Real Story Group. Make Better Technology Decisions.

Phil Kemelor

WebTrends' Xmas in August Release

10-Aug-2007

Tags: Web Analytics, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Analytics

Web analytics vendor WebTrends released Marketing Lab 2 last week, an ambitious effort that seeks to raise both the analytics value of the product while improving usability.

The introduction of WebTrends "Score" and WebTrends "Visitor Intelligence" are the featured upgrades to the Marketing Warehouse Version 2.0. WebTrends Score enables you to set values on events in order to measure engagement. While the idea of setting values is not ground breaking, analysts who currently spend time doing this offline in Excel will save time setting up values within the interface and having reports generate natively.

WebTrends Visitor Intelligence essentially makes it easier to create segments and multi-dimensional reporting from the product's "Marketing Warehouse." By using SQL Server 2005, the UI enables you to use drag and drop functionality to select a specific number of cubes upon which to filter data and generate custom reports. The UI is well organized and its graphical approach -- powered by Ajax -- may make it more accessible to analysts.

Existing customers of the Marketing Warehouse will be upgraded to Score and Visitor Intelligence at no additional cost. Clearly, WebTrends hopes that these new services will incent other customers to upgrade to the Marketing Warehouse, at a cost of an additional $1,000/month.

In general, the UI work exhibited in this release does a lot to unify what had been disparate parts of the WebTrends offering. As Web Analytics Report readers know, previously you needed to access Dynamic Search, Analytics, and Marketing Warehouse separately. These are now all part of a single interface, a seemingly minor improvement, but one that should help analysts who use the tool on a daily basis.