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.

When you first start trying to get value from your web analytics tool, you may be surprised by some of the road blocks put in your path by your own organization. Internal policies and procedures may be inflexible. It may not be easy to get necessary decisions made or, worse, you may not even know who needs to make them. And it may also not be readily apparent who in the organization stands to benefit from the data you can provide.

The journey from being a data-consuming organization to becoming a data-driven one can be long and painful, especially if you don’t accept at the outset that you ARE an agent of that change. Analysts or administrators can quickly find themselves, as the person who is “closest” to the data, called on not only to support the analytics tools or deliver insight from the data, but also to drive adoption of the data through internal marketing, coordinate projects with other departments, identify opportunities for increasing value to the organization, integrate analytics data with data from back-end systems, develop standards and governance models, perform cost/benefit analysis of analytics efforts, and assist with (or even drive) budgetary planning. Ultimately, your efforts as an agent of change will involve and impact many people along the way. And not all of those people will be happy about it.

Here are some ways you can plan for the  impacts of change and be successful as an agent of organizational change. (more…)

I’m going to dedicate this posting to the billions of dollars being wasted on SEM marketing, and those who unwittingly contribute to it. Even in ideal market conditions you’d think this would be a concern to any major advertiser, but given recent events now in particular is the time to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your SEM advertising dollar.  Of course I’ll be discussing WebTrends Ad Director specifically, but other similar technologies exist, such as Efficient Frontier.  And while I could dig into some biased opinions on why Ad Director is the technology leader in this space, it’s more important to me (for now) that readers understand the principle of automated SEM optimization, as a stark contrast to bid management. As is a tedious habit of mine, I’ll start with some history…….

Let’s go back to the abacus (just for a sentence!). Although very simple, just a wooden frame with beads that slide along wires, this device gave humanity an addictive first glimpse into a reality of machine-aided calculations. Move forward a few centuries—past the invention of the hand-held calculator and parallel computing, a computer’s victory over a world champion chess player and successful forays into artificial intelligence—to the present, where technology is freeing humans from the drudgery of repetitive tasks. With relative confidence we can now relinquish control of everyday things like balancing our check books and navigating through city streets, for example, and can shift our focus to activities requiring more non-linear intuition and decision-making.

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