Overview
What is Webtrends Analytics?
WebTrends provides an enterprise web analytics platform and, according to Forrester, has a strong focus on support for mobile and social channels and a very open platform. Webtrends competes directly with Adobe Site Catalyst, IBM Coremetrics. and comScore DigitalAnalytix.
Webtrends - Competing with GA is a tough sell
WebTrends Analytics On Premises - A Workhorse, Not a Ferrari
Wishing I could go back to Webtrends
Webtrends Analytics Reviews
Webtrends Infinity Analytics - an honest review
Webtrends Streams to Success for your Organization
Webtrends 8.5
Webtrends Review from long experience
The promise of a powerful analytics tool which was deceiving
It …
On-premise version not as strong as SaaS product.
Webtrends - Falling behind the curve
Not recommended
Webtrends in Big Distribution
Webtrends - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Choose a different solution
Pricing
What is Webtrends Analytics?
WebTrends provides an enterprise web analytics platform and, according to Forrester, has a strong focus on support for mobile and social channels and a very open platform. Webtrends competes directly with Adobe Site Catalyst, IBM Coremetrics. and comScore DigitalAnalytix.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is Smartlook?
Smartlook is an analytics solution tool for websites, iOS/Android apps, and various app frameworks, that answers the "whys" behind users' actions. It helps users understand precisely how customers interact with website and app — watch recordings, create heatmaps, use automatic tracked events, and…
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Webtrends Analytics?
Webtrends Analytics provides a combination of features that are designed to provide an accurate and intuitive view into an organization’s multi-channel customer journey. According to the vendor, the key features enable not only sophisticated analysis techniques but also make key insights accessible to everyone in an organization.
Webtrends Analytics Features
- Supported: Multi-Channel Measurement across social, mobile, web and SharePoint
- Supported: Configurable digital dashboards
- Supported: Reports
- Supported: Metrics and Dimensions
- Supported: Administration
- Supported: Path and Scenario Analysis
- Supported: Unlimited Data Collection
- Supported: Ad-Hoc Data Exploration
- Supported: Extensive data export
- Supported: Standard and customized analytics reporting
Webtrends Analytics Screenshots
Webtrends Analytics Integrations
Webtrends Analytics Competitors
Webtrends Analytics Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry |
Webtrends Analytics Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(67)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Webtrends On Premises with SDC and Tag Builder has proven to be a valuable tool for a variety of users across different industries. Many departments within organizations have utilized this product to assess the effectiveness of their websites and determine the impact of their outreach efforts. Marketing professionals have found Webtrends to be particularly useful in evaluating website performance, tracking marketing campaigns, and identifying successes or issues with site visitors. The tool allows them to measure website engagement, ad performance, overall traffic, and referring pages or sites.
Webtrends has also been implemented by interactive agencies as a means of providing implementation and support to clients who are Webtrends customers. It offers an alternative to other web analytics tools by offering customizable features and better data accuracy. This product has been used by eCommerce teams and analytics teams alike, enabling critical business decisions to be made based on insights gleaned from analyzing website traffic, performance, and usability.
In addition to these uses, Webtrends has addressed various business problems for multiple domains. These include campaign tracking, handling multiple currencies, eliminating data sampling, improving report performance speed, conducting funnel analysis, importing and integrating data, exporting data, segmenting visitors, managing data ownership, and adhering to service level agreements. With its comprehensive weblog analytics capabilities, Webtrends has assisted users in discovering trends between purchases, site visitation patterns, and forecasting.
The product's value extends beyond individual departments as it is also utilized across organizations to analyze platforms independently and globally. It provides a comprehensive view of overall traffic levels on websites and helps in analyzing customer usage and site search performance for effective SEO efforts. Notably, Webtrends has been chosen over popular alternatives like Google Analytics due to its customizable features and accurate data.
Moreover, users responsible for content management on internal web pages have found Webtrends valuable for gathering actionable information that optimizes web traffic. It has also been selected as a paid analytics supplier by companies looking for accurate data and decision-making support, addressing frustrations with other tools.
Overall, Webtrends On Premises with SDC and Tag Builder has emerged as a reliable solution for organizations and marketing professionals seeking to measure website performance, track marketing efforts, and gain actionable insights from data analysis.
Flexible Tool: Many users have found Webtrends Analytics to be a flexible tool with multiple methods of data capture. This flexibility allows them to gather and analyze data in various ways, catering to their specific needs and preferences.
Clean Visual Data Display: Reviewers appreciate the clean and to-the-point visual data display provided by Webtrends Analytics. Unlike other tools, it avoids unnecessary variables and default settings, making it easier for users to understand and interpret the data.
Customizability: Users value the ability to customize everything that the end user sees in Webtrends Analytics, including reporting based on customer channel. This level of customization allows them to tailor the analytics platform according to their business requirements, resulting in more meaningful insights and reports.
Slow customer service: Many users have experienced slow response times and a lack of follow-through on client requests, leading to frustration and delays in getting the support they need. This has impacted their overall experience with the product.
Limited local market reporting: Several users have mentioned that the local market reporting feature is too limiting for their needs. They desire the ability to further segment their data for more granular insights into specific markets or regions.
Difficulty with report exports: A significant number of users have faced challenges when scheduling and deleting report exports. This has resulted in delays in receiving important data, affecting their ability to make timely decisions based on up-to-date information.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 30)Webtrends - Competing with GA is a tough sell
- Custom built reports
- Huge customer support which is particularly useful for newbies
- Interface and UX is very intuitive
- Plugins are not easy to use or implement
- There need to be more reports and template dashboards to present you with actionable data instead of having to build it out yourself
- Takes time and effort to fully implement into your site
- Custom Reports
- Reanalysis of old data
- Can analyze raw log files
- Complexity
- Cost of ownership
- Adding new report parameters requires full reanalysis
I am more familiar with WebTrends than with Google Analytics, and I prefer its custom report creation capabilities. We still need to analyze raw log files occasionally, and having WebTrends on premises allows us to do that. With WebTrends, we own our data, and keep it onsite, unlike with Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is capable of showing live site visits, which our end users love. It is also easier for the users to do basic tasks in -- they find the WebTrends interface too confusing. User management is easier in Google Analytics than it is in WebTrends.
Wishing I could go back to Webtrends
- Having used two competitors, the company I am with now uses Omniture, I can honestly say that Webtrends is the best web analytics software I have used. Its UI is very intuitive and easily customized.
- The back-end data is fairly easy to get to, and it's no hassle getting IP or log level data, unlike competitors. I work with a team of web analysts now and talk about Webtrends to them like the munchkins talked about the Wizard of Oz. It's just a more superior software than most to data mine.
- Webtrends has great customer service support. They were able to allow us to build out custom reporting and dumps for our specific industry without price gouging us.
- I would like to see stronger SQL integration into the UI program and software.
- Better tutorials for people
- More user groups in our area.
Webtrends Analytics Reviews
- Powerful creation of reports. Different categories, globally seen by all platforms, platform specific and personal seen by only me
- Intuitive drag and drop interface
- Action center allows for events to trigger near real-time activities
- API interface could be more intuitive
Webtrends Infinity Analytics - an honest review
- Webtrends Infinity tracks our websites accurately - so we know the data we're getting is correct.
- Webtrends also tracks SPA's.
- Webtrends is customisable, so you can create and save your own reports, dimensions and metrics.
- You can really dig into the data with Webtrends Infinity to get many more insights that you could ever find using Google Analytics.
- The Webtrends team have helped us to produce dashboards for our regular reporting - literally saving us days of reporting time.
- The Webtrends team really know their stuff, and are on-hand to answer queries and questions, no problem at all.
- There are a few tweaks to do on the new Infinity system (and the team are really pro-active with feedback), but there's nothing I'd say would need a major overhaul. In fact, new areas are appearing every week.
Webtrends Streams to Success for your Organization
- The javascript tagging of our website provides better metrics over traditional weblogs in tracking unique visits and visitor
- The pushing of reporting to mobile devices like iPhone and iPad has been useful to the user community
- By adding scheduled tasks I was able to get web logs from SDC to run metrics hourly. Which comes in hand on heavy traffic days to demographics and for capacity planning for load balancing and adding additional servers into the server farm.
- Path analysis helps to track are visitors to the site going to the pages you want to direct them to. It also shows conversion rates and where the visitor left or abandoned the site before converting
- Metrics can be extracted easily to pass to web services to support other services. For example, passing website metrics to the CIO dashboard.
- Webtrends comes with a compliment of reports with the feature of creating custom reports for a particular client's needs, and to track particular metrics for a specific incident or interest
- The addition in Insight of social media tracking was a huge help to my Facebook and Twitter metric tracking
- No complaints it had all of the functionality that I needed.
Webtrends 8.5
- Provides website traffic analytics.
- Allows people to generate customized reports for particular time ranges or areas of site.
- Allows you to filter out what Web content should not be included in analytics results.
- Makes it easy to track downloads of documents such as PDFs, Word, Excel, etc.
- The product has an unnecessarily complicated licensing for limits on page index limits.
- Expensive compared to Google Analytics, hard to justify to IT management.
- Could be more flexible in exporting custom searches into other formats such as PDF, Excel, Word, etc.
Webtrends Review from long experience
- More than some of its competitors, most Webtrends' configurations (reports, dimensions, filters, content groups, measures) can be done in the admin UI, rather than in the tagging and site code. The tag itself is smart - it can sense offsite links, clicks on pdf downloads, form button clicks, and so on, which eliminates a lot of extra coding or tag modification that has to be done with other products.
- There are so many levers and buttons in the configuration that nearly anything can be turned into a report, or a report dimension, filter, or measure.
- It allows re-analysis of past data as far back as 90 days. Usually, you do this if you have created new custom reports, content groups, change the filters, and so on.
- There is a software version, called On Premises. (The SaaS version is called On Demand.)
- It has real path analysis ... it does not daisy-chain individual steps as others do. The paths it displays are what happens in actual visits, up to 20 steps long. It has forward and backward paths (one visit can appear several times depending on how many times the node was hit), paths-from-entry (one visit, one path), content group paths as well as page paths. Its one lack (that I care about) is SiteCatalyst's Pathfinder report which allows you to identify wildcard pages in a 3-step hypothetical path.
- This isn't going to ring a bell for a lot of people, but it handles list variables much better than its competitors (basically, parameters that hold multiple values such as "choose as many as apply" kinds of variables.
- It handles the tabulations of parameters really well. It deals with three kinds of parameters: those in the pages' URL, those placed in the WT.meta's (I don't think any competitors use this approach and it is fantastic for easily keeping URLs clean for SEO purposes), and those collected automatically by the standard tag. When tabulating parameters, its competitors require more up-front work, lots more configuration time, or severe limits on the quantity.
- Having recently tried out Google Analytics' new Content Groups feature, I was reminded of how powerful it is in Webtrends. There's really no comparison. Furthermore, the content groups can be configured p in the UI as well as hard-coded into the page. Content Group paths can be up to 20 steps long, and are not daisy-chained.
- The big downside, the elephant in the room, is that it does not (as of right now) have on-demand segmenting, drilldowns, etc. You have to think of what you want in advance and create those reports then analyze some data. This is huge. You can, of course, re-analyze old data after creating new reports but you still have to wait. (This deficiency may become obsolete with the release of Webtrends Explore later this month (May 2014).)
- It has fewer mature integrations with other products and databases than competitors do, although I'm told it works with SharePoint better than anything else does.
- Its attribution modeling capability is behind Google Analytics'. In my humble opinion, this could be changed quickly if Webtrends would make some tweaks to its standard visitor history files (i.e. preserve the order in which past visits were sourced beyond the single most recent one, rather than storing all those past sources as a randomized list).
- It doesn't incorporate statistical tests, confidence intervals, or statistical associations. However, this same criticism can be applied to its competitors (other than A/B Testing products). It's a tabulation program, as they all are. In this respect, web analytics tools as a group are relatively primitive. Sorry to bring this up as a criticism of Webtrends but it's my pet peeve about the whole industry and I just have to say it. (p.s. take advantage of the heavy-duty Webtrends Scheduled Export functionality to get really granular data that you can feed to a stats program to get significances.)
- Although the documentation, help screens, phone support and the knowledge base have improved tremendously in recent years, there is still a pretty steep learning curve because it is different from the tools that entry-level users may have already been exposed to. This can be a shock and many users are alienated at first because they just don't get some of the fundamentals at first. I'd like to see much better help screens that are thoroughly interlinked with the KB and documentation. Having superb online support would make a world of difference with the adoption of this basically powerful tool.
Other than that ....
The ability of the standard product to re-analyze back to 90 days is a huge differentiator.
If you want some really finely-honed filters, content groups, etc Webtrends probably has the flexibility to set them up exactly as you want, by configuring them in the UI. This is really Webtrends' strength - once you know what you want, you can almost always get it out of Webtrends, fix it in place, and get great insights.
Over time, Webtrends has added a lot of parameters to the data that its tag collects and you can do a lot with them. Webtrends' weakness, at this point, is that you have to do some thinking ahead for those finely focused reports. Of course, there are zillions of out of the box reports that area ready to go.
Also, if you won't accept the usual SaaS model where your data is held elsewhere, Webtrends Analytics On Premises is just about the only thing out there that has any power. Ditto for needing to re-analyze data going really far back, or analyzing server log data.
If you don't have a lot of IS support, meaning the ability to create code changes in the site when you want to change some of the configurations, Webtrends' smart tag and the many options in the admin UI can save you. (Don't let tag management vendors make you think that you won't still need IS all the time. You may not need IS per se, but you will need a technically savvy person to run the tag management!)
It was used in addition to other existing Analytics tools: Google Analytics and Tealeaf.
Our goal was to solve the following business problems:
- Campaign tracking supporting our redirecting structure
- Multiple currency handling under the same domain name
- Absence of data sampling 50,000 URLs/day or 500,000 visits/month
- Acceptable reporting performance speed
- Funnel analysis options
- Data import and 3rd party integration (ESP)
- Data export capabilities to other BI solutions (EDW)
- Visitor segmentation (personalization)
- Data ownership (client vs. vendor)
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- Don't ask you to pay for both collected and analyzed data
- Custom reporting: ability to leverage tracking and create meaningful reports for Business users
- The product itself was very slow (9) or buggy (10)
- The ability to create new custom reports complex (consultant needed and can not apply historical data without replay)
- The possibility to drill-down data limited and not dynamic (segments, funnels, goals)
- The UI is rudimentary (9) or visually overwhelming (10) without thinking about functionality (advanced segmentation)
On-premise version not as strong as SaaS product.
- It effectively measures transactions on the site. Currently, we measure primarily basic metrics such as visitors and site visits. We haven’t formalized a reporting/call to action for the data yet: It’s one of our biggest initiatives this year. Once the proper KPIs are established, it will provide the metrics to support the KPIs
- It does not provide real time monitoring. We typically can look at data about 48 hours after it has occurred. This matters specifically for campaigns and for troubleshooting the site.
- The On Premises solution is not as robust as the On Demand solution which our security department is hesitant to use. The On Premise version has fewer of the innovations than On Demand, including integration with Sharepoint, Spaces, and social media.
- We are a health insurance company, so we are always cautious about releasing Protected Health Information (PHI). Since we are highly regulated, the consequences of a privacy breach are pretty severe, so we tend to be very conservative when sending data outside of our data environment. Being On Demand means are sending log files through the cloud which may or may not include PHI.
Webtrends - Falling behind the curve
- Very flexible when there is a need to set up custom reports.
- Doesn't provide enough out of the box reporting/metrics.
- Dashboards and UI are difficult to navigate, but getting better.
- Excel plug-ins are not intuitive and hard to use vs. Omniture's Report Builder.
Not recommended
- Friendly Heatmaps
- Webtrends explore (tried) to make things look more user friendly ....(tried)
- There are a lot of areas for improvements for this tool. It's a powerful tool however it has so many restrictions such as running historic data for the past 3 months only
- Integration of Webtrends10 and WT9 did not work, you can see that since most of the time you still need to use WT9 in order to get results in WT 10 this is very confusing and frustrating
Webtrends in Big Distribution
- Gives complete data. This is critical if you want to look at all of the data in a particular set of analysis -- all of the specific search data or customer data. WebTrends was not a sample based product so we could get full data as needed.
- System availability. The tools were always available and had great up-time.
- Customization. With the proper Analyst support we could configure Webtrends to provide the specific data sets we needed to make report decisions.
- Customizing reports requires significant system knowledge. As a regular user, I found it very difficult to modify reports or metrics (compared to a product like Google Analytics). This required my organization to find and hire a WebTrends specialist to full utilize the power of the tool.
Webtrends - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
- In terms of simple web site usage, Webtrends is excellent at showing increasing or decreasing usage month over month.
- Webtrends is very good at showing what pages of the web site are getting the most usage, what are the most successful downloads
- Webtrends is also very good at showing the geographic location of the clients. It is pretty good at showing what organizations the clients belong to as well.
- For Webtrends on Premises, Memory usage is a big problem. And even powerful servers with copious amounts of physical memory - does not help for Webtrends
- There doesn't seem to be an upgrade path for Webtrends on Premises. It is stuck at version 9.2b, and there are currently no plans to upgrade. Companies that want the latest features must instead use the hosted version, Webtrends on Demand. Companies may save on salaries, but they will need to pay Webtrends lots of money, if they are big users of the software.
- Webtrends for SharePoint requires a Professional Services contract to do properly - Webtrends does not share the documentation. Some of the other add-ons have the same, or similar, issue.
1. If you want to use web server log files as input to your web analytics, then Webtrends will provides a good product, with great ease of implementation. Don't even think about being cheap on hardware, and make sure Webtrends runs on real servers, not in a VM environment.
2. If you want to use Data Tagging, similar to Google Analytics or Site Catalyst, Webtrends has a powerful product, just be prepared to pay.
3. If you are new to Web Analytics, but it is the strategic direction, start with Webtrends on Premises.
Questions to Ask
1. What are you trying to accomplish?
2. Can you place a dollar value on the benefit that you expect/need from Webtrends?
3.Can you live with Webtrends running SaaS?
Choose a different solution
- Content groupings were a nice way to see groups of content (all cart pages, all product detail pages, etc); but this is available on most analytics systems
- Historical reporting -- if you don't know exactly what you want to measure, you are out of luck. So, for example, if sales suddenly go up and you need to understand why, but you didn't have a report set up for sales by geography/sales by campaign/sales by promo code/sales by whatever (IP address for fraud, etc) you are out of luck. You can do a look back of 30-60 days, but it takes a significant amount of time to pull those reports. This is especially important when you're trying to trouble shoot issues -- maybe sales by browser (because of a cart issue in a browser, for example) is something you need, but you don't know.
- Consistency of account managers -- turnover at Webtrends is very high. Our company went through 8 account managers in 2 years. Every new account manager, you have to start over.
- Time to load data -- refreshes only every 12 hours. I need at least near-real time data. They do have Streams now which gives you real time data, but not on everything.
Engaging Metrics and Users
- Flexibility and scalable. One aspect is the capability of hosting in house. For companies that do want to keep therr data they have the option to as they say keep it on premises.
- Webtrends developed rapidly on data visualization which for companies that do want to quickly set that up they can have a clean visualization of all of your most important data and trends through dashboards, scorecards and an intuitive UI.
- Like any Web analytics software the customer support has to help the power users. I still would like to say one day that customer support has solved all my problems which indirectly solves the main stakeholders problems. This obviously translates to the success of the usage and extending the annual contracts within this company.
- Control privacy, data sharing and competitive industrial knowledge using Webtrends on premises
- Great control over custom reports, custom dimensions and metrics
- Flexible tool which allows multiple methods of data capture. To my knowledge it was the first tool with a Tag Builder / Tag Management function built in via a supporting website.
- Requires careful setup and planning during implementation
- If using web server logs, you're able to re-analyze historical data - but it takes time and careful planning/execution.
- It would be great to have a fully implemented public test profile to send potential clients to see all the product's features
- Wish it supported Microsoft HyperV virtualization. Last time I checked, only VMWare was supported for virtualization of on premises installations.
WebTrends 9 Review
- Story mode presents data in an easy to read narrative format. This is important for people who are not necessarily the most computer savvy but still have the responsibility in their job description of managing webpages.
- File exporting. This is convenient for whenever someone needs to report information to management.
- Product support. This is a must when dealing with a complex software and I know that users appreciate it.
- Outages. There have been a few times where the system was not able to provide information on the dates requested, which makes reporting to management difficult.
Webtrends: Falling behind in analytics world
- Ability to customize variables, values, structure
- Ease of access to customer support
- Good price point compared to competition
- User interface changes to allow for non-power users.
- More out-of-the-box variable possibilities (plug and play)
- Access to the deeper data (think data warehouse)
Webtrends Analytics Review
Used by marketing departments within the organization.
Address areas of improvement for site performance. For example, one ad space performing better than another, certain webpages within a site that are getting more traction, etc.
- Detailed traffic tracking - You are able to drill down within the profiles to get to a specific webpage you are looking for rather than it providing the "total" numbers (you are able to see which pages contributed to the total)
- Time period selection - You are able to select a single day, group of days, week, months, years, and see the available metrics for what you have selected. This is useful for comparing monthly, quarterly, or annually.
- Scheduling exports - The process of scheduling a report is not as simple as I believe it should be. The data arrives sometimes a day later than you indicated, sometimes a few days.
- Deleting scheduled exports - As I am not the administrator of the tool I am not able to delete scheduled exports. This included exports that I have set up and are being sent to my email/stored in a location I have indicated. Have the capability to delete scheduled exports that you have created would assist in keeping only the necessary functions running and assisting in eliminating the delay of enabled reporting.
Sufficient but perhaps needs updating to compete
- Provides accurate traffic data and information
- Includes heat maps to see where visitors are going on your website
- I feel WebTrends is a bit outdated, not quite up to par with Omniture or Google Analytics
Webtrends
- Data is well organized
- Standardized setup
- Has a clickmap, other software doesn't seem to have this feature
- Not very customizable
- "Clunky" or inflexible in some areas
- Limited access to segment building/modification
- The Webtrends user interface is fairly easy to navigate and the reporting is pretty intuitive to figure out on your own.
- The level of data that Webtrends provides is very helpful as an analyst to make appropriate optimizations for both the website as well as the paid advertising campaigns driving to the site.
- For the most part, I trust the data that is collected by Webtrends since the site is being tagged and managed by a team of professionals at the company
- In the past 2 years that I have been using Webtrends there was very little support and services/faq available online, which I've just noticed that they have started to address, which is great to see. For example, when I had a question on how Webtrends defines a certain site metric, they didn't even have a dictionary or reference guide online to help.
- Customer service in general has been in issue for our agency in regards to response time to questions/troubleshooting and following through on client requests.
- We have found that local market reporting can be limiting when you want to segment the data a lot further.
Powerful Software...Weak User Support and Assistance.
- Webtrends Analytics makes complex situations understandable to a non-technical audience. The vast capabilities and ways to slice data is both a great tool, but can also cause a user/users many hours of frustration.
- Visual data display is clean, to the point, and not overly convoluted with unneeded variables and standard (defualt) settings. Everything the end user sees is customizeable.
- Exports of raw data collections was easy and accurate. Once the parameters of data collection are finally set up and working, its easy to get what you want from the UI and is delievered in a variety of options.
- The weakness of this software by far is the staff that support it. My company and I had some of the most frustrating conversations with people supporting our account. They would continually re-route us to other support staff. Their deadlines for solutions/answers were continually pushed back, and their answers of "Why" things were happening the way they were happening was most of the time just a ploy and cover up in hopes we would eventually stop asking the questions.
- Although simple campaigns can be easily set up, I would say the set up for larger campaigns (as ours was) was extremely difficult and confusing. Webtrends offered many, many ways to see the same data, but unfortunately alot of the time the data was inconsistent when you knew it should be. An example of this would be our team trying to track the number of visits for Page A and where they were previously before coming to that page. Now, if on one view Page A visits returned 10,000 and on another view with different parameters showed 20,000 visits we knew something was not right. The issue would always be sent back to support staff who never really provided a logical answer as to why this was happening.
Great Customer Service and an Okay Product
- First and foremost, the customer service for Webtrends is excellent. Even if my name is not on the account, they will go out of their way to make sure everything is coded properly. Plus, they have a very active social media team that looks to answer small questions quickly that pop up on Twitter.
- Implementation of Webtrends is a rather easy process for the basics. Compared to Omniture, I would say it takes about half the time.
- I'm a big fan of the URL generator. When trafficking digital media, generating URLs can be a real pain and the generator is far better than anything for Google Analytics or Omniture.
- Over the years, they have greatly improved the UX and UI of the system. It used to look more like an IT tool than a Business Intelligence tool. Now, I feel that it can operate as both.
- Functionality is dependent upon implementation. If an IT department is in charge of implementation, then they will not be looking for the same things that a marketer needs.
- Certain clients have required that I and my staff have to be on their network in order to access Webtrends. Accessing via a VPN connection can slow down the data download process.
- Like all web analytics platforms, generating custom reports with multiple variables can effect the data output. I have found that the limit on Webtrends for a good pull is three dimensions. (I then have to go back and merge the data sets on my own.)
- I would love for greater level of integration with adservers like DART or Atlas. If I could line up cookie level logs on the analytics and adserver, I could execute much deeper attribution and better QA.
If the colleague is in marketing like me: I do most of my reporting through Tableau now, and Google Analytics allows me to pull the data directly into the program without downloading to an Excel file first. This is a big issue for me. If Webtrends can get themselves included on Tableau, I would be more apt to recommend it.
If the colleague is in IT, I would recommend with the caveat that they have to be flexible and talk to the other portions of their organization to ensure that reporting is optimized for all departments.
If the colleague is in finance, I would say that it's a good investment from the customer service standpoint. Omniture tends to be more expensive (Google Analytics Premium is definitely more expensive) so you need to see how your organization is going to use the information. Sometimes a business only needs the free version of Google Analytics, the work is not data intensive at that point and it's not worth the money.