Quid supports AI-driven consumer and market intelligence. Their Generative AI provides organizations with a holistic insight into customer context. Beyond capturing data, Quid enables organizations to see data through the lens of the future. By moving beyond data analysis, Quid predicts future trends, bridging data collection with predictive accuracy. Quid states its customers currently include companies like Ogilvy, T-Mobile, Lufthansa, and Walmart, who use Quid for an in-depth understanding of…
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Webtrends Analytics
Score 4.4 out of 10
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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.
In my use of [NetBase] Quid, I found the tool particularly suitable for curating pertinent content. It allowed me to develop more comprehensive analysis at a larger scale, all while substantially reducing the amount of research time needed. It is also a plus that [NetBase] Quid is delivered as a web app. I did some of my [NetBase] Quid work on a low-end Chromebook without issues.
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?
Their NLP is very strong with the ability to distinguish subject in sentences and then apply analysis based on either the subject or sentence. Competitors lack strong NLP and often have lower degrees of accuracy.
The platform is highly flexible with dozens of ways to filter and cut the data. It is great for an analyst that really wants to deep dive into the data. However, the analysis done automatically by NetBase is also strong enough that less experienced users would still be able to gain insight with ease.
The customizable dashboards are perfect for client reporting and drastically reduce the amount of time spent preparing recurring reports and decks. These are also very flexible depending on reporting needs.
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.
Dashboards can only currently be exported as PDFs. It would be helpful to have a more read/writable format (eg. PPT) that enables us to combine Netbase's outputs with other sources, or to make them more consistent with our own branding (colours, fonts etc.)
The business model revolves around a limited number of login seats. I would like to be able to roll out the tool to make it available/accessible to more people in the business, but the pricing model makes this impractical/uneconomical.
Logging out users after a period of inactivity can be frustrating when multitasking/task switching and unsaved work is lost.
While Netbase's focus on language processing is its key strength, additional functionality around social analysis (eg. people who follow a brand account, users who talk about X are also likely to talk about Y) is somewhat limited.
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.
We've had a good experience using the tool and have invested quite a bit of time training the internal team on how to get the most benefit out of it. There would need to be a compelling reason or business case to port over all of our existing topics and tool know-how to another platform.
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.
Very simple to use, quick to pick up on the key principles, and a task-centric design (ie. Topics to set up what you want to analyze, Analysis to do the exploration/analysis, and Dashboards to pull results and findings together to generate reports.) All intuitive, drag & drop etc.
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
NetBase constantly updates the platform with features. The platforms ability to analyze complex social listening topics is exceptional. Its fast and gives you the ability to create standardized reports for a quick topic analysis. Additionally, the standard overview tab provides the topic at a glance and assists in quickly identifying areas to further analyze. Great product with excellent support behind it!
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.
We had an internal implementation meeting with the NetBase team as well as a business seat implementation for one of our clients. I would highly recommend having all stakeholders attend an implementation meeting as they can understand the power of this platform.
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.
Meltwater took too long to load whenever you had to change keywords, their customer service was not very responsive, and their interface was not very customizeable. We decided to search for a new software company and we invited many companies to present. We selected Netbase after a free trial for reasons stated earlier.
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.
Positive - NetBase allows us to quickly gather a high level over view of a topic, which helps for new business pitch and being able to inform the account teams of basic information.
Negative - We have to use other tools to gather news, which affects our budget.
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.
