exclusive promotions and highly focused email campaigns which is their leading customer touch point. As a customer of both Webtrends Analytics and ExactTarget SBS, MUSA was eager to produce highly targeted product recommendations for specific website visitor segments.

MUSA’s initial work focused on scrubbing their list and doing a lot of A/B Testing. Using ExactTarget’s deliverability and email open rate reporting, together with Webtrends’ conversion reporting, they saw double the open rates and triple the click-through rates.

To take another step forward in the evolution of this behavioral retargeting initiative, customer project sponsor Erick Barney, VP of Marketing, worked closely with both Webtrends and partner ExactTarget as well as solutions integrator ACR Analytics to integrate ExactTarget and Webtrends Analytics.  MUSA studied detailed email subscriber click behavior via ExactTarget and onsite conversion behavior using Webtrends’ campaign and conversion reporting.

Recent behavorial retargeting campaigns focused on segmenting the subscriber list by products viewed during website visits, and products that were placed into the shopping process but abandoned. Using that datastream, customer segments received dynamically generated relevant offers in a special “Your Picks” section. Conversion rates were greatly improved – for example, within the group that received offers on products they’d abandoned – the email conversion rate over doubled the normal rate. Additional significant improvements were seen by looking at the merchandising space effectiveness. These two statistics are relevant to email marketers in all types of businesses, not strictly ecommerce companies. And what’s great is this was done with Webtrends Analytics and ExactTarget – products that MUSA was already running. Additional products were not required like some other marketplace analytics solutions would.

MUSA will continue to maximize their use of email and analytics via the Webtrends-ExactTarget integration to drive three levels of retargeting: static remarketing emails based on website visitor data, dynamic remarketing campaigns with varied offers by visitor, and at the deepest level, move to 1:1 product merchandising efforts such as this one based on interest, shopping behavior and related recommendations. For this third category, leveraging Webtrends Warehouse and integrating yet a third datastream of CRM information together with website activity and campaign response data, other segmentation options can be taken into consideration such as products owned and geography.

Learn more about behavioral retargeting for email and banner campaigns on our Open Exchange site. Do you have a story, question or comment? Please let us know!

Straight from the successful Webtrends Engage London, I find myself in Washington DC for the Teradata Partners (#tdpug) conference and Teradata Cares. It’ll be quite the week – I’m also speaking the eMetrics on Wednesday. Will be posting some recaps of the shows here and as they happen on Twitter.

I started my last presentation at Engage with the strains of “Hip To Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the news an ironic doth of the cap at the perceived geekiness of the practice of using data, something that the 2500 practitioners here in DC would be acutely aware of.

That being said, I chatted over breakfast with some guys from the NFL players association all ex pros from the sixties and seventies, that’s the beauty of these giant conference centres separate societies homogenized into one  (I think one was called Ed “Too Tall” Jones apparently he is famous. But what would I know – in the UK we have REAL football) .

They asked what I did and the discussion of data came up, obviously as sports professionals they also live by data and statistics and were extremely interested by the fact that thousands of people got together to speak about it, In fact they thought it was COOL.

One guy who was wearing a ring similar to one I saw Dan Marino wear in Ace Ventura – Pet Detective said ” We all live by numbers in some way”  To quote Huey for the final time; “Take it from me, its hip to be square” 

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!

Paul A. Barrett is the Customer Management Global Program Director for Teradata’s Communications, Media and Entertainment Industry Solutions group. Paul has over 20 years of industry experience and 15 years of internet marketing background. Prior to joining Teradata in 2006 he was the managing partner of Creative Convergence, a boutique management consulting firm. At Creative Convergence he built client relationships with companies such as Microsoft, AOL, Embratel, and other market leaders. Paul has an MBA in Marketing from George Washington University.

I had to take statistics about three times in college and grad school to be able to claim the credits.  So of course one of my first jobs after getting my MBA was managing a marketing analytics group.   We lived data – neural nets, regression analysis and predictive consumer behavior – I swam as hard as I could to keep up.

So I am simpatico to all the traditional marketers who are now getting swept up in a rising tide of cross-channel marketing data, analytical tools and statistical modeling, not to mention integrating marketing data with other enterprise data.  New books like Beautiful Data, magazines with predictions about the impending rise to coolness of statisticians, tweets about #measure and even casual postings from my friends about what data geeks they are – these things excite me about the future of cool.

“The future is here it is just not evenly distributed” William Gibson

Marketing has always been cool and it has always been about data.  But that data has often been simple and at times less than convincing.  The science of marketing is finally getting the observable data it needs to gain credibility and to significantly improve the bottom-line.

So if you want to be cool in the future here are three major areas of interest for you:

Reach Beyond: As recently as five years ago the majority of the detailed data in a company was about customers.   But now data is everywhere in marketing – more data about customers, campaigns, advertising interactions and increasingly, about brands, competitors and suppliers. Find those sources in your company and bring them into marketing and redefine how you measure your business.

Synthesize and Integrate: Lots of data is good, but it has to be mixed with other sources to reveal game changing truths.   Synthesize web data from advertising, search, site visits, conversions and more.  Synthesize online and offline data together.  Synthesize marketing data with other enterprise data.  Don’t be confined to customer integration, data can be synthesized geo-spatially and temporally to create new insights.  We think you can double or triple the value of your web data by integrating it with other data.

Experiment: Nobody knows exactly which data will transform their campaign, their company or their market.  Marketers have to take time to play with this new data, try, test and execute.  We experimented with some data years ago and drove $100MM to the bottom-line by merging two sales models together – there is probably lots of opportunity in your company.

I am really interested in how companies are approaching these topics – are you in denial, running scared, or taking the bull by the horns.  Let me know. Teradata and Webtrends have put together some great new offers in this space to help your organization get more value from the integration of your multi-channel marketing data and your other enterprise data.  We will continue to evolve those offerings to meet your needs.

If you are interested in learning more in person, visit Webtrends and Teradata at some upcoming events – Webtrends EMEA Engage in London Oct 13-14, Teradata PARTNERS conference in Washington DC Oct 18-22, and eMetrics in Washington DC Oct 19-23.  If you aren’t attending those events, you can learn more by participating in our joint webcast in November or by contacting your Webtrends or Teradata sales reps.

Webtrends is once again a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, which we have achieved for the last several years in a row.  This is a result of our continued demonstrated support of our on-premise software and hosted product offerings on the Microsoft technology stack.  To achieve this certification, we accumulated “points” with Microsoft as a result of having various skillsets, certifications, “competencies” and positive customer references. The Gold designation not only demonstrates the level of quality of our solutions, but also assures us continued access and the highest level of support from Microsoft.

One competency, which was a slam-dunk for us considering the size and quality of our state-of-the-art hosted operation is the “Hosting Solutions Competency” in which we demonstrate our ability to provide a hosted solution to numerous customers.

Achieving the “ISV/Software Solutions Competency” was completed by passing third-party validations of two products:  our on-premise software solution and our integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with the hosted service.  Both of these were validated by the third-party to be built according to Microsoft best practices.

Webtrends also employs several Microsoft Certified Professionals throughout the organization, which also demonstrates our knowledge, commitment and expertise in various Microsoft technologies.  Finally, we include several positive customer references as proof of our customer satisfaction with our offerings.

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!