Should You be Freaking Out about your Analytics? Tracking the Spikes and Dips.

This Blog Post is written by Aaron Lovelace. Aaron is an Analytics and Optimization Analyst on my team and he will be guest blogging on this blog.
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One of the challenges in web analytics is knowing whether a spike or dip in web metrics is something to be worried about. One common way that we deal with knowing whether to ‘freak out’ or not is to conduct a historical baseline analysis. Now, if you are a WebTrends customer, there is an easier and less time consuming way. But first, let me explain how we normally go about it so that you can fully appreciate the new development.

For any given site, our team typically maps out historical trends and create a set of standard metrics to measure against. We call this process a “baseline analysis.” These baseline metrics can then be used to determine whether what we are seeing in our analytics is normal or not.

If you do this type of baseline analysis on your site and you notice that your metrics are abnormally good, you can turn whatever caused the spike into a best practice. If your metrics are unusually bad, try to avoid whatever caused the problem in the future. Easy enough, right? Well, sort of.

It is easy to see that conducting this type of research is a necessity if you are serious about success, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a time consuming and laborious process. If you hire a consultant to do a baseline analysis for you, it could get expensive.

So here is the good news— there is a now faster and more accurate way to track spikes and dips in WebTrends… and to know if you should freak out about them.

WebTrends recently announced a new service (through a partnership with Technology Leaders) called “Dynamic Alert.” Among other things, Dynamic Alert allows you to track spikes and dips that deviate from your website’s historical norms automatically.

It should be noted that SiteCatalyst has a feature called simply “Alerts” which allows you to be notified if your metrics exceed a pre-set metric that you specify. With Alerts, you still need to do a manual baseline analysis to figure out which number(s) to enter in the Alerts configuration.

This is what is so great about the new WebTrends tool—you don’t need to pick a number, it just does it for you by automatically analyzing your historical data. One feature I would like to see, however, is the ability to integrate with other analytics tools beyond WebTrends.

Keep an eye out for more information from WebTrends and Technology Leaders about this useful new tool. Although Dynamic Alerts was developed by a partner, if you sign-up through WebTrends, your bill for this service will just be added to your regular WebTrends bill.

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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WebTrends Appoints New CEO

Management shakeup at Webtrends continues. The shakeup started last year when Greg Drew left Webtrends. After Greg, Webtrends appointed Bruce Coleman as the interim CEO, till it found Dan Stikler as the new CEO of the company. Today Webtrends announced the departure of Dan and appointment of Alex Yoder as the new CEO.

Here is the press release from WebTrends:

The Board of Directors of WebTrends Inc. today announced the immediate appointment of Alex Yoder as the company’s new president and chief executive officer following the resignation of Dan Stickel. Yoder was also appointed to the company’s Board of Directors.

In naming Yoder as CEO, the board turned to a WebTrends insider with seven years of experience at the company, and who most recently led WebTrends to its most successful quarter in history as its vice president of sales. He also has been one of the key executives leading the company’s long-term strategic planning, and has over 20 years of global business experience.

Commenting on the management change, board member Neil Garfinkel of Francisco Partners said: “Alex has a proven track record and has demonstrated clear leadership at the company over the years, helping to form our strategic vision and drive customer success. He’s the right person to lead WebTrends’ business forward.”

Yoder joined WebTrends in 2000 and has served in various management capacities in the sales organization. From 2007-2008, Yoder was the vice president of sales at Touch Clarity, a behavioral targeting company, before leaving to rejoin WebTrends as vice president of sales.

“I’ve spent seven of the last eight years focused on expanding the WebTrends brand and delivering business value to our customers,” said Yoder. “I’m excited to partner with other WebTrends leaders such as Nick Sharp, vice president and general manager WebTrends EMEA, to achieve our next phase of growth and become the clear worldwide leader in marketing optimization solutions. We will achieve this with an unwavering commitment to product innovation, by delivering valuable and compelling solutions to our customers and by building strong relationships with our partners.”

WebTrends recently announced its highest revenue quarter in the company’s history, and tomorrow will unveil its new search engine marketing optimization solution—WebTrends Ad Director™.

My best wishes are with Alex and team and I hope that now Webtrends will be able to find the stability and growth that is long overdue.

Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide, Assessing Vendors’ Competencies and Value

John Lovett from Jupiter Research released his new report titled Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide, Assessing Vendors’ Competencies and Value. In this report he analyzed the web analytics market and various vendors, and concluded:

The Web analytics feature race is largely over and we are left with Web Analytics providers competing on Price and Flexibility.

John provides great analysis and insights in this report but I do not fully agree with his conclusion that feature race is largely over. I believe that as new trends in web continue to emerge so is the need for new features. As Phil Kemelor, another great analyst, writes that audio and video are becoming an important part of the web, so there are clearly features needed to support their tracking. Other features currently missing are for Mobile Analytics. Mobile web is clearly gaining momentum and so is a need for Mobile Analytics. I am sure Product Managers of these tool providers are not ready to quit yet.

I do agree that most of the vendors are mostly competing on Price and Flexibility (post-data-capture segmentation, reporting on custom data elements etc.) at this time. (In my view, flexibility is also a feature though). However competing on price when there is still a lot of room for innovation and differentiation is a very myopic view by current web analytics vendor and will provide a way for someone to disrupt their business very quickly.

Satisfaction with the current tool

One of the surprising results in this report was that more than 69% of the web analytics clients have decided to stay with their current web analytics tool. This is a big change from the trend that we have seen in past. A lot of this has to do with education about web analytics tools, what they can do, how they operate and the fact that several most used features and reports are comparable in various tools.
72% of those 69% where completely satisfied with their current provider.
47% of the customer said that the biggest challenge they were trying to solve with Web Analytics tools was Vistor Segmentation. 47% also said that customer engagement was their biggest challenge.

And the Winner Is?

This report has a great 3 dimensional chart showing how different tool vendors rate in terms of business value, market suitability and breadth of company.
Omniture, Unica, and Coremetrics emerged as industry leaders for large enterprises while WebTrends, Google Analytics, IndexTools and Lyris HQ ClickTracks emerged as industry leader for small-to-midsize businesses along with the three listed for large enterprise customers.

It was surprising to see that WebTrends was not considered an enterprise tool anymore, though WebTrends was the only company to score 100% on availability of basic features. (Sidenote: A customer of ours is replacing Coremetrics and going with WebTrends).
Another surprising result was that Omniture was the overall winner even for small-to-midsize businesses.

You can get the complete report at http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/research:vision/79/id=100411

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Interview with Kathleen Brush, Chief Marketing Officer, WebTrends

Anil: Thank you for taking the time for this interview, let’s start with a brief overview of your background.

Kathleen: I have been in executive management in the software industry in the United States and abroad since 1988. During this time, I have held several CMO positions, including positions at Stamps.com and Websense. I have also been CEO and president of a few companies, including Rogue Wave Software and a division of Seagate Software. I have a Ph.D. in Management and International Studies and have taught international marketing at the graduate and undergraduate level. I have written two marketing and business-related books and have authored published articles on marketing and strategy.

Anil: What are the names of the books that you wrote and tell me a little about those books.

Kathleen: High-Tech Strategies in the Internet Era is an A – Z guide for strategy development for high tech products. It has been used at a couple of technical colleges. The book starts with helpful advice on how to go about the research process to identify new products. It then moves to validation, getting buy-in and execution through a technique called strategy deployment.

Watch Your Back is a book of fiction. I know how tedious it can be to read business books, so I decided to try to convey teachings about some of areas of business – most specifically, organizational behavior and the functioning of a board, which are not regularly taught – using a fictional approach.

Anil: Cool. Tell me about your new role at WebTrends?

Kathleen: I have quite a few objectives. I hope to position the WebTrends marketing organization as a showcase for optimizing digital marketing by using our products and those of our partners. The development of a new product strategy will include validating requirements for our current product portfolio and evaluating complementary additions that simplify the life of today’s online and offline marketer.

I’d like to see the company increase communications that provide helpful advice for translating the data customers receive from our products into actionable changes to their marketing campaigns. I will also lead an effort to build up our presence in international markets, and an overall refresh of the WebTrends brand.

Anil: Tell me more about “I’d like to see the company increase communications that provide helpful advice for translating the data customers receive from our products into actionable changes to their marketing campaigns.” Do you mean building strategic consulting practice or expanding partnership with strategic consulting companies like us or something else?

Kathleen: Something else. WebTrends wants to share our expertise with our customers. We will be putting together seminars, articles and white papers with the aim of helping clients and others to maximize the use of the data they receive from our products to improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

Anil: What are the challenges you see at WebTrends today?

Kathleen: The WebTrends brand is globally recognized as the pioneer of, and leader in, website analytics, but many do not equate WebTrends as being a leader and innovator in the broader industry of Enterprise Marketing Software (EMS). The process of refreshing our brand to be an innovative global EMS vendor is a challenge the entire company is enjoying.

Anil: What is your plan for overcoming this challenge?

Kathleen: We have developed a comprehensive strategy surrounding new product deliverables, the development of deeper domain experience, the creation of informative communications, the continuous improvement on the execution of world class online and offline marketing programs and building our international presence.

Anil: Where do you see web analytics market heading? What does future look like?

Kathleen: We see web analytics market advancing on a number of fronts: (1) Delivering in-depth, visitor-level intelligence that moves marketers closer to the ideal of one-to-one marketing; (2) Being able to more precisely measure customer engagement; (3) Going beyond analysis and reporting to delivering recommendations that improve results; (4) Being a central and foundational component to an integrated EMS solution; (5) Being a significant component in our customers’ plans for company-wide business intelligence.

Anil: How is WebTrends positioning itself for the changing market?

Kathleen: By preparing product, marketing and company strategies that are in line with the evolution of the new EMS industry (as noted above) and that focus primarily on meeting the needs of WebTrends’ current and future customers.

Anil: The theme of last year’s WebTrends conference was customer engagement and WebTrends’ Score product was showcased as the solution to measure visitor engagement. How are the customers embracing the WebTrends Score Product? Do you have any case studies that you can share?

Kathleen: Interest in the product has been very high. It is a brilliant solution for measuring customer engagement and permitting the segmentation of visitors into product/service preference areas that permit finely targeted follow-on campaigns. We do not have any published case studies for Score yet, but look forward to sharing those with you soon.

Anil: What is going to be the theme of this year’s conference?

Kathleen: We’re still finalizing the theme, but we will be sure to give you an update when it is finalized.

Anil: Finally, what do you think about Omniture? Their market position and all the acquisitions they are doing?

Kathleen: I have taught about the difficulties of acquiring companies and products: such as integrating disparate technologies and merging companies with varying cultures and processes. I think it is unlikely that Omniture will escape easily from many of the inherent problems in company acquisitions. Now, like most, I think integrated marketing software suites are something the market is looking for, but the key will be, as it always is, in the integrity of the integration. It’s a question of marketecture vs. architecture. Can Omniture truly integrate the products they have acquired to deliver the synergistic value customers are really looking for? Or will this require an open architecture that easily permits exchanging data among EMS applications?

Anil: Great, I think true integration of the solutions is not going to happen. It will be more around creating an easy exchange of data. Thank you for your time.

2007 Web Analytics and Behavioral Targeting Predictions Follow-up

In January of this year I made five predictions about Web Analytics and Behavioral Targeting for year 2007. Since the year is coming to an end, I feel it is time to do a recap of these predictions and see where I stand with these predictions. Let’s take a look at one prediction at a time.

1. Prediction: Web Analytics- A Great Career Field– There will be a lot more jobs in this field in 2007. A great year for those who are planning to enter this field or looking to move into better jobs in this field. Most marketing jobs will have web analytics as a requirement. Currently there are 1024 open job on Indeed.com but I expect this number to rise as there will lot more openings than qualified candidates.

   Follow-up – This was an easy one, I was hiring at that time (and currently too) and based on my discussion with various folks in the industry it was clear that more and more companies were starting to use Web Analytics and it was becoming difficult to find web analyst. When I made this prediction on January 3rd there were 1024 open “web analytics” positions listed on indeed.om, a job aggregating site. Since making this prediction I did a monthly follow-up on open jobs from Jan – Aug, you can find the last (Aug) follow-up at http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/08/web-analytics-jobs-trend-aug-2007.html
   On Nov 20th there were 2045 open positions listed on indeed.com, 99.7% increase since I made this prediction in January. Open positions have been up every month and Oct was the highest month ever with 2085 open positions on Oct 1st. So with this I can say that my prediction number one has come true.
   If you are trying to get into web analytics field I recommend reading interviews I did with various web analysts in the field (Yes I am still doing these interviews, if you want to participate please email me at batraonline at gmail.com)

2. Prediction: Lot more new writers – There will a lot more bloggers and writers in this field. Can somebody count how many blogs on Web Analytics are currently? This will help me set the baseline.

   Follow-up – I don’t know how many total blogs on web analytics were there last year but know for sure that a lot of new blogs on web analytics have started since I made that prediction (If I can locate all the blogs then I will publish a list in near future). Three new books on Web Analytics were published this year. Web Analytics Books by Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day ) and Jason Burby and Shane Atchison (Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions) were planned before I made my prediction so can’t take credit for those. Justin Cutroni also wrote a book on Google Analytics, a great resource and a must read for all those who are using Google Analytics.

3. Prediction: Web Analytics won’t be standing alone – Marketers will want 360 view of the customers. Integration of various data sources and tools will be expected from web analytics and other supporting tool vendors. Omniture started the trend with Omniture Genesis and this will continue we will see more acquisitions and partnerships similar to Omnitures.

   Follow-up – WebTrends had similar integrations, the latest one is with SilverPop, an email provider. Another example is WebTrends Marketing Lab integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide online marketers a consolidated, real-time view into both online visitor activity and offline customer information..
   Omniture’s acquisition of Offermetica and TouchClarity and integration with Salesforce is yet another step in this direction.
   I expect to see this trend continuing in the next year.
   (Also see my recap of this and following predictions.)

4. Prediction: Web Analytics will be about taking actions – More and more marketers would like to take actions and not just report the findings. It just won’t be about what happened, it will be about taking action to drive sales, user satisfaction, lead generation etc. Incentives and bonuses will be tied to the online KPIs. Optimization and Behavioral Targeting will become a common term used by marketers.

   Follow-up: Megan Burns of Forrester Research echoed the same thing in her Report: Web Analytics Market Pumped for Growth. She said “Many Web analytics companies started collecting data about Web site visits and providing reporting tools to analyze that data,” “Now they’re moving to the next level of value, which is enabling people to act on that data and becoming a platform for managing interactive marketing activities.” (Also see the follow-up I did earlier this year).
   Acquisition of Offermetica (Optimization) and TouchClarity (Behavioral Targeting) by Omniture are strong testament of my above prediction. Marketers are demanding a seamless way to not only learn from data but also to take actions to improve site performance. Some web analytics experts are now calling this Web Analytics 2.0. Here is what Josh James CEO of Omniture had to say when they acquired Offermetica
   “The acquisition is a key part of Omniture’s strategy to deliver the most comprehensive solution for optimizing online business. Offermatica leverages Omniture’s recent acquisition of Touch Clarity as the two are highly complementary and together address the spectrum from A/B testing and multivariate testing to behavioral targeting. Offermatica enables companies to define and test the structure and elements of their sites, and Omniture TouchClarity™ enables companies to deliver the optimal content to any individual at any time….This combination, with Omniture’s analytics as the underlying foundation, provides the industry’s first and only integrated site optimization suite.”..A year ago it became very clear to us that our customers wanted to leverage their data through a range of testing and optimization tools. Once we acquired the leading behavioral targeting technology, our customers continued to validate our thinking that in addition to behavioral targeting, A/B testing and multivariate testing were distinct and critical components of their long-term online strategy. Combining these capabilities into a single, integrated offering, built on patented behavioral targeting and testing technology, answers the market need for a complete optimization solution,”

5. Prediction: Behavioral Targeting – Only few main behavioral network players will be left and some of the existing ones with poor networks will either go out of business or be sold. See my previous article on why size of network matter. Behavioral Targeting won’t exist in isolation. Web Analytics tool will have to support behavioral targeting and visa versa. Also, on-site behavioral targeting will become very common.

   Follow-up: Several acquisitions happened in Behavioral Targeting since I made the above prediction. Recent acquisition of Tacoda by AOL and BlueLithium by yahoo proved me right. I think Revenue Science is next in line and will be sold in next few months.
   Also acquisition of Touch Clarity by Omniture proves that web analytics tools have to support behavioral targeting and visa versa. It also proves my point that on-site behavioral targeting is becoming very common. (http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/09/convergence-of-web-analytics-and.html see my post titled Convergence of Web Analytics and Behavioral Targeting.

Yes, I am 5/5 on my 2007 predictions.

What do I see next? I will be making my prediction soon, but this is what I see coming next

1. A tighter integration will happen between ad serving and Web Analytics. Maybe Omniture will buy an ad serving company.
2. Oracle gets into Web Analytics. Yes I think this is going to happen soon.(more on this later)
3. Google Analytics becomes a strong competitor in enterprise Web Analytics space.

WebTrends CMO Departing

Nov 1st I reported about the management shakeup at Webtrends. The I did a follow-up after talking to several employees of Webtrends regarding these changes. Though I was offered an opportunity to talk to Tim Kopp, the Chief Marketing Officer of WebTrends whom I have met on several occasions, I could not talk to him because I was in a hurry to put my post out and also Tim had already provided his view to the press and I did not expect to hear anything other than what he already told others.

Today Eric Peterson reported that Tim Kopp is the latest executive to depart Webtrends.

Wow!!! this is definitely another huge news out of Webtrends in less than a months. As I understand Tim was a force behind all the comeback Webtrends was trying to make, so his departure seems to be a big blow to the company. I am sure there will be more turnover, now it will be the time for many old employees to leave. I have been through similar changes in past so I know that it takes time before everything settles down. At the end it might not be such a bad thing, but who knows, time will tell.

I would like to hear the views of Webtrends’ employees and of course WebTrends’ official words on it.

Omniture, WebTrends and the Web Analytics Industry

Last week saw pretty big changes in Web Analytics Industry. Omniture bought one of it’s biggest competitor Visual Science and later in the week there was management shakeout at WebTrends.

“This has been one of the weirder weeks in Web analytics ever. One of the biggest publicly traded companies gets acquired, and another lets its executives go. Now I’m afraid to wake up tomorrow and find out what else might be going on,” said Eric Peterson to ClickZ.

I agree, the changes in Web Analytics Industry happened so fast that you never know what might next. As I was writing this post I was worried that I will have to change the post by the time I finish it.

Omniture’s purchase of Visual Sciences was the first big news of the week. It was great news for Visual Science investors and Omniture. Omniture bought one of their biggest competitors and further strengthened their position as a market leader in Web Analytics industry.
One of the beneficiaries of Omniture/Visual Sciences deal is going be WebTrends. Just like Omniture and other Web Analytics vendors, WebTrends will also have to compete in a market with one less competitor. Not everybody who would have gone with Visual Sciences will now go with OmnitureVisualScience.

I have found that there are generally 3 types of customer. One those who always like to go with number one vendor in the market, they will go with Omniture (and would have anyway) even though it might not give them everything they need for the price they need. There are those who make rational decision based on through due-diligence, they will choose Omniture, WebTrend or whatever tool makes most sense given their needs and budget. And then are those who will go with number 2 or number 3 just to make sure they don’t become prisoners of the market leader and make sure they don’t empower a company to become a monopoly. These customers will choose anybody but Omniture.

Recent changes at WebTrends however have caused some concern in the market. Blogger and Reporters in Web Analytics field have been speculating about what it means to WebTrends and Web Analytics industry. There are conflicting reports on if these changes are to put WebTrends on a path to be acquired in next few months or if they are to better prepare WebTrends to take on Omniture.

In my opinion, it will not be good for web analytics industry if Omniture also acquires WebTrends. As Sean Burton commented on my blog post blog post about WebTrends Management changes “I doubt that Omniture would be looking to buy WT at the junction, and it would be a crying shame if they did.

The competition between the two companies has driven the market forwards, and has resulted in numerous improvements for the end customer.”

WebTrends is a top competitor to Omniture today. As long as these two companies are competing there will be innovation, at least in near future. We certainly need more than one player in the market to continue innovation.

After coming back from WebTrends Engage Conference I came to the conclusion that WebTrends was on the right track with their new products and I expected them to give Omniture run for its money. At that time I did not even think about the management changes that just happened.

I am very impressed with Marketing Lab 2 and hope that WebTrends investors (Francisco Partners) don’t sell the company. If they do decide to sell then they should sell it someone who can keep the competition going on in this market. It is very critical for the growth of Omniture, the other tool vendors and this industry overall.

The sentiment at WebTrends is very positive and all the people I have talked to or heard from did not give any indication that the company is getting ready for a sale, on the contrary they are excited to move forward in this red hot web analytics market.

Here is one of the comments that an employee of WebTrends left on my blog:
“Wild speculation and facts on the ground are, it turns out, two very different things. I am employed @ WebTrends presently, and can tell you that the change in management is a viewed positively by employees. The partners could have sold the company, which is a net positive asset in anyone’s eyes (consider the brand, customers, product set, years of exp. developing solutions in the verticals, 2X growth since divestiture, etc, etc.). But they chose the strategic move, retrenching, which will require further investment but reflects a longer-term view. The interior culture had eroded badly due to the lack of strategically cohesive vision, employee engagement, unity among the functional business units, and execution in the channel. The surgery performed removes the chief architects of the disaster that was our management team. Certainly the partners could now cut staff levels to improve the marketability of the company in the hope of selling. Omniture would be an unlikely suitor given the VS buy (cash, FCC, etc. make their being the only enterprise vendor in the space unlikely). If the worst that happened is acquisition by a better funded SW behemoth as a stand alone business unit I don’t think you’d hear much opposition from employees, and it could radically improve WebTrends position. Change happens in SW. This is just another new day for a company that has grown accustomed to high-velocity change.”

Another former employee (recent) of WebTrends, also seemed very confident in Marketing Lab 2 (ML2) and WebTrends ability to take on Omniture.

One of the current employee said that Webtrends has seen YOY growth in last year and investors did not have to put any more money, which is a good sign but the growth is not what board was expecting based on how fast the industry is growing.
He also said that there is no plan for “fire sale” as a reporter from Portland Business Journal reported. The reporter could not contact the management of WebTrends and reported based on the speculation. He added that the WebTrends Visitor index and Scoring are getting good market traction. More than what WebTrends can currently handle. They have to do some more work on technical side and services to further improve WebTrends position in the market. He said we are rated number one in integration with other vendors such email, behavioral targeting etc. and board wants to continue use these strengths and take the company to next level.

Another senior employee of WebTrends said that these changes were welcome and somewhat expected by the senior team here. He said that the mood was very positive at WebTrends. He said that they know that they are number two in a very hot market, but also are the only sizeable player with new products, a big team in EMEA, partners in Asia Pac, etc., plus $80 million in revenue. According to him, it is okay to be number two, the underdog for once. He was enthusiastic about Webtrend’s new direction and said that they are ready to steal some market share from Omniture. He said “We’ve won some big deals from them recently, so why should we not take more?”

I wish Greg Drew and Jason Palmer good luck in their new ventures. I am sure they will continue to be a part of this growing industry. I also hope that WebTrends will continue to be a strong market force and provide the competitive landscape that this industry needs to keep innvovating.

Thoughts? Comments?

Management Shakeup at WebTrends

According to a news by Portland Business Journal CEO Greg Drew and three other executives at WebTrends Inc. have left the company. Details of their departure remain unclear.
The other executives that are missing from the list on the WebTrends site are Jason Palmer, vice president of product management; Tore Steen, vice president of business and corporate development; and Hamid Bahadori, vice president of product development and hosted operations.

Bruce T. Coleman, CEO of El Salto Advisors, a consulting firm that provides interim management to computer software and service companies is listed as the CEO of WebTrends.

According to the report, a number of former WebTrends employees believe that a quick sale of the company is imminent. They speculate that with its market share slipping, WebTrends management wanted to sell the company to its biggest rival, Omniture Inc., a publicly traded, $107 million company based in Orem, Utah.

Wow, this changes the whole web analytics landscape. Will Omniture buy WebTrends now? I believed that WebTrends was making a comeback and was ready to give Omniture a hard time but I guess I was wrong. Will Omniture buy them and coremetrics right now and just own the whole Web Analytics space?

Comments?

WebTrends Engage Conference

Earlier this week, I attended WebTrends’ Exchange conference in Las Vegas. Here are some highlights of the conference.

Evening before the conference

On Monday evening, WebTrends provided us a chance to see Live Diet Coke and Mentos show by Eepybird.com, you can see these guys in action here:

Expert Panel on Engagement

Picture courtesy June Dershewitz of Semphonic.

As the name suggest the theme of the conference was visitor engagement. I had a privilege to be on a panel with Gary Angel, Andy Beal, Manoj Jasra, Jim Novo and Jim Sterne. All of us, except Andy Beal, came from Web Analytics background and were in agreement that Engagement was not an excuse, it is a metrics. Andy Beal brought some interesting points about how we should look at engagement not from just web point of view (which was mostly the focus of this conference) but should take other channel e.g. offline into consideration when measuring customer engagement.

360 degree view of the customers

Remember the Predictions I made in January of this year? (Yes they have all come true, 100% on the mark; I just have to do a follow-up post). I wrote
“Web Analytics won’t be standing alone – Marketers will want 360 view of the customers.”.
Guess what? 360 view of customer was another of the subject that was discussed in this conference. Another validation of my predictions.

WebTrends Gone Wild!!!

On Tuesday evening, WebTrends threw a great party at the Palms hotel. The view of Vegas strip from the club was excellent, great choice of venue. It was interesting to see these web analytics folks “engaged” in dancing, free drinks and with each other.

New Products from WebTrends

I was very impressed with Visitor Intelligence and WebTrends Score. I have to say Visitor Intelligence is a great tools for doing advanced segmentation. A very easy to use interface, just drag and drop dimensions and measures and build your segments. It also has the ability to exports the cookie ids so you can take action on your segments, yes I am talking about targeting (behavioral targeting in particular).
Visitor Score allows you to score visitors engagement with the sites, product, attribute scores to various actions that a visitors takes on the site. Visitors Scores will allow you to measure visitor/customer engagement with a very simple interface. However the challenge most of the business will face it to determine what score to assign to which activities (and this is where I can help you). As I wrote last week,
If defined properly (that’s the key) engagement metrics can be good measure of past and predictor of future. Here is tool which can help you in defining engagement. Also, score provides a way to segment your users and then do on-site Behavioral Targeting.
According to my friend Jacques Warren
“Score will need to run on Visitor Intelligence, which will in turn need to run on Marketing Warehouse. This means that you will need to get new money to pay for them, whatever you have spent on the regular product.”

My New Prediction
WebTrends is on the right track with their new products and you will see them giving Omniture run for their money. Omniture get ready for some stiff competition. The more I think the more convinced I get that Webtrends is making the right moves. Howvere WebTrends has to make some more moves to get these products adopted by the market. I have my opinions on how Webtrends can make these products a success, and I already talked to them about it. Thank you for listening, I hope you will also act on what I said. If you are from Webtrends and want to listen to those again I would love to talk with you(Note: I will be at eMetrics next week). I have talked to several people about my concerns and they all agreed, so this is not just me.

Other reads:
Jacques Warren
June Dershewitz

What’s Next for me
I have a lot to write, two main ones are

1. A follow-up post on my Predictions
2. My view of the future and how cookie deletion won’t matter, yes, you will have to wait for it. I have discussed my views with two fellow bloggers and they have promised not to reveal it.

Next week, I am going to eMetrics, where I will be speaking about Behavioral Targeting
Then I am off to India for a week.

WebTrends Engage Conference 2007 in Las Vegas

Next week I will be in Las Vegas on 8, 9 and 10. No, I am not going to gamble (well maybe a little) but I will be there to attend WebTrends Engage 2007 conference. This is another great web analytics conference. I highly recommend this conference even if you are not a WebTrends customer, as it will allow you to see what WebTrends can do for your business. This conference will provide you an opportunity to learn from current WebTrends customers and other experts in the field.

I was a speaker at the last conference in Orlando. This year I will be on a customer engagement panel with elite group of web analytics and online marketing gurus. The panel on consumer engagement will include the following
• Gary Angel, SEMphonic
• Anil Batra, ZeroDash1 (Me)
• Andy Beal, Marketing Pilgrim
• Manoj Jasra, Enquiro Search Solutions
• Jim Novo, The Drilling Down Project
• Jim Sterne, Web Analytics Association and Emetrics

Some of the speakers at the conference are

Paul Wilmington, Naked Communications
Julian Brewer, Barclays Bank
Kevin Doohan, ConAgra
Loran Gutt, ShopNBC

I will arrive there on 8th evening; I would love to meet with readers of this blog, so if you are going to be there email me at batraonline at gmail.com.

You can read about the conference and register at http://www.webtrends.com/ms/engage07/