Webtrends - Competing with GA is a tough sell
Webtrends analytics is your run of the mill web analytics software that is being used within our digital marketing dept. It is able to …
Webtrends Analytics
Webtrends Analytics
Webtrends Analytics
Overview
What is Webtrends Analytics?
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.
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What is Webtrends Analytics?
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.
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What is Webtrends Analytics?
Webtrends Analytics provides a combination of features that are designed to provide an accurate and intuitive view into an organization’s multi-channel customer journey. According to the vendor, the key features enable not only sophisticated analysis techniques but also make key insights accessible to everyone in an organization.
Webtrends Analytics Features
- Supported: Multi-Channel Measurement across social, mobile, web and SharePoint
- Supported: Configurable digital dashboards
- Supported: Reports
- Supported: Metrics and Dimensions
- Supported: Administration
- Supported: Path and Scenario Analysis
- Supported: Unlimited Data Collection
- Supported: Ad-Hoc Data Exploration
- Supported: Extensive data export
- Supported: Standard and customized analytics reporting
Webtrends Analytics Screenshots
Webtrends Analytics Integrations
Webtrends Analytics Competitors
Webtrends Analytics Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry |
Webtrends Analytics Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Adobe Analytics, IBM Digital Analytics, and Google Analytics 360 are common alternatives for Webtrends Analytics.
Reviewers rate Implementation Rating highest, with a score of 9.9.
The most common users of Webtrends Analytics are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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May 21, 2018
Webtrends - Competing with GA is a tough sell
Webtrends analytics is your run of the mill web analytics software that is being used within our digital marketing dept. It is able to track and provide insights for our e-commerce website and goals set via trackers. It is primarily used by manager level associates to produce reporting and feedback to c-level execs within our company.
- Custom built reports
- Huge customer support which is particularly useful for newbies
- Interface and UX is very intuitive
- Plugins are not easy to use or implement
- There need to be more reports and template dashboards to present you with actionable data instead of having to build it out yourself
- Takes time and effort to fully implement into your site
My company uses WebTrends on premises, and has ever since I started work here. During my tenure we have added Google Analytics to our website, but we continue to use WebTrends as well.
- Custom Reports
- Reanalysis of old data
- Can analyze raw log files
- Complexity
- Cost of ownership
- Adding new report parameters requires full reanalysis
March 29, 2018
Wishing I could go back to Webtrends
I used Webtrends at a previous position, and boy do I miss it. We used it for complete weblog analytics to discover trends between purchases, site visitation patterns and our own forecasting. We used two feeds of Webtrends, a data dump and the UI. Webtrends allowed us to quickly and easily determine new demographics and merge important data with our other reports.
- Having used two competitors, the company I am with now uses Omniture, I can honestly say that Webtrends is the best web analytics software I have used. Its UI is very intuitive and easily customized.
- The back-end data is fairly easy to get to, and it's no hassle getting IP or log level data, unlike competitors. I work with a team of web analysts now and talk about Webtrends to them like the munchkins talked about the Wizard of Oz. It's just a more superior software than most to data mine.
- Webtrends has great customer service support. They were able to allow us to build out custom reporting and dumps for our specific industry without price gouging us.
- I would like to see stronger SQL integration into the UI program and software.
- Better tutorials for people
- More user groups in our area.
January 26, 2017
Webtrends Analytics Reviews
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Webtrends across the whole organization, for analyzing each of our platforms both independently and globally. All of the tools available compliment each other.
- Powerful creation of reports. Different categories, globally seen by all platforms, platform specific and personal seen by only me
- Intuitive drag and drop interface
- Action center allows for events to trigger near real-time activities
- API interface could be more intuitive
January 25, 2017
Webtrends Infinity Analytics - an honest review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
For several years, we've used Google Analytics as the primary data-gathering tool for our websites. GA has several frustrations, and the larger our membership grew, the more inaccurate the data became. We considered several 'paid for' analytics suppliers, and we decided to work with Webtrends - using their Infinity product. The Webtrends team were super helpful at introducing us to the tool and demonstrating how it could help our particular needs, as this isn't a 'one size fits all 'product' - it can be customised. The team contacted us regularly with additions they made that would help us solve the data problems we were looking for and this doubled as demo sessions to also showed us what Webtrends Infinity was capable of - things that we hadn't considered that have since been ultimately useful. And, since choosing to go ahead with Webtrends Infinity, we've been very satisfied with the standard of customer service - guiding us in using the product, producing dashboards for us, readily accepting feedback, and being available for questions whenever we need them. These guys really know their stuff, and I have no doubt whatsoever that we made the right decision. Having accurate data that we can really dig into has been a huge boost to us and has had an immediate effect on decision making within the company.
- Webtrends Infinity tracks our websites accurately - so we know the data we're getting is correct.
- Webtrends also tracks SPA's.
- Webtrends is customisable, so you can create and save your own reports, dimensions and metrics.
- You can really dig into the data with Webtrends Infinity to get many more insights that you could ever find using Google Analytics.
- The Webtrends team have helped us to produce dashboards for our regular reporting - literally saving us days of reporting time.
- The Webtrends team really know their stuff, and are on-hand to answer queries and questions, no problem at all.
- There are a few tweaks to do on the new Infinity system (and the team are really pro-active with feedback), but there's nothing I'd say would need a major overhaul. In fact, new areas are appearing every week.
September 30, 2015
Webtrends Streams to Success for your Organization
- The javascript tagging of our website provides better metrics over traditional weblogs in tracking unique visits and visitor
- The pushing of reporting to mobile devices like iPhone and iPad has been useful to the user community
- By adding scheduled tasks I was able to get web logs from SDC to run metrics hourly. Which comes in hand on heavy traffic days to demographics and for capacity planning for load balancing and adding additional servers into the server farm.
- Path analysis helps to track are visitors to the site going to the pages you want to direct them to. It also shows conversion rates and where the visitor left or abandoned the site before converting
- Metrics can be extracted easily to pass to web services to support other services. For example, passing website metrics to the CIO dashboard.
- Webtrends comes with a compliment of reports with the feature of creating custom reports for a particular client's needs, and to track particular metrics for a specific incident or interest
- The addition in Insight of social media tracking was a huge help to my Facebook and Twitter metric tracking
- No complaints it had all of the functionality that I needed.
April 29, 2015
Webtrends 8.5
- Provides website traffic analytics.
- Allows people to generate customized reports for particular time ranges or areas of site.
- Allows you to filter out what Web content should not be included in analytics results.
- Makes it easy to track downloads of documents such as PDFs, Word, Excel, etc.
- The product has an unnecessarily complicated licensing for limits on page index limits.
- Expensive compared to Google Analytics, hard to justify to IT management.
- Could be more flexible in exporting custom searches into other formats such as PDF, Excel, Word, etc.
April 08, 2015
Webtrends Review from long experience
Our use case is as an interactive agency. Some of our clients come to us as Webtrends customers, and we provide implementation and/or support as part of our overall web site development and maintenance practice. The Webtrends consumers at our clients' organizations tend to be in the marketing area, as the tool is used for one or more of the following: 1) assess the performance/value of the web site itself, 2) assess the performance of the marketing that brings people to the web site, or 3) for diagnostics, i.e. what parts of the content, navigation, etc seem to be causing site visitor successes or problems. The audience for the first is execs, for the second is marketers, and for the third is site managers and strategists.
- More than some of its competitors, most Webtrends' configurations (reports, dimensions, filters, content groups, measures) can be done in the admin UI, rather than in the tagging and site code. The tag itself is smart - it can sense offsite links, clicks on pdf downloads, form button clicks, and so on, which eliminates a lot of extra coding or tag modification that has to be done with other products.
- There are so many levers and buttons in the configuration that nearly anything can be turned into a report, or a report dimension, filter, or measure.
- It allows re-analysis of past data as far back as 90 days. Usually, you do this if you have created new custom reports, content groups, change the filters, and so on.
- There is a software version, called On Premises. (The SaaS version is called On Demand.)
- It has real path analysis ... it does not daisy-chain individual steps as others do. The paths it displays are what happens in actual visits, up to 20 steps long. It has forward and backward paths (one visit can appear several times depending on how many times the node was hit), paths-from-entry (one visit, one path), content group paths as well as page paths. Its one lack (that I care about) is SiteCatalyst's Pathfinder report which allows you to identify wildcard pages in a 3-step hypothetical path.
- This isn't going to ring a bell for a lot of people, but it handles list variables much better than its competitors (basically, parameters that hold multiple values such as "choose as many as apply" kinds of variables.
- It handles the tabulations of parameters really well. It deals with three kinds of parameters: those in the pages' URL, those placed in the WT.meta's (I don't think any competitors use this approach and it is fantastic for easily keeping URLs clean for SEO purposes), and those collected automatically by the standard tag. When tabulating parameters, its competitors require more up-front work, lots more configuration time, or severe limits on the quantity.
- Having recently tried out Google Analytics' new Content Groups feature, I was reminded of how powerful it is in Webtrends. There's really no comparison. Furthermore, the content groups can be configured p in the UI as well as hard-coded into the page. Content Group paths can be up to 20 steps long, and are not daisy-chained.
- 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 implemented Webtrends on 9 (with the promise of taking advantage of the version 10 release) on our 8 top website domains out of 32.
It was used in addition to other existing Analytics tools: Google Analytics and Tealeaf.
Our goal was to solve the following business problems:
It was used in addition to other existing Analytics tools: Google Analytics and Tealeaf.
Our goal was to solve the following business problems:
- Campaign tracking supporting our redirecting structure
- Multiple currency handling under the same domain name
- Absence of data sampling 50,000 URLs/day or 500,000 visits/month
- Acceptable reporting performance speed
- Funnel analysis options
- Data import and 3rd party integration (ESP)
- Data export capabilities to other BI solutions (EDW)
- Visitor segmentation (personalization)
- Data ownership (client vs. vendor)
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- Don't ask you to pay for both collected and analyzed data
- Custom reporting: ability to leverage tracking and create meaningful reports for Business users
- The product itself was very slow (9) or buggy (10)
- The ability to create new custom reports complex (consultant needed and can not apply historical data without replay)
- The possibility to drill-down data limited and not dynamic (segments, funnels, goals)
- The UI is rudimentary (9) or visually overwhelming (10) without thinking about functionality (advanced segmentation)
March 13, 2015
On-premise version not as strong as SaaS product.
- It effectively measures transactions on the site. Currently, we measure primarily basic metrics such as visitors and site visits. We haven’t formalized a reporting/call to action for the data yet: It’s one of our biggest initiatives this year. Once the proper KPIs are established, it will provide the metrics to support the KPIs
- It does not provide real time monitoring. We typically can look at data about 48 hours after it has occurred. This matters specifically for campaigns and for troubleshooting the site.
- The On Premises solution is not as robust as the On Demand solution which our security department is hesitant to use. The On Premise version has fewer of the innovations than On Demand, including integration with Sharepoint, Spaces, and social media.
- We are a health insurance company, so we are always cautious about releasing Protected Health Information (PHI). Since we are highly regulated, the consequences of a privacy breach are pretty severe, so we tend to be very conservative when sending data outside of our data environment. Being On Demand means are sending log files through the cloud which may or may not include PHI.
- Online training
February 27, 2015
Webtrends - Falling behind the curve
- Very flexible when there is a need to set up custom reports.
- Doesn't provide enough out of the box reporting/metrics.
- Dashboards and UI are difficult to navigate, but getting better.
- Excel plug-ins are not intuitive and hard to use vs. Omniture's Report Builder.
September 25, 2014
Not recommended
We used Webtrends until last month but we decided to move to to Google Analytics since we found a lot of restrictions with this product.
- Friendly Heatmaps
- Webtrends explore (tried) to make things look more user friendly ....(tried)
- There are a lot of areas for improvements for this tool. It's a powerful tool however it has so many restrictions such as running historic data for the past 3 months only
- Integration of Webtrends10 and WT9 did not work, you can see that since most of the time you still need to use WT9 in order to get results in WT 10 this is very confusing and frustrating
July 11, 2014
Webtrends in Big Distribution
Webtrends was the primary web analytics used in our North American eCommerce operations. It was used to measure overall traffic levels on our site as well as to look at specific customer usage (logged-in versus non-logged-in) and to provide deeper reviews of customer site search. This data was used to help manage our overall site search and SEO efforts.
- Gives complete data. This is critical if you want to look at all of the data in a particular set of analysis -- all of the specific search data or customer data. WebTrends was not a sample based product so we could get full data as needed.
- System availability. The tools were always available and had great up-time.
- Customization. With the proper Analyst support we could configure Webtrends to provide the specific data sets we needed to make report decisions.
- Customizing reports requires significant system knowledge. As a regular user, I found it very difficult to modify reports or metrics (compared to a product like Google Analytics). This required my organization to find and hire a WebTrends specialist to full utilize the power of the tool.
June 03, 2014
Webtrends - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Webtrends is used on a department by department basis. In most cases, the requirement is simply to gauge the effectiveness of the web site by measuring the number of visitors visiting the web site, and comparing usage month over month. Some of the newer implementations use Smart Tags rather than log files, and drill down deeper into how the web site is being used.
- In terms of simple web site usage, Webtrends is excellent at showing increasing or decreasing usage month over month.
- Webtrends is very good at showing what pages of the web site are getting the most usage, what are the most successful downloads
- Webtrends is also very good at showing the geographic location of the clients. It is pretty good at showing what organizations the clients belong to as well.
- For Webtrends on Premises, Memory usage is a big problem. And even powerful servers with copious amounts of physical memory - does not help for Webtrends
- There doesn't seem to be an upgrade path for Webtrends on Premises. It is stuck at version 9.2b, and there are currently no plans to upgrade. Companies that want the latest features must instead use the hosted version, Webtrends on Demand. Companies may save on salaries, but they will need to pay Webtrends lots of money, if they are big users of the software.
- Webtrends for SharePoint requires a Professional Services contract to do properly - Webtrends does not share the documentation. Some of the other add-ons have the same, or similar, issue.
June 01, 2014
Choose a different solution
We have used Webtrends for over 6 years, but we are not renewing our contract. The Webtrends user interface and the fundamental way they do analytics is behind the times. While it was used Globally, we have had many issues getting the business to get into the tool to really use it.
- Content groupings were a nice way to see groups of content (all cart pages, all product detail pages, etc); but this is available on most analytics systems
- Historical reporting -- if you don't know exactly what you want to measure, you are out of luck. So, for example, if sales suddenly go up and you need to understand why, but you didn't have a report set up for sales by geography/sales by campaign/sales by promo code/sales by whatever (IP address for fraud, etc) you are out of luck. You can do a look back of 30-60 days, but it takes a significant amount of time to pull those reports. This is especially important when you're trying to trouble shoot issues -- maybe sales by browser (because of a cart issue in a browser, for example) is something you need, but you don't know.
- Consistency of account managers -- turnover at Webtrends is very high. Our company went through 8 account managers in 2 years. Every new account manager, you have to start over.
- Time to load data -- refreshes only every 12 hours. I need at least near-real time data. They do have Streams now which gives you real time data, but not on everything.
May 21, 2014
Engaging Metrics and Users
It's been used more at the departmental level. It was planned for high level use which then was left in limbo since resources weren't available (turn over).
- Flexibility and scalable. One aspect is the capability of hosting in house. For companies that do want to keep therr data they have the option to as they say keep it on premises.
- Webtrends developed rapidly on data visualization which for companies that do want to quickly set that up they can have a clean visualization of all of your most important data and trends through dashboards, scorecards and an intuitive UI.
- Like any Web analytics software the customer support has to help the power users. I still would like to say one day that customer support has solved all my problems which indirectly solves the main stakeholders problems. This obviously translates to the success of the usage and extending the annual contracts within this company.
We used Webtrends On Premises with SDC and Tag Builder to analyze B2B, B2C and local government websites. Typically it is used by a several departments to determine the effectiveness of their outreach. It provides an alternative to 'free' web analytics tools and other paid hosted WA tools.
- 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.
- Requires careful setup and planning during implementation
- If using web server logs, you're able to re-analyze historical data - but it takes time and careful planning/execution.
- It would be great to have a fully implemented public test profile to send potential clients to see all the product's features
- Wish it supported Microsoft HyperV virtualization. Last time I checked, only VMWare was supported for virtualization of on premises installations.
- Online training
- In-person training
- Self-taught
Yes
Generally everything goes well with careful planning and execution. Contact support first if you need to upgrade across multiple versions (like jumping from v6 to v9).
Surprise... Don't try on-premises if you're not running real hardware or VMWare. HyperV is not supported unfortunately.
May 09, 2014
WebTrends 9 Review
WebTrends is used by approximately 400 people across the organization who are trained as Web Authors. Web Authors are responsible for content management on the internal web pages for their department. We use WebTrends to gather data (visits, views, etc) and transform it into actionable information that we use to optimize web traffic.
- Story mode presents data in an easy to read narrative format. This is important for people who are not necessarily the most computer savvy but still have the responsibility in their job description of managing webpages.
- File exporting. This is convenient for whenever someone needs to report information to management.
- Product support. This is a must when dealing with a complex software and I know that users appreciate it.
- Outages. There have been a few times where the system was not able to provide information on the dates requested, which makes reporting to management difficult.
May 08, 2014
Webtrends: Falling behind in analytics world
Webtrends was being used by our clients for analytics purposes, primarily marketing professionals. Typically, users were interested in tracking interaction-level data such as user paths and marketing channels, and in some cases for data visualization and report-building.
- Ability to customize variables, values, structure
- Ease of access to customer support
- Good price point compared to competition
- User interface changes to allow for non-power users.
- More out-of-the-box variable possibilities (plug and play)
- Access to the deeper data (think data warehouse)
May 06, 2014
Webtrends Analytics Review
Used to track website engagement (ie. ad performance, overall webpage traffic, referring pages/sites)
Used by marketing departments within the organization.
Address areas of improvement for site performance. For example, one ad space performing better than another, certain webpages within a site that are getting more traction, etc.
Used by marketing departments within the organization.
Address areas of improvement for site performance. For example, one ad space performing better than another, certain webpages within a site that are getting more traction, etc.
- Detailed traffic tracking - You are able to drill down within the profiles to get to a specific webpage you are looking for rather than it providing the "total" numbers (you are able to see which pages contributed to the total)
- Time period selection - You are able to select a single day, group of days, week, months, years, and see the available metrics for what you have selected. This is useful for comparing monthly, quarterly, or annually.
- Scheduling exports - The process of scheduling a report is not as simple as I believe it should be. The data arrives sometimes a day later than you indicated, sometimes a few days.
- Deleting scheduled exports - As I am not the administrator of the tool I am not able to delete scheduled exports. This included exports that I have set up and are being sent to my email/stored in a location I have indicated. Have the capability to delete scheduled exports that you have created would assist in keeping only the necessary functions running and assisting in eliminating the delay of enabled reporting.
May 02, 2014
Sufficient but perhaps needs updating to compete
This is being used by our eCommerce team, as well as our Analytics team to get a deeper look into our website traffic, performance, and usability. The data received from WebTrends helps us to make critical business decisions that impact revenue.
- Provides accurate traffic data and information
- Includes heat maps to see where visitors are going on your website
- I feel WebTrends is a bit outdated, not quite up to par with Omniture or Google Analytics
May 02, 2014
Webtrends
It's used by our analytics department to assess the viability of our websites that we produce. If there are usability issues or technical problems with a site, Webtrends helps us address those.
- Data is well organized
- Standardized setup
- Has a clickmap, other software doesn't seem to have this feature
- Not very customizable
- "Clunky" or inflexible in some areas
- Limited access to segment building/modification
- The Webtrends user interface is fairly easy to navigate and the reporting is pretty intuitive to figure out on your own.
- The level of data that Webtrends provides is very helpful as an analyst to make appropriate optimizations for both the website as well as the paid advertising campaigns driving to the site.
- For the most part, I trust the data that is collected by Webtrends since the site is being tagged and managed by a team of professionals at the company
- In the past 2 years that I have been using Webtrends there was very little support and services/faq available online, which I've just noticed that they have started to address, which is great to see. For example, when I had a question on how Webtrends defines a certain site metric, they didn't even have a dictionary or reference guide online to help.
- Customer service in general has been in issue for our agency in regards to response time to questions/troubleshooting and following through on client requests.
- We have found that local market reporting can be limiting when you want to segment the data a lot further.
December 11, 2013
Powerful Software...Weak User Support and Assistance.
- 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.
- The weakness of this software by far is the staff that support it. My company and I had some of the most frustrating conversations with people supporting our account. They would continually re-route us to other support staff. Their deadlines for solutions/answers were continually pushed back, and their answers of "Why" things were happening the way they were happening was most of the time just a ploy and cover up in hopes we would eventually stop asking the questions.
- Although simple campaigns can be easily set up, I would say the set up for larger campaigns (as ours was) was extremely difficult and confusing. Webtrends offered many, many ways to see the same data, but unfortunately alot of the time the data was inconsistent when you knew it should be. An example of this would be our team trying to track the number of visits for Page A and where they were previously before coming to that page. Now, if on one view Page A visits returned 10,000 and on another view with different parameters showed 20,000 visits we knew something was not right. The issue would always be sent back to support staff who never really provided a logical answer as to why this was happening.
December 11, 2013
Great Customer Service and an Okay Product
- First and foremost, the customer service for Webtrends is excellent. Even if my name is not on the account, they will go out of their way to make sure everything is coded properly. Plus, they have a very active social media team that looks to answer small questions quickly that pop up on Twitter.
- Implementation of Webtrends is a rather easy process for the basics. Compared to Omniture, I would say it takes about half the time.
- I'm a big fan of the URL generator. When trafficking digital media, generating URLs can be a real pain and the generator is far better than anything for Google Analytics or Omniture.
- Over the years, they have greatly improved the UX and UI of the system. It used to look more like an IT tool than a Business Intelligence tool. Now, I feel that it can operate as both.
- Functionality is dependent upon implementation. If an IT department is in charge of implementation, then they will not be looking for the same things that a marketer needs.
- Certain clients have required that I and my staff have to be on their network in order to access Webtrends. Accessing via a VPN connection can slow down the data download process.
- Like all web analytics platforms, generating custom reports with multiple variables can effect the data output. I have found that the limit on Webtrends for a good pull is three dimensions. (I then have to go back and merge the data sets on my own.)
- I would love for greater level of integration with adservers like DART or Atlas. If I could line up cookie level logs on the analytics and adserver, I could execute much deeper attribution and better QA.