Webtrends Marketing Lab Webcast
I use WebTrends as my primary tool, so I’m very interested in their new version. I watched the WebTrends Marketing Lab Webcast today. I tried to live blog it. It’s really hard to type and listen at the same time! Plus, some of it would make more sense with pictures. All in all it was an OK presentation. As these things always are, it was too general and lacking in specifics for my taste, but they laid out a good vision of where Web Analytics is headed and what WebTrends is doing to go down that path. The Warehouse portion of the product looks great. I wonder how much it costs.
In any case, What I wrote is below, fisked in italics. All I can promise is that it will take you less time to read the description below than the 25 minutes it will take you to watch the webcast
.
Presenters: Greg Drew (CEO), Jason Palmer (VP of Product development)
First slide: Webtrends promise: We deliver solutions that make it easier to prove and improve your marketing investments.
“it’s no longer about web analytics” bummer for WebTrends… what is it about?
Old saws… 34% media time is online, 6% of ad dollars spent online. Expect 5x growth in ad spending near term. 5 times 6. Makes sense.
Yes! he trotted out the “half of my ad spend wasted, but I don’t know which half” bit. That never gets old.
The web is like direct marketing and it is more measurable than other types of advertising. Is he going to talk about his product?
“Leverage visitor intent to build relationships”. Need to look at visitors as people, with individual intent. Also, the visitors/customers are talking about your site from all over the place. Lot’s of traffic sources and advertising opportunities. How to keep track of it all?
The questions:
- Where to spend marketing dollars? To decide we need integrated metrics.
- How can we improve relationships and customer lifetime value? This means relationship marketing, not push marketing.
- How can we justify our ad spends? Need consistent enterprise wide KPI’s These are 3 nails hit on the head. If WT can help with the first and the last I’ll be very happy. I’m skeptical about WT helping with the second one.
The web is the new marketing hub, so, Web Analytics is evolving into Marketing Performance Management. maybe “measurement” is a more accurate term than “management”
Need stronger customer relationships and higher lifetime value based on consistent metrics and constant optimization.
“Where does MPM fit in?” Ha Ha! I love it. We’ve called our internal tool “MPM” for a few years now, since we sold the trademark of the original name to Atlas. If WebTrends starts using the term MPM we’re going to be really confused…
Tools need to be able to look at customer segments over time for any type of behavior in any channel. Don’t focus on the visit, focus on the customer. Hard to argue with that. I’d hope he talks about the cookie issue. If someone deletes their cookie it’s difficult to focus on them over time. That’s the big wrench in the plan.
So we’re done with Greg. On to Jason. Hopefully we’ll get some product specifics.
WT will consolidate cross channel info into a single system? Great!, but it seems a bit ambitious…
WT Analytics 8: KPI dashboards and goal driven metrics. Marketing optimization and BI integration opens data to entire enterprise. Good, this is a big deal, particularly the BI integration bit
WT Marketing Warehouse (new product): Enterprise class data warehouse. ID valuable customers and drive targeting campaigns.
- WT Explore: Analyze visitor behavior in real time.
- WT Segment: Slice and dice warehouse info.
What does it cost?
Problem: Data is siloed so KPI’s are inconsistent and poor targeting results. Web has many different advertising investment opportunities. which makes this problem even worse.
WT will bring everything together….Now it looks like he is going to show new features by the persona of who will use them. Starting with the Marketing executive.
You can:- Manage by KPI (set up dashboards) with “What if” tab. Pretty sliders and dials. This is cool if there is enough data to make valid predictions.
- Set Goals I like this feature a lot. It looks like you can put in a KPI goal and it will give you a nice dial showing how close you are to it.
- Model Performance This is the “what if” widget. I’m going to do this manually later this afternoon, so this will be a welcome tool.
…he goes over some existing features with some other personas… (campaign drill down, scenario and smartview.) no major changes visible here
Customer Marketing Manager persona: Will use WT Explorer. ID visitor behavior and quickly segment them out. Nice visual interface that looks intuitive. Pretty pictures move product.
Example of Warehouse / WT Explorer use:
Segment out folks who came from a particular keyword and did a particular action. For example: On a travel site, get everyone who visited 3 times, searched for “Cruises from Miami” and dropped out of the cart at the “airfare” step. If you have email addresses for these folks you could send them a very targeted email. Nice theory, but that’s a big IF! It might be feasable in some instances, I guess. When it works it would be very powerful… but it seems like a very limited example. How could I target those folks if I didn’t know their email addresses? Can I tie it back into the site somehow and offer them a package? Is it fast enough to work like that? I know that type of stuff is possible, but I don’t know of an analytics package that does it. If WT can do it that would be really cool.Back to Greg
Yada Yada…. Thanks and bye bye.
Recent Comments