I had a terrific time at Engage this past week – and I don’t even go to most of the parties! There was plenty of great conversation, however, and that’s always heady wine for me. Definitely enjoyed giving my new Database Marketing & Web Analytics presentation too – drop me a line if you’d like a copy. It’s a perfect complement to the blog series I’ve been doing.
So what’s the news?
Well, the latest rev (Analytics 10) goes much further in carving out a unique niche for Webtrends in the Digital Analytics space. With V9, Webtrends entered the modern analytics interface world and staked out some interesting territory around open standards, open data integration, and social measurement. Nevertheless, Analytics 9 was really a catch-up release and while I think it delivered one of the nicest dashboard interfaces in our space, it was, at best, incrementally better than the competition.
What’s more, the product-line as a whole still had significant functionality trapped in the older interface and I had some concerns not only about that but about where the company as a whole was heading. Was Webtrends working to be the best classic Web analytics solution or were they striving to carve out a separate niche focused on the integration of social, mobile, competitive and Web data?
V10 both does and does not resolve those concerns. It goes a long way to answering the question though, and, in my opinion, tilts heavily toward the second alternative. The interface is lovely (which is what I’ve come to expect from Webtrends recently though it flies in the face of their traditional market perception) and distinctive. They are the first enterprise vendor to break-away from and go beyond the basic GA paradigm.
Let’s face it, all the enterprise companies have been trying to catch-up with GA when it comes to UI design and they’ve been more or less successful at achieving parity. V9 may have been a tad better than GA, but it clearly echoed the GA design. That’s not so true with V10. V10 is not only more striking (and better in my - truly humble when it comes to design - opinion), but it incorporates a number of basic UI improvements that I think make it a significant improvement. This is a release that Google Analytics will have to do some serious UI work to catch-up to.
The direct integration of panel data, Facebook data, PostRank data, and bit.ly data make this – by far – the best and easiest tool in our space for creating a Digital scorecard across the enterprise. This is, in many respects, the digital enterprise view that marketers have been asking for.
That's a significant win.
What’s the downside (yes, there is always a downside)?
There are still plenty of important integrations missing and we all know that integrations, particularly when they need to be represented in the core interface, are time-consuming and difficult to pull off well.
Webtrends has been working to fundamentally rethink their middleware level around a new meta data and semantic layer on top of the data. Their success at this foundational task will be critical to their ability to achieve the necessary pace of innovation in the product. And there is still the unresolved question of that deep ad hoc segmentation and reporting functionality trapped in old versions of the software. How that gets resolved will have a great deal to say about the ultimate success and market position of the product. Bringing that functionality foward could ruin or hugely enhance the product.
Web analytics tools have always had different strengths and weaknesses, but those have been incremental enough so that no organization really needed more than one (at least more than one paid solution). There was never a compelling reason to have Webtrends and Omniture, or Omniture and Core, or any other combination of products. The trouble always vastly outweighed the benefit.
If Webtrends continues to aggressively pursue their current direction of a visually striking scorecard interface on top of an open data platform across digital analytics, that view of the market might change. You can actually get some pretty good digital analytics dashboarding out of Analytics 10 even before you deploy a tag to measure your site!
After all, not every software space is mono-product in nature. In social media, for instance, we are increasingly recommending that our client’s use more than solution because of the significant functional differences in products and the way they are used.
Unlike last year, where I viewed Webtrends’ natural and necessary path to be the traditional one of delivering the best product within the existing market, I’m beginning to think they’ve found a “third way.” There is a real, significant, and unfilled need for deep, open, and affordable digital analytics integration and scorecarding. Analytics 10 delivers on a good chunk of that in a way that clearly distinguishes it from all the competition and, possibly, stakes out a new and different ground on which to fight.
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