WebTrends: A Busy Summer for Web Analytics

By Phil Kemelor (@philkemelor) Aug 28, 2009

Summertime may be the time for blockbuster movie releases, but I don’t usually associate summer with blockbuster releases among web analytics vendors. WebTrends (site, news), with its Analytics 9 release in early August, sought to change all of that. WebTrends is having 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 upon first look at all of its features there is definitely a “wow” factor — both because the interface and analysis functions are cool in of themselves, but a vast improvement on the “traditional” WebTrends interface. The general thrust of the release is geared to making it easy for your report users to access reports more easily and analyze the data more quickly. Does WebTrends succeed?

User Interface Improvements

The new Insight report profile report summary and drill down is clearly presented to the user with both standard and custom reports available. Rather than split up reports into a vendor-centric hierarchy (a frustrating norm from all vendors 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, you must enter the specific name of the report, as it is not a fuzzy search. On the plus side, the search form does fill in with possible reports based on your entry.

Story Telling, the Old Fashioned Way

A “story” feature is available for all standard (not custom) reports. This is a great little feature that spits out a descriptive analysis of the report that’s been run.

For example, instead of you 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.

RSS Overlay for Event Associations

If you are using RSS for news, press releases, blogs and so forth, you can insert the RSS URL into a report, and see on what dates stories were going out on the RSS. All you need to do is a cut and paste of the URL into the RSS Overlay field and you’re good to go.

Data Access, Reporting via REST

The other aspect of this release that is quite exciting is the use of the REST API to create automated Excel reports. Readers of the CMS Watch Web Analytics Report, and more sophisticated users of WebTrends know that automated Excel reporting (a la Omniture’s Excel client) has always been a weak point.

The new REST APIs make this pain a thing of the past…for the most part. As long as you’re using Excel 2007, all you need to do is 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.

The good news is that 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.