A power user of WebTrends recently told me that, “With WebTrends, you are only limited by your imagination.”  For our advanced users, this is true.  They see the power of the platform, get in there, and access all sorts of custom controls and configurations made available to them. However, exposing these power features to our power users has come at a cost, the overall user experience.  When I joined the WebTrends team, my mandate was to dramatically improve the user experience of our products for all users. I am proud to announce the first manifestation of this initiative.

Previous Tag Builder - Version 2.2

Enter Tag Builder – the starting point for our User Experience (UX) transformation.  Tag Builder is a great power user mini-app.  It allows a user to quickly put together a powerful custom javascript tag for visitor/behavior tracking.  These tags work for both the Analytics and Warehouse platforms and even includes options for Ad Director and Quantcast tracking (2.2 release feature) all within one custom javascript file. Tag Builder, because of its small size, allowed us to do a complete overhaul on the user interface while keeping the engine that builds the actual tag on the backend the same.  We even included a link to the 2.2 version of TagBuilder so users who rely on Tag Builder can access the previous version during the transition so they can compare the javascript files for their own curiosity and quality assurance.

New Tag Builder - Version 3.0

The next four articles will walk through the detailed changes manifested in the new Tag Builder, the methodologies that led up to them, and what this means for the larger WebTrends product line.

Try out the new WebTrends Tag Builder yourself. And let us know what you think.

You Asked, We Acted.
Today we launched a few improvements to WebTrends Tag Builder. Based on input from this blog we were able to quickly make some changes to a couple of issues you called out.

•   We didn’t update referrer appropriately when off-site links were clicked. Now these are passed with every off-site click.
•   We were a little too picky about file extensions. File extensions you specify on the Click Event Tracking tab are now case-insensitive.

Auto Detection of Paid Search for AdWords
Are you interested in tracking paid search for Google AdWords in your WebTrends reporting without having to deal with additional setup? Now our tag detects if referrals from Google originate from paid or organic placements without requiring you to set an additional parameter. This does require that you have the “Destination URL Autotagging” option enabled in your AdWords account. We will keep you posted as we automatically detect other engines in the future.

Integrated Tagging for Quantcast Publisher
Tag Builder now includes Quantcast as an option when you are setting up your WebTrends tagging. Quantcast is a no-charge solution that provides access to detailed geographic, demographic and lifestyle data about visitors to your site (including age, race, sex, income range, children status and other sites visited).

With WebTrends and Quantcast you can:
•    Compare your traffic acquisition strategy to competing sites
•    Get insight into how your competitors are getting traffic
•    Use insight on high-value populations to move ad dollars
•    Adjust your ad buy mid-stream – see what demographics are responding

For more details check out the Quantcast site.

Please keep the feedback coming. We are listening! Whether you are a software or On Demand customer, we’re always working hard to improve your experience with WebTrends.  Let us know how we’re doing -  from within the products,  here on the blog, user forums, Twitter or contact any of us directly.

If you haven’t used the new WebTrends Tag Builder yet – you’re missing out. I love it!

The 2.0 version of Tag Builder contain all sorts of awesome functions that you can chose to include or exclude, so you optimize the script based on your reporting requirements. Out of all these optional functions dcsAdSearch and dcsOffsite have to be my favorite. With a little tweak to dcsOffsite, together these functions can make tracking onsite ad impressions and click through so much easier. No more messing around with onclick event handlers in ad link tags.

Provided you have a unique identifier already in a query string parameter in the address of your ad link, which most ad placement software will use, for example ‘n=’ in Double Click ad’s. You no longer even need to worry about amending WT.ac or any other parameters to your link addresses.

Under the additional settings tab in Tag Builder you simply need to check the ‘Create ad view from links containing this parameter’ option box. This will ensure the ‘dcsAdSearch’ function is added to your script. The function will trawl through all the links in a given page via the DOM looking for the ad click parameter. Every time a matching ad link is found its ad click parameter value is added to the ad view parameter (WT.ad) list (semicolon separated). Yeah – it builds your WT.ad parameter value/list for you too! (more…)