Interestingly is it that WebTrends president & CEO Alex M. Yoder writes that WebTrends is all about openness. In his introduction of the blog he tells us WebTrends is about “open access to data; open platform we develop upon; open exchange of information with our partners; and open communication with our customers and the rest of the web analytics community”. Personally I think this is a great change of mind and a good method to get closer to their end customers.

Visit WebTrends blog at http://blog.webtrends.com

The tool can be found at http://tagbuilder.webtrends.com and has many configuration features like the use of first party cookies, click event tagging, tracking of downloads etc. Also very handy is the ability to save your configuration to an XML file for later use and duplication.

The Geotrends database is fuelled by the IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Their role on the internet is to keep record of all IP Addresses, they maintain the register who ows which IP Addresses. Now not all IP Addresses have a owner, there still are some addresses available though they are running out of stock (hence the introduction of IPv6). All IP Addresses that do not have an owner yet, are hold by IANA. That means that if you lookup an IP Address from one of the Regional Internet Registries, you will see the address of IANA

Now here it comes… the IANA is located in Marina Del Rey: http://www.iana.org/contact.htm. This is why you see Marina Del Rey in your reports. A simple solution is to keep your GeoTrends database updated.

If you add the WT.srch=1 parameter a destination URL will look like: www.omtrends.com/?WT.srch=1 This Query Parameter only tells WebTrends that the visitor came from a Paid Search advertisement, nothing less and nothing more.

To determine which Paid Search program was used (ie. Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing), WebTrends will capture the Referral information also. So if this visitor came from an AdWords campaign, WebTrends will see a Referring URL like http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4EGLC_enNL238NL238&q=visual+workstation+hbx and translate this into “Google AdWords”, with help of the file keywords.ini:

[Google AdWords]
ID1=.google.com
KeywordIndicator1=q= 

As you can see WebTrends will capture the q= parameter to retrieve the keywords. These are the keywords the visitor used in Google.

So for instance, if I search for “visual workstation hbx”, I might see iMETRIX in one of the Google AdWords advertisements. WebTrends will pick up the Search Phrase “visual workstation hbx” and report this in the out-of-the-box report Most Recent Search Phrases (Paid). Alrighty! you think?

Not really WebTrends reports on the Search Phrase the visitor searched on, not the phrase you are advertising on. This means that you cannot match your WebTrends reports with your Google AdWords reports. Let’s say you are advertising Broad Match on the word “HBX” and the user searches at www.google.com on “visual workstation hbx”. Google AdWords will report a clickthrough on the word “HBX” while WebTrends reports “visual workstation hbx”. There is no way to match both reports and if you didn’t know about this – you should have had a lot of discussion with your Google AdWords Professional already.

So now we know that  your reports probably aren’t displaying the data you think they are displaying. Let’s fix it rightaway!

We are going to use a Visitor History parameter. WebTrends has 4 available for you; WT.seg_1, WT.seg_2, WT.seg_3 and WT.seg_4. These Visitor History are meant to be used for segmentation purposes but actually can be used for anything you would like to store. A great advantage of using a Visitor History parameter is that it will store the information in a database so that if a visitor visits your site on day 5 of the month through Google AdWords and converts 20 days later, WebTrends will be able to report on this. If you’d use a regular parameter, ie. kw=<keywords>, WebTrends will only be able to report on behavior of the specific visit that has this information.

Ok I assume you are not using the WT.seg_1 yet, so we will add it to your URL. The value will be the keyword that you are advertising on at Google AdWords, resulting in this Query Parameter to be used in your landing page URL: WT.seg_1={keyword:nil} Google AdWords will automatically replace {keyword:nil} with the keyword you were advertising on. In this example it will eventually look like: WT.seg_1=HBX. More information about Google AdWords Keyword Insertion can be found here.

As you can see we also use the WT.mc_id campaign parameter. We add this to see which overall campaign performance in our campaign overview report. The gclid parameter is being added by Google AdWords because of the Google Analytics auto-tagging of AdWords destination URLs.

Eventually, when you would click on the Google AdWords adversitement, the destination URL will look like:

http://www.imetrix.nl/producten/Visual_Sciences.stm?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=PRHB&WT.seg_1=hbx&gclid=CKemrfi56I8CFQuuQwod6hU4Dw

It seems that this version includes only some little bugfixes and language additions/completions.

• This document lists all enhancements in WebTrends 8.1a
• This document lists all bugfixes in WebTrends 8.1a

The new version can be downloaded from WebTrends FTP site.

It’s interesting to read why WebTrends offers this program. As they state in their press release, it is targeted to those “who may be uncertain about future support for their existing investment”. Maybe WebTrends suggests Visual Sciences will drop support for HBX Analytics since their tool Visual Site is much more comprehensive. Or could it be that WebTrends responds on reports that Visual Sciences settled an patent litigation with NetRatings Inc?

Read the press release: WebTrends Invites HBX Analytics Customers to Move to WebTrends Marketing Lab 2

The good news is, I had no problems at all upgrading my 8.0d installation to 8.1! I will be on the road tomorrow to get a new WebTrends customer on the road but I’m sure I will have time later this week to give you screenshots and samples from rhe new WebTrends interface.

We skipped back and forward to all kind of topics,  starting with explaining topic one and ending with something completely different. Tiring but it keeps my job interesting

Deciding whether your site is doing okay or not is easy for ecommerce sites as sales and conversion are easy to measure. With content based sites it’s less easy to know whether your Visitors are feeling happy with your offering. One of the discussions we had was about Visit Duration being a metric to use as one telling whether your content or campaign is successful.

If your visitors spend an average of 10 minutes on your site, does that mean your site is optimal?

If he was on your site for 10 minutes it could mean that he is searching for the information he needs, not knowing where to find it because of -for instance- suboptimal navigation or malfunctioning internal search. On the contrary it could mean that he sees so many topics he just can’t get enough of reading all information provided.

But what if the Visit Duration would be only 10 seconds, would that be bad? With current attention span anything above 3 seconds is just great… it could mean that the information provided wasn’t what he was looking for but it could as well mean that he found the information needed and left the site as a satisfied Visitor. And what if I advertise on Google AdWords and my visitor landed at my landing page and flew away without browsing other topics. Would that be bad? NO! It most likely tells you that your landing page is perfect, the visitor has been informed.

I advised the customer to define Key Information Pages, what are the pages your organization makes writes to inform the public. Get them tagged being a KIP and see what part of the visitors saw a KIP and who didn’t. This way you get a very straight forward report; those who were informed and those who were not.

In early August, WebTrends Marketing Lab 2 will be available, including the new WebTrends Analytics (v8.1)! What does that mean to you? For one thing, you’ll see a streamlined new interface, and experience some great new features.There’s something new for everyone, so take a look at what you can expect in the new WebTrends Analytics.

  Watch the 5 minute webcast 

For Business Analysts

• Quickly answer questions and share information about your website
• Gain adoption across the organization
• View side-by-side reports to quickly compare results

For Business Users

• Schedule push delivery or pull key performance metrics into corporate scorecards or other solutions within your enterprise
• Enhance export delivery using FTP or pull data with WebTrends Visitor 360 Analytics Data Service

For Administrators

• Administration console enhancements make it easier to search for, define and organize reports
• Enhanced auditing ensures you can quickly identify changes made to things such as reports or profiles

 Watch the 5 minute webcast

• Client side Java applets have been replaved with server-side generated images. No local Java is needed anymore.
• Create scheduled exports on from the reporting console.
• New design/template for viewing reports; less green and more blue
• Retrieve data through Web Services!
• Search and organize content in the Administration Console

For more information about WebTrends Analytics 8.1 and WebTrends Marketing Lab 2.0, download the feature detail sheet.