On The Trail

WebTrends just started the promotion for their new version, apparently it is slated for release in late April. They’re calling it “WebTrends Marketing Lab”. They’ve put a PDF up on their site about it here:
WebTrends Marketing Lab (PDF)
From the pamphlet there look to be a few new and noteworthy features, so it looks like a good upgrade:

1. Performance Dashboards You’ll be able to put your goals right into your dashboards. The graphics show some fancy meter style graphs that I assume allow you to see if you’re hitting your numbers or not. The graphics are neither here nor there for me, but I really like the idea of encouraging users to define their goals and to try to hit them. There is also a “what if” section on the dashboards that looks pretty cool. The graphic has sliders, so I assume you can see (for example) what would happen to your revenue if your visitors doubled. We use something like this now for our PPC campaigns in Atlas One Point and it is pretty cool. Of course the difference there is that you have complete control over PPC, while control over what people do on your website is, well, a bit less complete.
2. Business Intelligence Integration This is a huge one. They claim that you’ll be able to access WebTrends data via a standard ODBC connection. That will make WebTrends really easy to integrate with non-web data. In my book this is the biggest feature enhancement.
3. Interactive Reporting Console They claim this will allow segmentation of reports on the fly. In theory this is an excellent feature and one that their competitors have had for a long time. Whether it is worthwhile or not depends in exactly how it is implemented. I hope it isn’t lame.

They’re also releasing something called the WebTrends Marketing Warehouse as a separate product. There is scant info in the brochure, but it looks like it is meant to be used in real time, probably so you can dynamically modify content for individual visitors. It looks like this product has a desktop application interface instead of a web interface.

Excellent! I’m looking forward to seeing more of this new version.