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.

Had the clock just struck thirteen? Had I just been subjected to 2 minutes of hate? Was I living in a dystopian society?

The answer to all the above is no—I’m not Winston Smith and the year is not 1984. Phew! But, Big Brother IS following me on Twitter.

The Big Brother I am talking is not the totalitarian state (not is this blog anyway) but of course the successful reality TV show.

WHY?

In the UK certain events quintessentially define British summer time these range from Wimbledon and Royal Ascot to the Glastonbury music festival. Over the last 10 years the phenomenon that is BB has rowdily forced its way into this, creating a televisual feast of reality on our screens 24 hours a day 7 days a week for the entire summer period.

Rewind to the beginning of this years “summer”, Webtrends had just launched social measurement (if you haven’t seen it call your local rep and demand a demo! IT’S AMAZING) and I had been working through some demo ideas to show customers. I chose Big Brother for a topic idea as it has an element of community—stuff happens and the power of social media means that people want to talk about it instantly. One of my initial ideas was to compare traditional summer events with Big Brother and the results are of this are below:

Astonishing, but actually Big Brother gets far more mentions in social media than “traditional” summer events. I just guess sports events haven’t captured the hearts and minds of Twitterers in the same way reality TV has.

During the time of the MP expenses scandal exposed superbly by one of our customers, The Daily Telegraph, one of the housemates called “halfwit” (read here to find out why he is called that) had shown an interest in becoming a politician after the show. So I did a comparison of mentions for that week betwixt him and the major political figures in the UK today:

Amazingly again the housemate, even in these troubled times had more share of voice than the 2 leaders of the opposition parties in the UK and on one day eclipsing the Prime Minister himself!

I also made a conscious effort not to watch the actual TV show itself , but actually use mentions and conversation cloud to understand what had actually gone on within the house.

This sort of fun insight is better shared with the Big Brother community than locked away in a demo, so I started tweeting the outcomes of some of the trends I had discovered and two things happened…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKS2qV1FKVs]

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.

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…)

The Visitor Summary table, which appears in the Visitor Dashboard or the Overview Dashboard, is one of the most used features of WebTrends Analytics products. But it is also one that can lead to confusion, especially when your data users want to compare the numbers shown in this table with other “visitors” numbers shown elsewhere in their WebTrends reports. In particular, when they see that the numbers shown in this table do not match the ones shown in the New vs. Returning Visitors report, they inevitably ask, “Which number should I use? And why are they different?”

Visitors Who Visited More Than Once

The Visitor Summary table shows Unique Visitors numbers for all the web pages included in the profile based on the sessionization method in use. The most commonly used sessionization method  is a First Party Cookie (FPC), because it gives you the most accurate data short of requiring all your visitors to log in. If you are using a FPC, but the particular visitor’s browser rejects the cookie, then WebTrends will resort to using IP-User Agent for sessionization of that particular visit, and the visitor count will reflect that. If you are using IP-User Agent for sessionization by default, the Visitors number will be based on that, instead. But all of those visitor numbers, even those based on IP-User Agent instead of cookies, are included in the Visitor Summary table.

(more…)