Being the gadget obsessed, late thirtysomething geek that I am. The notion of Webtrends Analytics Insight being built with web standards pleased me greatly for a number of reasons most notably:

1. I could digest dimensions/measures/reports and add context to them ANYTIME,ANYPLACE ANYWHERE so much so we should have called this release Webtrends Martini !  this link truly shows my age

2. Not having to depend on plugins, adminstrator access,mobile applications, being tied to a particular machine or license is a truly liberating experience, imagine measuring the success of a campaign or understanding your traffic IN traffic on the bus, train, tram or tube…

Well you can! Web standards rock!

Props to all involved in the project to make this happen, its a fantastic addition to the Webtrends arsenal.

In order to demonstrate this I went around the house and I tried Insight on all the internet enabled devices within, below are the results of this experiment.

first off, I tried the humble Blackberry Curve and it worked!

I then moved to the lounge and tried the trusty PS3 browser it worked again.

it also works on the iPhone…

and on the G1 Android phone so well I included an extreme close up (below).

I also tried it on the old PSP (excuse the bling colour) it worked.

And finally…It didn’t work on my Pure Evoke Flow Internet enabled radio

So as a challenge, I urge fellow geeks, technoheads and analysts to try Analytics Insight on the devices that you own and let me know results, I will offer a truly amazing Webtrends pen for the image of Insight on a chumby.

Today we announced and launched Webtrends Analytics 9, the most significant set of advances in user experience and data integration in our 15+ year history.  Webtrends Analytics 9 is comprised of three primary feature areas:

Insight Interface: No Instructions Necessary

To compliment our powerful analytics engine, we’ve added a new interface called Insight. The new Analytics 9 Insight interface combines numerous breakthroughs in data exploration and visualization, including:

• RSS Overlays. Quickly determine how your web site is being influenced by other marketing investments by visually overlaying data from any RSS feed on top of trending web metrics.  Overlays from Webtrends Social Measurement, for example, provide direct insight into the relationships between web site traffic and activity on enthusiast blogs, video channels and other interactive media.
• Story View. Automatically converts data and metrics into non-technical narratives that provide written context that graphs and charts can’t. Narratives can be downloaded and shared as PowerPoint, Word, and other formats.

Data-in, no Restrictions. Data-out, no fees

Webtrends industry leading enhanced application programming interface (API) provides self-service access and integration of your online and offline data without any added charges:

• Live spreadsheets. Review web site metrics throughout the day in live spreadsheets that anyone can access. Create excel dashboards with live data in three easy steps.
• Data collection. Uncover cross-channel trends and business opportunities by programmatically sending data from mobile applications, devices and any other standards-based source to Webtrends hosted collection service for processing and analysis alongside your web site traffic and other data.
• Data Extraction. Populate widgets, dashboards and other applications with Webtrends data using the iron-clad, and no fee, Webtrends Web Services built with Representational State Transfer (REST) URLs and other web standards – or combine data from Webtrends and other business intelligence tools to create best-of-breeds solutions catered to your business.

Powerful to the Core

Analytics 9 provides all of the core analytics features customers have come to depend on with Webtrends On Demand, including:

• Unlimited scale, capacity. Distinct and fully redundant data collection, analysis and rendering help absorb even the largest spikes in traffic without system outages or lost data. Webtrends has never lost a byte of customer data.
• Unmatched data flexibility. Unlimited dimensions and measures based on any attribute or parameter let you explore your data without restrictions or incurring extra charges.

Analytics 9 is available for purchase beginning today. Current Webtrends On Demand customers have access to Analytics 9 at http://insight.Webtrends.com

And now the traditional product manager ramble (Wilson started it):

Truth be told, I’ve been doing this line of work for a long time.  But in all this time, I have never seen both the tireless dedication from everybody who worked on this project and the immense creativity and talent that was required to get the job done.  This effort was not only in product development, and not only in marketing, but throughout the entire organization.  People stepped up every day and offered their help. I am immensely proud to represent this product and even more so to work at a company where everybody is so passionate about customers success.

Brian Agranoff, founder and principal analyst for ACR Analytics joins us this week as a guest blogger. ACR is one of Webtrends solutions partners and prides itself in doing the analytics “heavy lifting,” so marketers who don’t possess web analytics experience can focus on strategy, messaging and customer experience and other areas.

I recently embarked on a personal journey to shed some of the extra pounds that I’ve picked up over the past 20 years. After successfully losing 35 pounds in 90 days, I’ve chosen to share my experience because so many people have asked for the secret sauce. And given the countless hours I’ve spent on the treadmill (hint), I’ve had a bit of extra time to think. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I had done to successfully get in shape may help others improve their health and oddly enough their analytics.

My name is Brian Agranoff and I founded ACR Analytics 1 year ago after serving as a Solutions Engineer for Webtrends, a position I held for nearly 10 years. As I went out on my own I was hopeful that I could use this change in my work life to also make a change in my personal life. I was quickly approaching my 39th birthday and realized that getting back in shape was only going to get more difficult with each day that passed. And after another 180 of them had passed, I was finally inspired to take some action.

I had just returned from an annual Thanksgiving trip to California and attended one last turkey dinner with friends. Fortunately, the first thing we did when we arrived was had our picture taken.

I studied it carefully and came to the conclusion that now was the time, although I really had no idea what that meant or how I would go about doing it.

When it comes to analytics, there are some organizations that are in great shape! They have an analytics solution in place, have very specific goals, and always know how they are measuring up against those goals. They are engaged in a continuous cycle of action which could be anything from simple changes on their website, to remarketing through email, to A/B testing, to an investment in Behavioral Targeting or Site Optimization.

There are also many organizations that are a little out of shape when it comes to analytics. They usually fit into one of the following groups:

1. No analytics solution in place.
2. Analytics Solution in place, poorly implemented.
3. Analytics Solution in place, properly implemented.

If you think you need to get in shape, the good news here is that it doesn’t really matter which category you fall into. It’s not the solution that you have in place or even how well it’s implemented that will determine your level of fitness. Analytics is like your scale. You need to have something in place so you know how much you weigh. But, the scale alone will not help get you shape. Until you take some action, don’t expect to see any big changes when you weigh in.

A Little Inspiration Doesn’t Hurt

The picture put me over the edge, but the inspiration for change had been brewing for some time. Inspiration is all around you. It’s really not hard to find. You may just need to take a moment, as I did, to appreciate it.

I was inspired by the success of others. I had come to look forward to Tuesday nights on NBC, where I would grab a bowl of ice cream and watch the Biggest Loser. It is truly amazing how much weight some of the contestants lose and how consistently they are successful, at least during the show. Keeping in mind the unrealistic situation that these contestants are subjected to, I was struck by the fact that losing weight is really nothing more than a numbers game, very much like analytics. Yes, there are many factors that come into play such as competitive spirit, motivation, health factors, and emotional struggles. And yes, they all make for good TV, but at the end of the day, it’s “calories in” and “calories out”, a very simple formula that allows these contestants to consistently lose amazing amounts of weight in such a short amount of time. Calories are the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that has helped to unravel the mystery of weight loss for me. I realize this may be completely obvious to many of you, it wasn’t for me. Another parallel when it comes to analytics. When I work with customers, I’ll insist that they set their list of requirements aside for a moment and just tell me the top 3 drivers of their business. If the answer requires much thought, it’s usually a sign that we need to do some work around identifying the proper KPI’s to measure.

I was inspired by friends. During the turkey dinner, I got into a conversation with my brother-in-law Sean (who had just lost 10 pounds) and friend Ken (who always looks slim) about a “short term cleansing diet” that had worked for them. I’ve never been crazy about “diets”, but figured it couldn’t really hurt to try. It was only for 7 days and I was hopeful I might even learn something from it. Both of them encouraged me to give it a shot.

I’d also watch nearly every morning as my 70+ year old neighbors drove past my office on their way to the YMCA to work out. They started their regiment about 12 months ago and I now look forward to seeing them several times a week in the gym.

I was inspired by family. My greatest source of inspiration has come from that which is most important to me, my health and my family. Again, I’m very fortunate to be surrounded by very healthy, caring, and fun loving family and I’d like to be around to spend my days with them. Of course, there are no guarantees, but being a numbers guy, I figured I’d like to do what I can to increase my chances. Every time I start to succumb to my old ways, family quickly enters my mind and makes it easy to reverse course. It’s a no brainer.

Where will your inspiration come from? In my experience, organizations that are in shape when it comes to analytics have a passionate force leading their efforts. They are often led by an individual who has a strong technical background and has an excellent handle on the direction and goals of the organization. But, most importantly, they are driven with a level of passion for improving results each and every day. It’s not an easy resource to find!

During my journey, I’ve come to realize that passion is fueled by inspiration. It’s something that can easily dissipate if not properly nurtured. I now pay much closer attention to the inspiration that is all around me. In fact attending the Webtrends Engage User Conference was a great opportunity to learn first hand about the success of others. For those attending who also attended, there was no shortage of inspiration!

I was ready for action! So, the analyst in me took over and I came up with the beginnings of a dashboard – a simple chart to measure my progress.

It was the first in a series of actions that have led to success for me and that I’ll continue to share in a series of posts over the next few months.

About two weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting with a couple of agencies on the West coast; the topic? Web Analytics.  The message I heard? 

Customers aren’t getting enough value out of their web analytics solution.

In addition to my meetings I had the opportunity to see Eric Peterson present at SearchFest 2009, put on by Portland’s own SEMpdx community.  In his presentation Eric introduced a “50/50” rule – essentially for every dollar you invest in web analytics technology you need to invest a dollar in people skills to effectively use the technology.  Whether the ratio is correct or not is surely not the point.

Web Analytics is a discipline – a discipline that requires defined processes and governance, skilled people, and a culture committed to on-going refinement of methodologies.  The technology should then support the discipline. So if you find yourself and your business saying that the value you’re getting for your web analytics solution can’t be justified by what you’re paying, stop paying!  Just stop paying.  Instead, invest the monies into your people and the processes that data can power. 

WebTrends held a webinar with Ian Ayres (author of Super Crunchers and Engage keynote speaker) last week and when Ian was asked what is the biggest obstacle to putting super crunching to practice he responded (and I’m paraphrasing) ‘The willingness to take action with the data and the executive signoff to do so.’ When, and only when, your people find themselves stifled by the limitations of a free offering … when they can clearly demonstrate substantial ROI from an enterprise solution, that will be the indicator your company is ready for the capital investment.  But until then, invest in your people.

To echo Eric’s words, web analytics is NOT easy.  To think or say otherwise is to propagate the problem. We will keep working hard at WebTrends to make web analytics easier and as I see it, the long term growth of this industry will always be bound to its people’s talents.

Although the field of web analytics has slowly broadened its reach, it’s still far short of a household word. As an analyst or administrator of WebTrends, this lack of familiarity with analytics can become a huge stumbling block, especially if the decision makers in charge of budgeting and resources are among the uninformed. Our clients are often unhappily surprised to find that a sound installation and a plan for moving forward sometimes aren’t enough to get analytics data adopted enterprise-wide, nor to get the attention drawn to their area that will guarantee adequate resources and funding.

In a past job, I was the proverbial lone voice in the wilderness, preaching the benefits of using analytics data to drive decision-making, but unable to gain enough support internally to move us forward. Perhaps you’ve felt like that, too. Simply providing the data doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to get decision-makers to start using it; you have to build a culture of data-driven decision making so compelling that it spreads throughout your organization. That is a tall order for a single analyst, or even a single department. The only way to succeed is to find allies. Preferably, allies with influence, decision-making power or organizational clout.

One way to find such allies is to look among your “squeaky wheels”. If there is one manager or executive who consistently cross-examines the data and finds it wanting, that’s the person you want to recruit as an ally. Why? Because a true conversion story always carries weight. If you can convert that complainer into your advocate, then everyone in your organization  is going to take notice. Here are some tips for winning him or her over: (more…)

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.

If you’re an analyst this might sound familiar. You get a call at the eleventh hour, usually around 5 PM on a Friday:

You: Oh, hi Bill. What’s up?

Bill: We have a site (or campaign or web app…) launching over the weekend and we need to have reports on it to deliver to the executive committee on Monday afternoon. You knew about the launch didn’t you?

You: …groan….[remembering last month's weekend-long report creation marathon] Do you have any information on what kinds of data the executive team is looking for?

Bill: Ah, you know, whatever you can get together easily. They mentioned something about wanting demographic information on all their visitors and being able to compare that against the sales region data.

Oh, and I guess they have some sort of AJAX app that runs some interactive content which you can then subscribe to or forward to MySpace or LinkedIn and stuff like that. They’re all charged up about it and it cost a pretty penny, so you know they’ll want some stats on that too.

You: …groan….[realizing it's going to be another long weekend]

This fictional scenario would be a lot funnier, if it didn’t happen so often. Not many analysts have the luxury of working in an environment where everyone is kept in the loop about upcoming web initiatives and where requirements for report data are always defined well in advance. Sometimes the web development project simply moved so quickly towards the go live date that there wasn’t time to define reporting requirements or perhaps the people who needed the data assumed it was something the analyst might already have available. Whatever the cause, web analytics data was an afterthought to the development process and you are left working over the weekend…again.

If this situation seems all too familiar, this blog post is for you. By looking at other business processes — and how they are managed — you can learn how to get out from behind the Q-ball and in front of the curve. In short, you can manage analytics as a service, just like others provided by your organization.

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As we approach the end of the year, I’ve worked with some of our clients to review the digital initiatives and measurement efforts they’ve launched over the past 12 months (with both success and failure). I am a firm believer in streamlining process and efficiency which is probably why I am involved in the web analytics industry. One of the issues that stands out across the board is the lack of a measurement strategy. While most organizations understand the need for online measurement — it seems little time is spent understanding why or how they will measure it. Instead, they just start measuring everything which leads to the inevitable question:

“Okay, so what do all of these numbers mean?”

The topic that always follows and is extremely popular in the realm of web analytics are key performance indicators, or KPIs. While they certainly have their place in not just web analytics but all metric based initiatives, they are very often used as a solution to the problem rather than a tool.I am often asked what “good KPIs” are and my response is always the same. Good KPIs are simply the correct KPIs that are actionable and easy to understand.

To prevent unactionable and confusing inefficiencies caused by KPIs, I would urge everyone to begin (or take a step back) by asking yourselves a simple question:

What is the main purpose for measuring our digital activity?

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Once you have WebTrends implemented, you will likely find yourself, or someone else in your organization (perhaps even several someone’s), pouring over the data to determine if it’s accurate. Ideally, this testing and validation stage takes place before you start distributing the data internally and in a development or staging environment. That gives you time to address any potential issues — missing tags or forgotten filters — and put forward the best quality data right from the start.

But not everyone has the luxury of a testing environment or the time to do it before deployment. Even if you do, your testing environment may not match your live site exactly, or perhaps something was simply overlooked. These things can lead to data that is less accurate than you had hoped, quite apart from the inexactitude that plagues any form of web data. The problem is compounded further when you are moving from a different measurement tool all together, or moving from log files to client-side tagging. These factors combined can result in data that varies widely — sometimes shockingly so — from what you were expecting. And that means you could lose internal credibility, making it even harder to get the resources and attention you need.

Here are a few steps you can take to mitigate these risks and ensure that you not only capture the best data possible, but that you can distribute it confidently.

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