Lead Forensics vs. Webtrends Analytics

It's a great system. As I said, I had never used it, but I feel that if I do move on, I would definitely take this with me - everyone I introduce it to via my network is amazed by it. As a small company, for our sales and marketing, it is a brilliant platform; in fact, I'll go as far as to say that our logistics and supply chain look at it daily as well. Reports are fantastic, and the fact that you can jump on and see data in real time is brilliant.

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?

• Lead Forensics helps us see which companies are visiting our site, even if they don’t fill out a form. This gives us a chance to reach out to businesses that are already showing interest but might not have contacted us yet.
• Instead of cold-calling random prospects, we can see which pages a company has viewed and how often they return. This helps us tailor our conversations based on what they’re actually interested in.
• The Lead Forensics support team has been great whenever we’ve had questions. They’re quick to respond and always ready to help, whether it’s troubleshooting an issue or offering advice on how to get the most out of the platform.

• 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.

• Better updates on companies' current names. Often if a company was a different company years ago it still says the old company name which is confusing.
• Better identifying the correct location. Sometimes it seems like that the location coming up is the wrong location.
• Giving a better understanding of how they got to the website would help too. Often is says "direct" but I would like to know if it was via a link from an email or what

• Webtrends is not great at providing statistical data for analysis. You need to enable Log File Delivery or create an analysis export to perform this. This could theoretically be done with Streams.
• Webtrends has difficulty identifying multi-visit users due to the inherent fragility of cookie-based tracking.
• Webtrends Analytics does not provide Pathing capabilities for segments, only for the aggregate. However, this can be worked around with Scenario functionality selectively fired by a tag management system.
• Segmentation by high-cardinality parameters tends to cause issues with table limits. Even after scrubbing and scrutinizing data, we commonly see up of 10K rows per dimension. Due to this, we use Webtrends Analytics to roll up data into larger segments and export all of our log data into our database for heavy duty number crunching.

The obstacles to renewing are 1) finding people to manage it who know it well and 2) frustration because of the lack of on-the-fly analysis. Usually, renewal prices are reasonable and the cost of switching to something else when you have a somewhat complicated setup far outweigh the renewal costs, especially if your implementation is sound and your reports are humming along. A lot of renewal decisions are going to hinge on the new product that will start to roll out this month.

Lead Forensics is usable and has clear videos scattered around the platform, encouraging users to level up. The CSM team is great at supporting and providing training for sales and marketing. Dashboards are a bit clunky, and the UI isn't the best. From memory, it hasn't really changed since we've been using it. These factors hold the platform back, as something as simple as filtering can be hidden behind a few clicks, which some salespeople are unaware of.

Incentivized

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.

Top support from the Lead Forensics team. They take time to understand your business specifications, they make sure your needs are fulfilled, they show the new assets of the platform. The rythm for the business review is very flexible. You can access a live chat at any time. A lot of tutorials help you to deepen your skills in using the platform for your busines.

The Webtrends Support Engineers are expert at what they do, and we get to speak to someone on the support team quickly. They provide great solutions when available, and when there is no solution, which can happen, they describe work-arounds.

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.

Sincerely, I have used both of those platforms before. The portal interface (UI) is much better than LF's, but the quality of the information Lead Forensics provides is higher. Data mining is quite similar, but I had the impression that LF gave us more valuable information, even though other platforms were sometimes better from that perspective. Anyway, in the end, we preferred to go to the market leader about this type of tool, LF is the Coca-Cola of this market.

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.

Incentivized

• We are still in the very early stages of using Lead Forensics for our agency, but I can see that it could already be very useful to us as we haven't had insights like this previously.
• Our very first use case with Lead Forensics was with a brand-new client and I would say it went exceptionally well. We were running a large media campaign for them, and it was very insightful to see how those specific businesses were getting to the site and what page they were going to. Like mentioned previously, this helped their very small sales team to go after businesses they know were interested in them.

• 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.