The Big Integration

WebTrends Engage07 officially finished yesterday. The news is: the visitor is at the center of everything now. Finally. After seeing the new module, Visitor Intelligence (VI), in action (well, just the surface of it of course, since those events rarely give the opportunity to go deeply) I must say that I was quite impressed. I remember that at one point I couldn’t contain myself and asked to get one. “I wanna play with that new toy!!” was how I phrased it I believe.

Those of you who came to Web Analytics from the BI world will scream “At last!!” when you see VI. It is your very powerful drag and drop “n” dimension analysis tool that puts all the measures around the visitor. If you’re a heavy WebTrends Analytics user, you know there are many things we can’t get “by visitor”. VI puts an end to that situation. VI, running on SQL, is a true query application, which means that the need to reprocess the data when you change a configuration is over. Yes, you read well. Finito the obligation to re-analyze a profile ‘cause you forgot something, or want to ask a new question.

VI is not a replacement to Analytics, WebTrends insists. It makes perfect sense, since our old friend will still be in charge of analyzing the traffic in more traditional terms. But it is my opinion that Analytics will not develop aggressively in the coming years with Visitor Intelligence becoming the main product with its growing adoption. Apart from some UI and minor changes, 8.1 is the same product, and when you will see VI, you will understand that the latter got most of the R&D budget. This raises the question of how quickly WebTrends will be able to recoup those costs, since most of the people I talked to (outside WebTrends) doubted that VI adoption would be quick.

Price wise, I have no idea how expensive it is; I only heard that it is on the pricey side. Also, in order to fully exploit it, companies will need people who are familiar with the usual BI tools (and the more complex slice’n dice, cubes, etc.). Note that it might help solve the hiring problem in Web Analytics, since there are many more people out there accustomed to BI tools than there are Web Analysts.

For now, only a minority of WebTrends clients will adopt it in the coming year I would think. However, WebTrends is definitely on a new good track with such a tool, and I can’t wait to have the opportunity to play with it while making vroom vroom noises. I will publish more details when I get a little deeper into the documentation I got.

WebTrends also introduced Score this week. This application allows you to attribute values to all kinds of events and actions on your site. You see that particular page, you’re assigned 5 points. You subscribe to the newsletter, here are 50 points. On the behavioral analysis side,this is a much more powerful way to qualify traffic than the visits by time spent, or visits by page views we currently have in Analytics. Publishers of content sites will like it a lot.

Score will need to run on Visitor Intelligence, which will in turn need to run on Marketing Warehouse. This means that you will need to get new money to pay for them, whatever you have spent on the regular product. As far as I know, those products will be worth it.