At last, WebTrends Insight is now available in Software guise! They even renamed it for the occasion in "Analytics 9 On Premises". Loads of new features giving the platform a completely fresh look and feel (at least for the Insight piece).
It was about time!
We will probably all agree that WebTrends v8.5 was really starting to become frustrating (I think the last major software re-design was 3years back!) – especially when compared to other Web analytics products. Last year, I had an opportunity to have a go at the On-demand version and since then I have been desperately waiting for the software version. This day has finally come. But why am I so happy? Which features make me rejoicing like that?
There is of course the new WebTrends Analytics Insight, its nice interface, the account dashboard and story view but to be honest, I am more excited by some of the features and services that come with it:
1) The REST data extraction API: REST API is NOW in the software version. The ability to extract data in a much easier and more flexible way will make data reporting and – more important – data integration more powerful. Web data will not be isolated anymore. While WebTrends Analytics already offered an ODBC driver, it showed some limitations when used extensively. The new data extraction API should be more powerful (and support Unicode).
2) The data collection API: the collection API provides alternative (and more accurate) methods to collect data from different sources such as mobile and Facebook apps. This is coming just at the right moment for many customers we work with!
3) Alerts: Ever been in a situation where a developer / agency made changes to a website, messed up with the tagging and you only found out at the end of the month when doing the report? I have been through this toooo often. Alerts will allow me to be notified directly. Yes!
4) Exportable trends: How many times have I been asked “how can I export the trend graph of this report” and I had to answer “You can’t – you need to export day by day manually” (usually followed by a “oh” expressing the user’s huge disappointment)? I stopped counting. This time is over – Insight offer ability to export trend data via the Export API.
5) Annotations: Very simple but so useful – I used it a lot on Google Analytics and Anametrix InstaVista (a Business Analytics platform). It will help to put data in context and you probably know how important context is for data interpretation.
There are also some new features in the Analytics product, others than the new brand colours:
6) Traffic source reporting: Another feature that was cruelly lacking in WebTrends - the ability to have simple categorisation of traffic sources: organic search, paid search, direct, campaign and other referrers. Not lacking any more!
7) Ability to add new measures while preserving old data: this more a technical enhancement but a really useful one. It is so frustrating when you create a custom report and then few months later you want to add new measures but either loose past data or need to reprocess EVERYTHING just for a measure. Now, it is possible. Thanks WebTrends.
All in all, a very exciting release of the new WebTrends reporting platform and with the recent acquisition of Transpond (the Social Marketing company), just maybe WebTrends is finally turning things around. We will definitely be watching with eager anticipation!
Partial information provided from KaizenAnalytics
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