Summertime may be the time for blockbuster movie releases, but we don’t usually associate summer with blockbuster releases among web analytics vendors. WebTrends, with its Analytics 9 release in early August, sought to change that. WebTrends had quite a busy summer, also acquiring a small multivariate testing firm called Widemile at the end of July.

The Analytics 9 release is quite an intriguing package and at first glance its array of features stimulates the “wow” factor, largely because the analysis functions and interface are a vast improvement. The interface itself goes beyond the “traditional” web analytics reporting interface one tends to see in the analytics marketplace in general.

The release is geared towards making it easier for your report users to access reports more easily and analyze the data more quickly. Does WebTrends succeed?

• The new Insight report profile summary and drill down is clearly presented to the user with both standard and custom reports available. Rather than splitting up reports into a vendor-centric hierarchy (a frustrating norm since the beginning of web analytics), the reports are presented in alphabetical order.  A search function is also available to quickly find a specific report.  However, users must enter the specific name of the report, as it is not a fuzzy search. On the plus side, the search form does auto-complete with possible reports based on your entry.

•  A “story” feature is available for all standard (not custom) reports. This is a useful feature that spits out a descriptive analysis of the report that’s been run. For example, instead of needing to write about the top-level numbers and trends, the story feature populates the analysis template with the numbers in all of the right places. I laughed when I first saw this, because I could completely relate to having to spend time on writing these rather obvious analyses that are both labor-intensive and tedious…but often necessary when sending reports along to stakeholders.  There is a bit of a downside, in that you cannot customize the canned analyses.

• If you are using RSS for news, press releases, blogs and so forth, you can easily insert the RSS URL into a report, and see what dates stories were going out via RSS. This easily provides much-needed context to explain dips and spikes in traffic reporting. All you need to do is a cut and paste of the URL into the RSS Overlay field and you’re good to go.

The other aspect of this release that's worth mention is the use of the REST API to create automated Excel reports. Both readers of The Web Analytics Report, and more sophisticated users of WebTrends, know that automated Excel reporting (à la Omniture’s Excel client) has always been a weak point. The new REST APIs alleviate this pain…for the most part. As long as you’re using Excel 2007, you can copy the http link generated by the report in WebTrends and paste it into the “From Web” field under the Data tab to get the report.  You can generate the same report as often as you’d like…daily, weekly, monthly and so on, and the http link will be the same, so you can point to the same link. In addition, there is no limit to the number of rows available in the data export. The automation aspect...that is hands free update of the data into the Excel sheet… is not currently available. This means that you’ll need to do the data refresh manually. This is a bit of an inconvenience, but would not likely be too much to bear unless you’re doing quite a lot of automated Excel reporting.

Analytics 9 is a great step forward, but rather than being a standalone summer blockbuster it has to be viewed either as the first part of a multi-part serial or a preview of things to come. There are a few significant unfinished parts to this story:

What is to become of WebTrends’ custom report interface? This is not covered by the new release. If you need to develop advanced reports, such as those using filters or importing campaign and product IDs into reports, you need to use the “traditional” UI from release 8.5. Same goes for doing drill down reporting.

Other “cliffhanging” aspects in Analytics 9:

• The list of reports in Insight is pre-defined; the company indicates that you’ll be able to custom configure the list in the next release.
• There are two different log ins…one for Insight and one for the “traditional” UI, but there is on administrative control over setting permissions from one or the other.
• Insight does not work with Marketing Warehouse.

There is definitely a “work in progress” element to the WebTrends product right now…which feels both exciting and risky. WebTrends management stresses that it is now in a mode of rapid release cycles, and that the product will be fully re-engineered over the next 6-9 months... with the next release coming out in October. According to the company, there have been 44 customers in beta since mid-June, and they are planning to use the feedback from this group to help shape the evolution of the new product.

I think it’s all a good thing, and I’m impressed by the progress the WebTrends team has made since Alex Yoder took over as the CEO a year ago. But for all of the advancements in Analytics 9, I have a question about what exactly and when exactly the core product will be completely re-engineered. It is not exactly clear what features will be addressed and when they’ll be addressed going forward. I think it would be helpful to have more definition around the product development roadmap.  Without this guidance from the company, I’m not exactly sure when the “new” product will be finished or available in entirety. This type of product development mystery might be ok for a product like Google Analytics...partially  because it's free and partially because Google has created an acceptance around releasing "beta" products. I think WebTrends is doing something positive on the one hand by going to rapid release, and getting new functionality out into the marketplace, but I think its more challenging for a company that's charging significant dinero to walk the same tightrope.

If I were evaluating WebTrends, I’d ask my rep to be as clear about the product development roadmap. Otherwise, I’d feel a bit like I’m guessing on how the product story is going to turn out. Might be fine for the movies, but in the case of a web analytics investment, I’d like to know how the story ends before I put my money down.

Using WebTrends now, or considering a purchase? Definitely interested in your thoughts on this one.