In early February Forrester issued a report about the Web Analytics market. That report positioned WebTrends as #1 in Market size and Strategy. If you see the graph below, you’ll see that regarding the current offering WebTrends was a little bit behind Visual Sciences and Omniture. But that was with Version 7.5!
With version 8 which has been called MarketingLab, WebTrends takes a huge step forward and positions as #1 also regarding its current offering.
This reminds me of the Panel Discussion in February’s HBR by Don Moyer (Harvard Business Review, Volume 84, Number 2, p.168). The title is ‘Take a Giant Step‘ and under a very explicit cartoon, Don talks about races between competitors and how very often the small steps done by a player are quickly matched by competitors. The only way to avoid this lack of real differentiation is to make a giant step (he refers to HBR 2004 October’s article “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne). As he says “(…) those giant, muscle-straining strides that take innovators off the well-trod path and drop them miles away on a different road where no one else is.”
From our point of view this is what WebTrends has done with this new release. And what I’m certain is that WebTrends is not going to stop here. WT is releasing more and more clever features and it provide real answers to business critical questions that all marketers should be asking themselves.
Some of these gigantic steps include features as Performance Dashboards (see example below) in which you can measure the success of your website against your goals and even allow you to make predictive analysis and direct ROI calculations and complete Business Intelligence Integration thanks to its new open Marketing DataWarehouse that let’s you easily integrate external data directly with your online data.
If you want to see it for yourself you can take an online tour here. Next week we will start releasing the trials of the new version so if you would like to be among the firsts to experience WebTrends Analytics 8 just drop me an email and I’ll make sure you receive a trial version (rdo at ox2 dot be).
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