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.

Scorecarding has been an analytic passion of mine for a few years now.  In my last position before I started working here at WebTrends I developed an extensive scorecard that stretched across multiple channels and was so rich in data that it was in fact intimidating to nearly everyone but a data freak like me.  What I forgot to do then and what I am working on now as I move forward with scorecarding is to condense the wealth of data down into an easily digestible format and customize it to the specific business users.

Who is your audience? When it comes to dashboards and scorecards one size does not fit all.  Learn from my experience, before you go about developing one first figure out who your audience is and what it is they want to know. The information an executive team is interested in is far different than that of the marketing team and ecommerce certainly has different needs than IT.  Everyone one wants (or should but that is another blog) the data.  The key point for each business user is this data you are presenting to them will help them make decisions.

What questions do they want answered? When I was deciding today between writing either about gathering business requirements or scorecarding I had one of those ah ha moments realizing you really can’t be successful with your scorecard if you don’t first gather your business requirements so let’s take a look at what that looks like. (more…)