Adobe Marketing Cloud vs. Webtrends Analytics

If you have a rather large budget and/or several clients to take advantage of the AMC, you would likely benefit from its all-in-one solutions. There are a myriad of excellent tools for digital marketing professionals to take advantage of within the suite, and creating a campaign becomes much more manageable for collaboration and execution through to reporting thanks to the suite's vertically integrated nature.

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Scenarios 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?

• Content Analysis - Between the Pages report and the participation metrics which show what percentage of conversions a page was involved with, you get an excellent analysis of what content is important and effective, and what is not. With the ability to add up to ten metrics side by side, drill downs, and power tools like Ad Hoc Analysis, you will know exactly where you need better content.
• Pathing - Adobe Analytics captures every single path of every single visit of every single visitor and puts it at your fingertips. There are tools to aggregate common paths so you find out how frequent they are, lots of good page flow reports, and tools to pick out specific paths that will keep you from being overwhelmed. This has been absolutely invaluable to us as we have learned about how our customers are using our sites and which paths are leading to exits rather than converions.
• Customization - There are so many custom metrics and dimensions you can add and you can create segments based on all of them, along with the out of the box metrics and dimensions. You truly get an implementation that is specific to your company, your needs, your strategy, and your site.

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• 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.

• Customer services could be improved for smaller clients. Adobe Marketing Cloud provides great support for most of its customers, however, it may not work well enough for smaller engagements.
• Adobe could offer multiple price options based on the usage, which is missing at the moment.

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• 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.

Although a powerful tool, Google Analytics has been catching up in capabilities and is much simpler to use. As analytics move to the spotlight, more sections in a company want to have access to it. However, creating straightforward reports/dashboards and sharing them with different groups is not a strength of Adobe Marketing Cloud.

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I would be willing to try Webtrends again AFTER some research from other users. I would need to see that users mention better and faster customer support on questions and issues that arise while using the software. The software is capable of vast and incredible things, but if it isnt properly set up and supported during use, it is just a big hassel and waste of everyones time and money.

If I could give it a 0, I would. Not having an intuitive user interface made it impossible to convince non-analytic business users to use the tool on their own. Even as a seasoned analyst, frequent calls were needed to get what should be simple tasks done. Account managers don't understand the tool either, and have to refer you to technical support

It is much better than average. Down time usually occurs because of a need to refresh the server on our end.

The v9 admin interface and v10 reporting interface work as well as expected, but have a tendency to be pokey, especially for bulky reports and whenever you're connected to wifi. I much prefer using the REST API for all reporting for this reason, which simply dumps out the data and doesn't bother with the user interface.

I once went on to Twitter to ask for help from my network of analytics people, and Webtrends themselves responded. They have been an excellent partner in making sure that their product is being used to the best of it's ability and I greatly appreciate that. Both Omniture and Google Analytics, do not have that level of support over social media

The in-person training was comprehensive enough to get you started, but I strongly recommend having a more experienced person when beginning with the tool.

Webtrends provides several free webinars over the course of the year, many of which I would expect to pay for. The people providing the webinars seem to have a good feel for real-world application of the product.

Careful planning and patience. Use a non-public test site to fine tune tags and reporting. Despite best laid plans, there will be surprises when you collect the data, run the analysis and begin generating reports using the tool. Perform a tag audit to ensure tags fire as desired.

I would say it is the leader in the industry and was easily the number one choice in two of the three places I have implemented a marketing automation platform. Hubspot is its closest competitor and ended up being the better choice for a membership association but the Adobe product can doo all the things and do them well. Just make sure you get all the discounts available before closing the deal.

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Webtrends has its work cut out for itself considering you have the behemoth Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium having a strong offering and brand recognition for the price of free. After reviewing the paid service I'd suggest you start off with GA as a cheaper alternative that is just as robust, if not much more flexible in regards to the reporting and goal tracking needs for our company.

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• It has helped us track our ROI better and see costs versus revenue coming in directly from emails.
• A/B testing is very helpful to ensure the best email is being chosen to get sent out.
• Our deliverability has improved a lot.

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• Webtrends has had a positive impact on site visitation because it allowed us to understand the sources by domain for site traffic and find out ways to increase visits from those domains.
• Webtrends has also allowed us to understand areas of optimization on the site, which has had a positive impact on the overall user journey on the site, likely leading to longer site duration and engagement.