Online Marketing Trends

A new version of WebTrends will be available soon. It’s believed to be released to OnDemand customers within the next month and available to software customers a little later.

One of the big changes will be the Java applets, which most likely will not be there in the new release. The new release most likely will use Flash to display graphs. Other enhancements are better integration with the Marketing Warehouse and Dynamic Search. We’ll keep you posted!

WebTrends is expanding it’s base of consultants with the purchase of Swedish analytics firm Webcontrol.

With this aquisition WebTrends shows that they are not only into building great software but also see consulting as one of their services. Currently WebTrends works with an large partner network of web (analytics) agencies and related type of companies. This could well change in the future.

WebTrends buys Swedish analytics consultancy company press release.

Last April my colleague Vincent and I visited the WebTrends Partner Event hosted by Distrilogie in Brussels. Maarten Sambre from WebTrends showed us the WebTrends Marketing Warehouse. If we weren’t enthousiastic yet, we certainly were after the presentation. Though besides some licencing costs questions for which we couldn’t get an answer, we had some little doubts how usable the software would be. “Does it really work…”.

There is some licensing news though. WebTrends is introducing a Express edition of Marketing Warehouse with licencing costs based on a amount of analyzed PageViews for the normal profile.

This is what Scot Roth from WebTrends tells us:

As to the question of the cost of Marketing Warehouse - based on the sales experiences we’ve had since the solution was launched we feel very confident that it is competitively priced relative to the competitive offerings that are available and the unmatched level of individual visitor insight that our solution provides. In addition, to help companies of all shapes and sizes take advantage of advanced analytics, we’ve recently released Marketing Warehouse Express that has a single price point for the complete solution (needs analysis, implementation, and annual product usage).The “single price point” for Marketing Warehouse Express comment means two things. First, you pay one price to use the hosted solution for a year - that price includes implementation, configuration, full usage of the product, and ongoing support. Second, as long as the web property (or properties) that you want to analyze with Marketing Warehouse Express collect under 250M PV’s per year, there is one price for the solution - regardless of how big or small your site is.

Download the Marketing Warehouse datasheet

A while ago I needed to build a conversion report containing two dimensions; a dimension showing conversions entered by one of two Customer Care Centers or showing the term External. The CCS’s could be determined by static IP addresses. So all External conversions could be determined by all IP addresses minus the CCC’s IP addresses.

To build this report, I used a WebTrends Custom Report with one custom Dimension and the standard WebTrends Dimension Product (Drilldown). The Custom Dimension includes a translation with a Custom Report Datasource.

These are the steps I took to get this report:

1. Create Custom Report Datasource translation file “Visitor.csv.txt” and place it on the WebTrends server.

2. Create Custom Report Datasource

3. Create a Custom Dimension based on Visitor (this is the IP address). Check “Override default string” and enter “Extrernal” as description. This will replace the “None” in your report. Enter a Regular Expression to pick out the IP addresses of the CCC’s so that these will be translated and the other IP addresses won’t.

2. Create a new Custom Report, add the newly created Custom Dimension “Visitor” and the WebTrends dimension “Product (Drilldown)”.

Now add this Custom Report to your profile and analyze it.

This is how your report will look like (I removed dimension Product (Drilldown) for this screenshot.

Using the WebTrends Scheduled Export functionality you can choose to either export a single report or the whole report template. WebTrends by default exports your drilldown report partly when you do a full template export and exports your full drilldown report when you only selected the specific report to export.To change this behavior, go to <webtrends>\modules\rde\ and open DocUtil-constants.xsl. Find this part:

< !–
Set the maximum depth for which drilldown tables are expanded in a full PDF or Word export. If only a single report is exported, then any drilldown tables are fully expanded, regardless of the value of this setting. A depth limit of 1 will limit the expansion to the first dimension, a depth limit of 2 will limit the expansion to the first two dimensions, etc. A value of zero disables the limit. However, depending on the report template in use, some systems may not have sufficient resources to generate a full report when this limit is disabled or set to a larger value.
–>

<xsl :variable name=”drilldown-table-depth-limit” select=”2″ />

And edit it to your wishes. You’re done!

WebTrends has released a new version with yet another set of bugfixes and new features. This new version got number 8.0d.

WebTrends 8.0d bugfixes

New features in WebTrends 8.0d

A list of bugfixes in previous releases of WebTrends

Download WebTrends

WebTrends just released WebTrends Analytics 8.0c. This new version can be downloaded from the WebTrends FTP site.

Read the PDF to see which issues have been solved in WebTrends 8.0c. And the PDF listing all changes to WebTrends 8.0c

Internet Explorer 7 is currently supported in WebTrends OnDemand 8.0b, with the exception of the SmartView module. Product versions prior to 8.0a (software) and 8.0b (OnDemand) do not have support for this important browser update.

The files found below provide a solution for customers with WebTrends Analytics version 8.0a software and Internet Explorer 7. This solution contains updated files for the User Interface server and SmartView. Two new files are required, and these are available on our FTP site: 

SmartView update
WebTrends UI server update

Installation Instructions:

We recommend backing up the WebTrends installation directory before proceeding.

1. Log in to WebTrends as an administrator.
2. Select Service Health under Administration | Monitoring.
3. Click the Shut Down System button.
4. After the system is shut down, extract the 8.0a_IE7_Solution.zip into your installation directory (e.g. “C:\Program Files\WebTrends”), overwriting existing files.
   • If WebTrends is installed in a Distributed Architecture you will need to overwrite the files on each system WebTrends is installed in.
5. After this completes, start the WebTrends system database, if stopped (for example, the “WebTrends - MySQL” service in a MySQL environment)
6. Next, launch SmartViewUpdater.exe. After the installation completes, your WebTrends server will have an updated version of the SmartView in the component repository.
7. After the files have been overwritten and the SmartViewUpdater install completes, start the WebTrends system. To start the system, run “SystemShutdown.exe mode=start” from the command line when in \modules\analysis under the installation directory.

The next time users run SmartView from an updated server, they will be informed that a newer version is available and asked to upgrade. Once they select “Upgrade” the new SmartView client will be downloaded and installed over their previous version. The new version includes support for both Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

I just discovered why WebTrends deletes my data when analyzing ParentChild profiles.

We often create Custom Reports or change filters for our WebTrends customers. After doing so, I re-analyze the profile. All old logfiles are already FTP-ed to a local server and the logfiles of last week are still located on the live server. I always use two Data Sources, one pointing to the old logfiles and one pointing to the new logfiles. After analyzing the profile with the Data Source pointing to the old logfiles, I change the Data Source bound to the profile to the Data Source pointing to the new logfiles.

With normal profiles everything works fine. Though, with ParentChild profiles WebTrends first deletes all data before analyzing the new logfiles.

This is considered a bug

The default Directories report in WebTrends reports on only one single level of directories and leaves subdirectories unreported. You can change this through modifying the global wtm_wtx.ini file.

Follow these steps to make this change:

1) Stop the wtrs and wtrs_ui services.
2) Open the wtm_wtx.ini file with a text editor such as Notepad.
3) Find the following line in the [PROFILE] section:

TopDirectoriesMaxDepth=

4) If the line is not already present, add it.
5) Set the value. The default setting is 1, which means limit the
report to just the top levels. To see the top two levels, set this value
to 2. To see all directories regardless of level, set this value to 0.
6) Close and save the wtm_wtx.ini file.
7) Restart WT services

Thanks to WebTrends forum member Scholar for this information.