The Webtrends (R)Evolution

On August 4th 2009, Webtrends Analytics 9 was released. No major historical news, but I thought it was a good reason to write down my personal thoughts about one of the leading web analytics vendor in the market.

My first experiences with Webtrends already go back about 6 years. I’ve always been on the consultancy side in web analytics, having done and still doing business development, implementation, analysis and optimization, and trainings. I am a Webtrends Certified Consultant and Authorized Trainer since 5 years, so I think I know Webtrends and its solutions pretty well. But my relationship with Webtrends has been one with ups and downs from the start. Nevertheless I must admit that I am totally loving the new spirit that seems to live within the company since Alex Yoder and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff have taken over the ship.

A small recap of the last 6 years, from version 6 up until 9:

6 years ago Webtrends was still written with a capital T (WebTrends) and was owned by NetIQ, a leading provider of integrated systems and security management solutions. The products I first lay my hands on, the Log Analyzer 8.0 and the WebTrends (eBusiness and Enterprise) Reporting Center 6.0, were still sold in a box with software cd and printed manuals included. Webtrends was the worldwide market leader and provided the most robust solution of all existing web analytics solution. Their product was targeted towards and used by the IT team within the enterprise clients, more focusing on the number of hits and the time to load, rather than on marketing ROI. But that was the general trend in web analytics those days. For me web analytics was all quite new but I was enjoying all aspects of it and learned a lot.

A huge turnaround came only a couple of months after my introduction to Webtrends with the release of version 7, in April 2004.  The new product got a major facelift and WebTrends 7 had become a marketing solution rather than an IT tool. The new release was built around the ‘Acquire, Convert, Retain’ process with the calculation of ROI as prime goal. Besides the fancy facelift, a bunch of new features and reports were included such as:

• Campaign, Commerce, Merchandising and custom reports with drilldown capabilities
• Extensive and Visual Scenario (Funnel) and Path Analysis reporting
• Excel plugin for SmartReports
• Smartview, the site overlay plugin for IE
• Data Integration

WebTrends 7 came in 3 flavours: Small Business, Professional and Enterprise. Version 7 was followed by some smaller upgrades including the release of 7.1 and 7.5 in 2005. The taglines now were ‘actionable analytics’ and ‘accurate data’.
The enhancements that were added included extended Visitor Segmentation, extended Email and Search Marketing report capabilities, more drill-down functionalities, onsite search, and data accuracy via first-party cookie tracking. Webtrends also integrated a quite extensive Customer Center to its UI with lots of useful manuals, white papers, knowledge base, webcasts, etc.

In the mean time, March 2005, Webtrends was acquired by Francisco Partners, a private-equity firm, for approximately $94 million in cash. This acquisition was not really a big surprise. Web analytics was not an IT tool anymore and therefore not really in line with the core business of NetIQ. Francisco Partners announced major investment in the product development which, amongst other minor product enhancements, resulted in the release of the Markting Lab 1 year later.

The WebTrends Marketing Lab was the new product family that would “revolutionize marketers’ ability to improve the performance of online campaigns and direct marketing”. The MarketingLab was a 1st step towards a broad marketing platform consisting of Analytics 8, Dynamic Search, Score, and the Visitor Intelligence module. This platform was launched in March 2006.

In my opinion, WebTrends Analytics  8 didn’t change that much from the previous version, except for some smaller UI enhancements and integration in the MarketingLab platform. And now, depending on the number of page views and features, you had to choose between 4 packages: Standard, Marketing, Advanced Marketing, and Commerce.
Dynamic Search (now Ad Director) was/is a semi-automated bid management solution, but especially targeted to end-user with quite a big media budget. Except for a demo I never used it or sold it to a client.  WebTrends Score on the other hand was very promising. This solution allowed you to attribute scores to different events in your online platform in order to measure the visitor engagement and create segments based upon these scores, in order to target your future marketing communication on these different segments and even on the individual. Only one minor disadvantage, but you needed the Visitor Intelligence in addition in order to make use of it…

Visitor Intelligence was the integrated version in the MarketingLab of the actual standalone WebTrends Marketing Warehouse solution. This was the first step towards a real data warehouse, but the first release was actually far from being a warehouse and far from being flexible or actionable. The release of version 2  changed little compared with the original version. And the warehouse was only available as OnDemand, and not as software.

In addition Webtrends disclosed very little information about this new solution to its partners, and hardly provided the opportunity to play around with it, probably because of the previous mentioned limits. Being a Webtrends Insight Network (WIN) partner, we were never asked any feedback about the solutions or marketing activities, and we received very little insights in any future product development.

It was only from version 3 of the Marketing Warehouse that we actually got valuable data out of it, but although it all looked very nice, still it wasn’t an very open solution that you could easily plug into an existing BI environment. And at that time, the market showed a clear demand for a solution which included an open (relational) database and offered easy integration with internal warehouses. At the same time other web analytics vendors such as Omniture and WebSideStory (later on re-brand as Visual Sciences) gained market share and some of them did offer a product with open database or warehouse included.

During this period Webtrends had some internal managerial issues as well, which finally ended with the resignation of CEO Greg Drew and three other executives in October 2007. Webtrends was clearly struggling: no great success with their Marketing Warehouse, more competition and some internal conficts.
After the internal turbulence in 2007, my guess was that Webtrends would be acquired by Microsoft or another big player in web analytics or business intelligence, and my hope in a resurrection of the former market leader had decreased heavily. In addition, the new management couldn’t really get the train on the rails again, until…

Until Alex Yoder (CEO since August 2008) and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff (VP Marketing since October 2008) became the new captains of the ship. It seemed like a complete turnaround, and a new positive and open culture had taken over:

• They got rid of the capital T !
• Yoder (http://twitter.com/yodera), Kaykas (http://twitter.com/kaykas) and Webtrends (http://twitter.com/Webtrends) on Twitter
• The Webtrends team is being proud again of working at Webtrends, and tell this to everybody via their blog and tweets
• Re-branding to blue
• WebTrends Engage 09: first in Vegas, now finally in Europe (London) as well
• Integration with buzz monitoring solution Radian6, baptised as Webtrends Social Measurement
• Release of the Webtrends Marketing Warehouse On-Premise
• Acquisition of testing and optimization provider Widemile (according to me, it’s a must for each web analytics tool to have at least an integrated testing solution)
• The Webtrends Digital Maturity Model (DM3), through which they clearly show that web analytics is much more than just a tool
• And finally, on August 4th, the release of Webtrends Analytics 9

Webtrends Analytics 9 is still completely based on the same analytics engine as version 8, and feature-wise doesn’t differ much from its predecessor. The major difference is the UI, which went through an incredible make-over and is more intuitive than ever before with some extra enhanced data exchange possibilities as a bonus. In addition to the current  capabilities there are now 2 new capabilities:

• Analytics 9 Insight: a complete new approach of looking at your data, with easy and quick to use metrics and account drilldown options, comparative reports and very nice RSS overlay feature

• Analytics 9 Open API: a complete self-service application programming interface (API) for integrating Webtrends data with Excel or your own analytics reporting apps, or importing data from external data sources into the Webtrends reports.

Although this latest upgrade is focused on UX and open API’s, and is not really a major upgrade on new functionalities, it clearly shows once again the intention of Webtrends for future product development and expansion of its platform (through the recent acquisition of Widemile). I’m really looking forward to the Webtrends Engage 09 summit in London in October, and I’m curious to hear and see what’s next to come. But first let’s play around with Analytics 9!

What’s your experience with Webtrends as a company, and with their tools? Let me know!