Based in San Francisco, Metadata.io is a Demand Generation and ABM platform designed to execute thousands of B2B campaigns in a matter of hours, automatically optimizing campaigns for pipeline impact at a high velocity.
$24,000
per year
SAS 360 Plan
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Formerly SAS Marketing Operations Management, a solution to integrate and manage all marketing processes for greater consistency, efficiency and effectiveness – from marketing strategy development and planning to content creation, campaign execution and post-campaign analysis.
N/A
Webtrends Analytics
Score 4.4 out of 10
N/A
WebTrends provides an enterprise web analytics platform and, according to Forrester, has a strong focus on support for mobile and social channels and a very open platform. Webtrends competes directly with Adobe Site Catalyst, IBM Coremetrics. and comScore DigitalAnalytix.
Metadata is well suited when you have a really large ad budget (>50k per month at least). This is because the power of metadata lies in the ability to quickly set up and run a large number of experiments (combinations of channel, audience, creative, and conversion assets). To evaluate these variations, all of them need a large number of impressions, clicks, and conversions to be statistically relevant. If your budget is smaller, you will either have a very small number of experiments (not fully utilizing the power of metadata), or your experiments will not have enough clicks to make informed decisions. We had expected a better explanation of this from metadata before signing up.
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?
Create and manage a detailed plan for a marketing campaign: when you create detailed project plans and then task and role levels, SAS Marketing Operations Management (SAS MOM) makes it easier to coordinate between projects with very little, if any, issues.
Share, reuse and leverage existing marketing assets: Like some marketing tools, SAS MOM allows you to create and reuse assets across various channels.
Manage project collaboration and execution: You are allowed to set up a workflow that helps move processes along without having to manage each step of the project.
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.
If you don't have a large budget and audience it's hard to meaningfully optimize. If I have 4 ad creatives, to 2 audience groups on FB and LinkedIn, that creates 16 experiments, each of which needs an ample enough budget, say $40/day, that's now $640 per day or $19K per month.
Limited ability to edit ads after they've been launched. You usually have to stop the ad, clone it, and launch a new campaign.
Can't add new ads to existing campaigns which limits the ability to optimize. If I start an MD campaign with 4 ads, and in a few weeks we see that one is working well and the other 2 are not performing, I can pause those (or it can autopause by rules), but I can't add 2 more new creatives to the mix against the high performer. I'd have to either stop the high performer, and recreate it in a new campaign (losing likes and comments), OR - leave the high performer in the first campaign, and create. a second campaign with the new ones, which will only optimize against each other.
Limited to a single conversion event on a landing page. I'm not able to choose either a Demo Request OR a Sign-Up conversion, I can only choose one.
Google search ads are doable but aren't necessarily more feature-rich or easy-to use than native, so there's no value added to doing it through Metadata in my opinion aside from unifying ad reporting.
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
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.
We chose [Metadata.io] because it was a smaller company and could get more personalized attention. The price was better and they seemed more eager to support us. The feature set was what we were looking for and not more - it was exactly as robust as we needed it to be. Didn't want to pay for features we weren't going to use.
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.
Huge decrease in CPLs, CPMQL and Cost Per Opportunity
Big improvement in MQL to SQL rates
90%+ of our leads from paid social now have valid business emails, before it was like 30%
Saving us hundreds of hours over the course of the next year doing daily manual optimization and budget management tasks for us so we can focus on strategy and testing new things
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.
