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.

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.