WebTrends helped establish the analytics industry in 1993 with the birth of the Web Analytics Association, and has set the standard for innovation and value ever since. TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award winning WebTrends Analytics 9 is one of only a few products on our list of web analytics providers that was found to be in 100 percent compliance with the Web Analytics Association defined analytic terms (it helps that they wrote the book on web analytics).
As a company they are focused on helping organizations analyze confusing data gathered from websites and transform it into actionable information that can be used to optimize web traffic and campaign ROI. Customers include Renault, Kettle Foods, ShopNBC.com, Virgin Atlantic, LaQuinta Inn & Suites, and McAfee Security.
WebTrends describes themselves as an enterprise customer intelligence company. What they mean by this is that they look for opportunities that other providers may have missed and act on them before competitors have a chance to. They have been providing top notch web analytics for more than a decade and continue to lead the way as innovators in the industry.
Standout Features
- 100 percent compliance with Web Analytics Association Guidelines
- Story mode presents data in an easy to read narrative format
- Wide variety of powerful optimization tools and services
WebTrends offers a variety of products that when properly combined can provide your business with a custom solution specifically tailored to meet your needs. These products include Analytics 9, Ad Director, Marketing Warehouse, Professional Services, Score, Social Measurement, and Visitor Intelligence. Because there are so many ways to combine these services, we recommend contacting WebTrends for a custom price quote.
Most WebTrends products are available in both software and hosted “on demand” formats, which offers a choice of where your data is stored.
WebTrends does not offer a free version of their products. A trial version is available, but we were unable to determine if there is a cost involved.
From our research it is unclear whether this solution works if the visitor has JavaScript or cookies disabled on their computer, but we strongly suspect it will react much like similar programs and only gather very basic information from such users.
Data Collection API is used to collect data about your website visitors who don’t use a computer or JavaScript enabled mobile device. Examples for this include mobile or desktop applications and gaming consoles like the Xbox 360.
Recently, WebTrends partnered with Radian6 to offer social media analytics. This feature allows organizations to easily monitor social networking sites such as Twitter, to see what people are saying about a brand or product. Listening to comments made on social networking sites can provide valuable information about customer preferences and current trends.
WebTrends is capable of monitoring each metric in our comparison matrix, plus some. You can even take these statistics and compare them with any number of other factors in custom reports.
Reports can be generated based on referral domains, referral sites, or even referral pages. You can get as specific as you need in this category. Do you need to know what the most common domain referral is? There is a report for that. Do you need to know what your most popular organic search phrases are? There is even a report for that. There are at least a dozen reports you can run just for referrals.
Reports, reports, and even more reports. The number and quality of reports you can generate in WebTrends is nearly endless. Luckily you can easily break these reports down into months, weeks, days, and even hours. You can know exactly what your visitors were doing yesterday at 6 a.m. if you would like.
WebTrends can track the majority of events featured in our comparison matrix. We were unable to determine whether this solution is capable of tracking error pages on a website, or whether it knows when a visitor saves a page to favorites or bookmarks. The latter two features are fairly uncommon but extremely useful at times.
Once again, nearly every metric in our comparison matrix is met by WebTrends. The only exception is user name which is a rarely tracked attribute as it is. WebTrends can take the data gathered from visitors and use it to help you create targeted advertising and marketing campaigns based not only on your customers geographic and techno-graphic data, but also based on what they like and what they look at online. It is almost creepy how specific this solution can get about the likes and dislikes of your visitors.
File exporting from WebTrends is available in Excel, XML, and CSV formats. PDF is also available but not by default.
Product support is available if you purchase a Care Plan. You can choose between the Essential and Premium plans, and information about each can be found on the Compare Plans portion of the WebTrends website.
Each plan includes telephone, email, knowledge base, and online chat support.
WebTrends has an impressive list of Free Educational Guides on Web Analytics including “Top 5 FAQ’s about KPI’s,” “Engagement Marketing Guild,” and “Measurement Web 2.0 Technologies, Part 1: RIA and RSS Up Close.” These guides provide valuable information about how and why your company should be engaging customers via the web and are great if you are new to web analytics and web 2.0.
WebTrends is the grandfather of web analytics. They have helped to pioneer the web analytics industry and are still one of the most comprehensive and accomplished web analytics providers in the world.
If you are interested at reading about our top two picks for web analytics solutions, check out Coremetrics and Omniture.
For information about web analytics solutions on a smaller budget, look at our Website Traffic Statistic reviews. Also, check out our Search Engine Submission Services reviews to find out how you can improve your Google page rating.
Please Note: We did not actually install tracking code into our HTML pages from this service. Review is based on available information, demos and experiences with customer service.
