Linkdex Enterprise SEO Platform vs. Webtrends Analytics

From my research, Linkdex is the least expensive enterprise SEO platform available. If you have a team of optimization specialists or you are managing SEO efforts for multiple clients, Linkdex is a perfect entry-level enterprise platform. If you are a solo practitioner managing a single site - even if you work at a multiple billion dollar organization - Linkdex may be TOO much for a single individual or a small team to handle, as you surely will not use the platform for its collaboration ability and not dive into certain areas on a frequent enough basis to make the cost justifiable.

Incentivized

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?

• Share of Search is awesome! It is one of the primary features we use and talks about with our clients and it always makes its way on to our monthly dashboards. Being able to assess your organic coverage in comparison with your competition is extremely focused and drives action.
• Content 360 allows you to not only see areas which have SEO issues and how many keywords the page is ranking for, but it also integrates data from Google Analytics - showing engagement and value metrics. This lets you quickly assess whether you are going to optimizing a page that is trafficked frequently or if you are optimizing a page that no one cares about.
• It is a comprehensive SEO platform. Linkdex incorporates not only base SEO tools like issue tracking, keyword rankings, etc., but its integration with Google Analytics and Search Console provide an even clearer picture - helping you prioritize your optimization work. In addition, it has content strategy tools within the platform to help you plan your next blog post or content update by sharing competitive analysis and showing online authors - so you know where to look and who to reach out to if you are link building.

Incentivized

• 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.

• While on-boarding was done relatively well, with recurring meeting and even the account rep logging into our account and doing some of the grunt work for us, Linkdex is a bit of a beast to setup and configure to get the full potential out of the platform. So you cannot expect to get immediate value out of it on day one.
• Dashboarding and Report Generation capabilities could be better, as the visualizations are somewhat limited and lack filter abilities where needed. This can cause additional work of exporting data and manipulating it manually. Depending on scenarios, this could be solved using the API; however, for those don't want to go that route, this would create a gap.
• Lack of integrations. It would be ideal to pull in additional data points beyond the out of the box Google Analytics, Search Console, and Twitter options. Facebook, YouTube, and other social media and marketing platforms would help make the data set more robust.

Incentivized

• 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.

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.

Linkdex is truly an enterprise solution. We have had enterprise clients attempt to use Moz as an enterprise solution and it falls short. Specifically with the ability to add unlimited users to the platform and configure rights. The task management capability is also great to enterprise teams, as you can assign tasks and include comments around hypothesis or context as to why you are implementing an SEO solution. Being able to review when changes were made to a site and then measuring how rankings/traffic/engagement changed because of it, without having to use an SEO tool, Google Analytics, and Excel... it is all in a single platform. If you are a small organization or a single individual, that is the only reason, in my opinion, to choose Moz.

Incentivized

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 were manually pulling data to provide a rough calculation of Share of Search before Linkdex. This process would take 3-4 hours per client, per month. With Linkdex, we would log in and see Share of Search... it was just there without any work. We were able to provide a better service to our clients by spending more time analyzing the data and less time cultivating it.
• The relatively small investment from a monthly/quarterly tool budget perspective was great for us. At approximately $600 per month, it was so insignificant to the many clients we served that by staying in the same platform versus having to log in to multiple platforms, multiple times to see information across clients, we easily saved $600 in task switching simply from a login/logout perspective on a monthly basis.
• The fact that the account rep would take some tasks off of our plate and go in and configure the system for us was great and saved our consultants time to bill the client doing additional activities, while still moving forward in configuring the platform.

Incentivized

• 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.