Jascha's Blog

Running a business is hard.

"Analytics...form the connective tissue."

The ecosystem surrounding a business – developing IP, building a brand, motivating people, managing operations – often appears disjointed. We employ separate technologies, have separate (often competing) departments, separate sets of processes, even separate offices. Thus it’s easy to forget that business does indeed operate within an ecosystem, that all these seemingly separate entities must work together to make business flourish. Managing your business ecosystem is hard, but truly successful business – that is, to understand the problems we’re solving and take care of our customers:

1) They understand the business problem they are solving.
2) They take care of their customers.
3) They innovate.

All of our businesses have problems, whether they’re related to internal processes or those of our customers, and we face an ever-widening array of tools we can use to address them within the business ecosystem. Analytics are one of the most basic parts of that ecosystem. They form the connective tissue that intertwines with marketing automation, multivariate testing, business intelligence and a bevy of maturing technologies that make it easier for us to run a successful business that understands the problem they are solving and takes care of their customers.

Yet all too often there is an expectation that analytics are removed from your business. That they are a business within your business. That only from identifying separate processes and separate resources can analytics be successful. I’ve heard businesses say more times that I care to share in the last year that they need to “make analytics successful.” We’ve got it wrong.

Technology can’t be beneficial to your business if it operates in a vacuum of resources and expertise. Maybe your business can be stronger with the newer tools (or maybe the new tools get in your way), but they can’t replace a good recipe and a skilled cook.

Success happens because of people and process supported by technology, not technology in and of itself. Web Analytics is not hard, running your business is. I think you’ll agree, however, that when operating within the context of a well-run business ecosystem, analytics can help you solve your business problems better, take better care of your customers and support innovation. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be exploring how marketing plays a role in a successful business. How the practice of marketing iteration is practiced and how it is supported by a recipe of analytics, mvt, a myriad of emerging technologies and, most importantly, skilled cooks.

In the meantime, I’d love to know what makes your business hard, what challenges you are facing, and how you use process and technology (like analytics) to make your business better.

At Webtrends, we’re excited about the announcement of Google Analytics public beta for their Data Export API.  Why would we be excited?  It’s simple really, because we understand that value is derived not solely from the data, but the insights you get from this data that lead you to action.  Action enabled through integration of the data into enterprise systems and processes of YOUR business. 

Gone are the days of the all-in-one suite falsely promising it can be everything to everyone.  Today’s business owners should refuse to pay for the convenience of getting at their data through vendor APIs. We launched public beta of our web services on April 7, and customer response has been fantastic – we have about 20 times more accounts (customer and developer/technology partner) enabled today than we did at the end of our private beta period a few weeks back.  The release of the Google API a few days ago reinforces all the reasons we were so excited to announce the Open Exchange to our customers.  We believe you should be able to get to your data in a way that makes sense to your business and that includes the integration of the data into tools/processes that provide true meaning of the data – whether it is a complex business intelligence tool or Microsoft Excel, a tool that most people use every day.  Providing unfettered access to your data is why we announced Open Exchange at our Engage customer conference a few weeks ago and why we talked about it during our seminar series last November.  Having Google join us in this effort is exciting.

We believe that our new web services, and the developer network community we launched, provide powerful tools for integrating Webtrends data with everything from Excel or your own custom reporting apps and everything in between.  We created these new web services so that our customers can:

• Build their own powerful applications by integrating data directly in to their apps. Custom dashboards, widgets, and analytics apps just got a lot smarter with REST URL methods
• Build dashboards in Excel by bringing in live data from your Analytics reports. In Excel, you can use the “import from web” option to import report data.

Why build something that makes it easier to get data into Excel?  Excel is the most widely used analytics tool in the world.  Fortune 100 companies to small businesses us it to analyze, understand, and present this data throughout their organization.  A typical barrier is that most business users aren’t programmers or developers, and think that REST is something your body gets at night when you are asleep.  We had a challenge to ensure that our business users could take full advantage of our new REST API from within Excel.  To support the typical business user, we developed the REST URL Generator tool as part of the new web services.  Check it out and see how easy it is to get this data out of Webtrends and into Excel.

So maybe you are reading this and thinking you’re a programmer, what’s in this for me?  The same powerful and elegant solution we’ve created for business users is what we’ve set out to accomplish for developers as well.  As I mentioned, we’re using REST, which is a powerful standard that is widely accepted to program on. Our simple XML and JSON formats are easy to consume into applications you can build.  The JSON format is a less verbose option than XML, which will make performance better for applications that can consume it.  Plus we have an Excel-specific XML format to make data appear in Excel the way you want it to – in case you are programmer building powerful Excel applications for business users described above.

Open Exchange doesn’t end with web services.  We’ve released enhancements to our solution for managing the complexity of javascript tagging, Tag Builder, to allow for easier partner connections and more efficient tag management.  We’re building a new Data Collection API to further enable customers to derive value from our partners, which will be out in beta this summer.

In all we believe that the future of the analytics industry is going to be driven by enabling customers to get their data, in a way that works for their business, that gets them to insight and leads to action.  We fully expect that all the other players in the analytics space will be moving this direction too.  We welcome it because it ultimately benefits our customers – and that is what truly excites us.