When René barged into our bedroom some 72 hours ago with my laptop in his hand, announcing Greg Drew’s departure from WebTrends, we finally understood why his name had been popping-up on searches to our blog for the last 24 hours in such an abnormal way.
I had thought Greg already looked tired when we briefly met in Washington and attributed that logically to the Road shows that WebTrends was holding, following its August release of the long awaited Marketing Lab² (ML²).
On the other hand, this news also reminded me of some discussions we had back in the spring in San Francisco with some WebTrends folks about the need for a refreshing touch within WebTrends in order to get past the very bad feeling we all shared about the first release of Marketing Lab. All partners we talked to were anxiously waiting – for far too long, I really want to stress that – for a more advanced release that would bring true added value to our existing clients. With ML1, this was clearly not the case.
So, let’s get back to WebTrends news as some more information has been published online regarding it’s top management changes.
The first thing that seems clear now is that Greg Drew and the other three VPs were asked to leave by the Board of WebTrends.
Bruce T. Coleman, who has become the interim CEO, knows WebTrends very well as he was member of the Board since 1998. So even if he has no experience in Web Analytics operations, my feeling is that he understands very well the sector and he has got some ideas for the future.
Coleman has also extensive experience in running technology companies and thus we can expect some changes in the coming months. From public declarations of their CMO Tim Kopp:
“The company has been doing great. We’re driving double-digit growth. But we believe we can continue to do better and the board wanted to make a change to help accelerate growth“.
So the objective is to increase growth and this seems to be the main reason of the management changes. This was corroborated by Bruce Coleman who stated:
“We need to get more new deals, this is a company that’s growing, but not growing as much as the marketplace. Given the investments, [the owners] want to see more of a return.” (more…)
Greg Drew, WebTrends’s CEO has now been replaced by Bruce T. Coleman.
Excerpts:
CEO Greg Drew and three other executives at WebTrends Inc. have left the company. Details of their departure remain unclear.
Pictures and biographies of each executive disappeared from the company’s Web site late Wednesday. Calls and a visit to the company, as well as a call to Drew, received no responses.
Drew had headed Portland-based Web analytics firm WebTrends for the past four years, and was part of the management team that took the company out as a separate enterprise from San Jose-based NetIQ Corp. in March 2005.
The WebTrends Web site now lists Bruce T. Coleman as CEO. He is CEO of El Salto Advisors, a consulting firm that provides interim management to computer software and service companies. He was most recently interim CEO of San Diego’s Websense until May 1999 and remains a director of that company.
[…] They speculate that with its market share slipping, WebTrends management wanted to sell the company to its biggest rival, Omniture Inc.
This particular piece of news begs the following questions:
why would two companies that just recently launched major upgrades to their product lines want to be acquired?
why sell to Omniture when WebTrends and Omniture have different views on Web Analytics?
were Visual Sciences and WebTrends in the same race and aware of it?
was Visual Sciences really favored over WebTrends? If so, what were the decisive factors in Omniture’s decision?
I am sure many people in the Web Analytics industry are as sad to see Greg Drew go as we are and wish him the best.
After the acquisition of Visual Sciences, we all wonder how Web Analytics vendors will react. So let’s get back to the different vendors out there and try to take a look at the future.
If we take the latest Forrester Research regarding Web Analytics that Megan Burns wrote a few months ago, which you can download here at Unica’s website, we find the main Web Analytics vendors well represented. Here’s a graph that sums up Megan’s findings:
– All OX2 team that has been working hard on top of their day2day jobs to get this event ready.
– And last but not least, all the participants that showed up. This event was for you and the best gauge that I can think of to measure the successof the event are the feedback forms. Besides one person that complained because it was too much oriented for big compagnies, here are some interesting statistics from the 50 forms that we received back:
100% of respondents found the conference instructive
100% said that the agenda and topics matched their expectations
100% would recommend the event to their friends
Regarding the speakers, the ranking of satisfaction was pretty much as expected: Eric leads with almost everybody stating that he was very good followed by Aurélie, Dave and Stephan. On the vendors side, the ranking of satisfaction placed Omniture followed by WebTrends and then Indextools, Nedstat and Extenseo.
I have to admit that we were really amazed by the feedback forms and the positive emails that we have received since last friday. Here are some of the comments we have received:
“René, Aurélie, just a short note to say congratulations and thank you for today, I thought the audience, content and venue were all first class!”
“Thanks for hosting the event last week. I thought it was very informative and I certainly picked up a few useful insights.”
“I just wanted to congratulate you guys again in setting up this great event. All the people I have spoke to during the day where all enthusiastic about the event and Web Analytics.”
“Thank you for your event, I was really impressed”
“As I just told Rene over the phone. I think it was an amazing event on the level of Emetrics (and I do about 25 shows a year).“
this last comment really made my day, as eMetrics is for me the nirvana of the Web Analytics event.
Thanks again to everybody that came and allowed this event to be a great success.
And yes, see you next year at our third OX2 Web Analytics Day Brussels (It’s going to be difficult to do better I think…).
My conference journey started out on Thursday, when I hooked up with a couple of Belgian clients at the eDay in Rotterdam, before heading back to Brussels together with Eric, after his brief radio interview, where I was lucky enough to play around with his iPhone. To be quite honest, I’m not really an early adopter but if you touch it, believe me, you want one and leaving your credit card at home doesn’t really seem to work 😉
The car ride back home went fast – as we both like to drive fast – and discussed on the way recent evolutions of the Web Analytics industry, including Megan Burns’ latest Forrester wave that had been officially released a couple of days before.
To be quite honest, the night was short and the next day promised to be quite long as I picked up both Dave and Eric to head to the Federation of Enterprises in Brussels in order to have breakfast around 8 am.
When setting up the Web Analytics Day in Brussels, our intention was mainly to get practitioners from major Belgian companies – and picked up a couple of international attendees in the process – in order to allow them to get a full review of what Web Analytics is actually about, looking beyond the pure acquisition of a web analytics tool. As Eric’s Web Analytics is Easy presentation also emphasized, using his RAMP analogy, the first letter stands for Ressources which include both technology as well as people. The other acronyms respectively stand for Analysis, Multivariate testing & Processes. (more…)
This is exciting, my little Web Analytics Business Unit could’t be happier with the upcoming Web Analytics Day to be held on September the 14th in Brussels!
We had some experience setting-up a Web Analytics Day back in 2005 and managed, in those early days to get almost 100 people to listen to what we had to say during workshops and conferences. This time around, man oh man, it’s going to be a ball!
Some of my favorite speakers are coming: Eric Peterson to talk about process!, KPIs & Web 2.0. Wandering Dave Rhee to discuss his favorite subject: Social Networks! and last but not least, the World Federation of Advertisers with its very own Stephan Loerke to discuss how Advertisers are becoming Accountable.
And it’s not all because we’re also going to let the vendors show off in order to fill you in on what they’ve been up to and how they see Web Analytics evolving. Omniture‘s going to surely show off Genesis while WebTrends will be presenting Marketing Lab 2 (ML² for those familiar with the topic), IndexTools‘ wonderful Dennis Mortensen will certainly crack a joke while assuring you his solution is the most cost effective one and flegmatic Ian Thomas from Microsoft will also be emphasizing his view upon Web Analytics… and free tools. In addition we have also Nedstat, the biggest Dutch Web Analytics vendor who will be represented by Krist Verhelle and finally Extenseo, the leading SEO company in Belgium that will speak about Web Analytics & SEO.
But don’t forget, it’s also about the networking, about asking the questions you’ve always wondered about but were afraid to ask or blog about!
René’s in charge of food & cocktails so you can be sure all this exciting knowledge will be graciously floating on top of your cocktails. Hopefully, he’ll even think about the chocolates!
This is really a day about knowledge, about getting the most out of the online channel and the challenge we’ve all been embracing for many years now, building up an accountable society.
Join us, challenge us! Without you, we couldn’t made this wonderful European Dream Team happend!
Looking forward to meeting you on Friday the 14th of September at the Federation of Entreprises of Belgium. More information: www.webanalyticsday.eu.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at some BBC program about Paris and I was surfing through our blog in paralel when I stopped at the Google Trends post I wrote last year. Then I went back to the tool and I was intrigued to see the evolution of the trends of certain terms.
Yesterday, during the Emetrics Summit in London we were given the opportunity to ask questions to a panel of Web Analytics vendors that covered most of the top players of the Industry. Jim called it the ‘Vendors Variety Hour‘. It was a pity that Ian Thomas could not participate as Microsoft hasn’t yet launched Gatineau 😉 (looking forward to see you in the panel next year).
Last year during the Emetrics there was a question ‘Vendors name one thing you do better than WebTrends‘. This year I decided to bring again the question, but with a twist ;-):
‘Vendors, what would be your unique selling proposition?‘ And the twist was for Avinash that was actively representing Google: ‘Avinash you cannot say that GA USP is it’s free‘.
WebTrends, the market leader for web analytics and Marketing Performance Management solutions, today announced it was recognized as the leader in Market Suitability in JupiterResearch‘s report, “Web Analytics Constellation: Assessing Web Analytics Applications,” published on February 6, 2007. WebTrends out-scored all other web analytics vendors for its top ranking in market suitability, which was based on product pricing, critical feature set, standard feature set and product support cost. JupiterResearch mapped and ranked WebTrends available feature set against a pre-requisite feature set as determined by JupiterResearch, and interviewed vendor clients to assess the strength and availability of its services.
“WebTrends has led the industry since the market’s inception, and we are thrilled to be named the top vendor for market suitability for the second consecutive time in Jupiter’s web analytics vendor evaluation,” said Greg Drew, CEO and president, WebTrends. “Over the past year, we’ve built-out a strong suite of solutions focused on marketers’ highest points of value including accurate comprehensive analytics, targeted relationship marketing and automated paid search optimization. This momentum, which has made WebTrends solutions the most award-winning in the industry, continues to accelerate.”
The eMetrics summit held in Washington last week was attended by some 480 participants, of which only 9 companies from Europe were present! Amongst which, Italy was represented by Giovanni (left) from BigBang, Scotland by Vicky Brock* (right) from Highland Business Research and us, little Belgians. Avinash (middle) is an exception, I’d call him a world citizen and one of our greatest inspirators.
The week before attending, I received an email from Brian Induni, Web Analytics Association President, regarding a possible subcommittee about certification or how to define Web Analytics professionals.
During the course of this week, I was reminded of the fact that web analytics products are not a silver bullets, independantly of the one you choose. Some products are better than others, will adapt better to your needs; with the Golden Palm going to what I call the analyst nirvana, Visual Sciences. I mean WOW!
All presentators and attendees agree on the fact that Web Analytics is hard!
Education remains the essential underlying theme of sucessfull web analytics projects and as Avinash pointed out, curiosity and spending at least 20% of your time “providing analysis no one asked for and only you can perform” is actually where INSIGHT can be found. Gosh, that was so true!
Please note I used the term insight and not reporting or reports. It’s not about reports as these can be spitted out by any tool. The WSS whitepaper I commented upon (thanks Eric for your comments) last week defines KPIs for the media sector. Such reports can be set-up of course in WSS’s HBX but also WebTrends, Instadia or Coremetrics, amongst others.
I got a remark this week from one of my possible future clients – doing a PoC, Proof of Concept for them – where he mentioned that it seemed actually quite difficult to introduce tags into the “application” we wanted to measure. The application was actually a Flash file and as far as Flash files go, yes, it’s a bit of a hassle but nothing really spectacular as long as you get all the little details right.
It’s actually quite funny how this question came back a couple of times lately and the answer to such a question remains invariably “it depends”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not really complicated and as for any kind of task, it does require some preparation. I often compare it to cooking a dish: integrating the tags is like shopping for your ingredients. Once you’ve got all your ingredients in place, the fun part starts but without one particular ingredient, you might get your dish completly wrong. (more…)
I got housted last week for a recent post on this blog, a situation I sincerely regret.
While driving home from the Dutch mountains, I was thinking about the terms used in this constructive critism and more specifically the term “WebTrends experts”.
As my team’s been heavily involved with the product for over 3 years now (it first landed on my desk over 6 years ago), I was wondering whether I’d use such an expression to describe my team. (more…)
I got a mail this morning from Greg Drew, WebTrends CEO, and he seems happy. I felt like sharing the joy and gratitude for all the good work these guys in Portland and London do for us to make the online channel something that is really starting to count.
Not only did WebTrends sign on Microsoft as a customer back in May, launched V8 – also called Marketing Lab – but also announces today that they’re doing quite well financially.
An extract of the full press release: “I am pleased to announce that in Q2, WebTrends continued to strengthen its financial position and market leadership; increasing profitability and reaching record financial milestones and yearly growth rates that continue to exceed the growth rate of the market. In particular the overall business grew 30 percent year-over-year on a bookings basis and WebTrends On Demand continues to see very strong growth experiencing bookings growth of 78 percent year-over-year. Internationally, WebTrends EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Asia) achieved 108 percent year-over-year growth.“.
Yeap, we’ve been busy also here in Europe and having fun 😉 (more…)
Well, this week, WebTrends CEO, Greg Drew, sent me an email announcing that Microsoft had chosen WebTrends as a Web Analytics solution (Read the press release) for their own use.
I see that the WA market is getting more and more segmentated. The fact that Microsoft that now also posesses it’s own Web Analytics solution (DeepMetrix) also chooses a tool such as WebTrends makes me think that this is indeed the case.
In the coming years WA Vendors will specialize further as the Internet continues to grow and keeps getting more and more complex. I remember back in the 90s when you couldn’t do that many things with your website and a tool like FrontPage could easily handle 90% of what was possible to build back then. Nowadays, more and more systems are being launched and the complexity of the Internet is growing. So is the reporting.
For the moment I see 3 segmentations in the sector: (more…)
Some weeks ago I posted a quick comment on Omniture going public. I didn't expect that little post to be so popular. It has become one of our top 5 posts more visited and recently a happy customer of Omniture (my supposing is based on the fact that he's an Omniture customer) has just posted a comment. John doesn't join me in my assumption that Omniture 'needs' money. This, to him does not merely justify their IPO and I agree. My reflections are today based on different facts coming from multiple sources. I wanted to share my current thoughts. (more…)
Siegert planted the scene related to our attendance of the Emetrics Summit in London, May last. I would like to focus on one major issue that stroke and comforted me during this 3 day event regarding Web Analytics: what vendors thought of and could do better than WebTrends.
This past day I've been playing around with the new born form Google: Google Trends. This is an interesting tool (reminds me of Technorati with the little graph on the left side) that allows to view the popularity of search keywords or phrases. It even allow comparisons.
As a picture often works better than words, see hereunder the search made for some Web Analytics solutions
Because Siegert today was making fun of a new article on Clickz.com today entitled, The Ideal Web Analytics tool, I decided to take a look.
It’s indeed always funny to see such a title and then just underneath “sponsored by WebTrends”
I read the article and I agree. I’m trying to figure out what I love most.
” Ultimately, the real value lies in the ability to be able to gain insight into visitor and customer behaviour. This requires a number of things:
the ability to quickly segment and looks at different groups of visitors and customers based on any number of criteria
the ability to be able to aggregate and summarise data in a way that makes it easier to observe patterns and trends
the ability to integrate site centric data with other data sources to get a holistic view of the customer“
Also tricky thing is that it doesn’t actually quote on WebTrends or it’s specific components but mostly shows the business requirements related to the use of a web analytics and how it should position itself within other channel related data.
I agree with the vision and the road ahead.
Looking forward to the journey.
As we @OX2 finished integrating WebTrends with our Content Management System, On[i]Sys some weeks ago, I was wondering if the same kind of reflection had been haunting other CMS vendors on my market.
Anyhow, I moved on and typed into Google "Tridion" & "WebTrends", looking not only for possible integrations but also remembering that some time ago, a Tridion client told me about Tridion developping it's own Web Analytics solution and what I thought about it.
Well, to be quite honnest, I didn't know about it and wouldn't actually care less.
As an enterpreneur, I know how important it is to stick to what you know.
For those who know me, it's quite obvious I'm the "best of breed" kind of person. T
hat also explains for me why we chose for WebTrends in terms of Web Analytics solutions – amongst others such as Google Analytics.
Anyhow, getting back to Tridion and WebTrends in Google, top result is: http://www.tridion.com/Company/Careers/read.asp?component_id=10210.
By the way, for those who might tell me this is old, the publication date can be found in the source code (unless Tridion goes through an entire publication process for all content over and over again, which I doubt: it's not optimal and useless) and thus the publication date states <meta name="DC.Date.X-MetadataLastModified" content="2006/04/11 14:28:51"/>. Interesting meta: answers one of my clients questions of last week: who publishes content & at which frequency?
I'm diverting again.
The point is that Tridion is recruiting an Online Marketeer for Amsterdam.
And the Roles and Responsabilities of the Online Marketeer will be "Measure online effectiveness using web analytics tools like Webtrends."
Thanks guys for supporting my view related to WebTrends.
And let me know if there is more to Tridion & WebTrends, will you? or Web Analytics as a matter of fact. Can't seem to get results from your Search unfortunately 😦
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. (more…)
While we @OX2 are thinking harder and harder about the use of the word CMS (content management system), Webtrends’ release of MarketingLab titles in their latest communication “Get reading for the changing world of marketing..”.
Seems we are on the same wavelength regarding the evolution of marketing activities or the responsibilities of CMOs (Chief Marketing Executives), as the Americans call them.
So, we’ve got a date: March 23rd at 10 AM (PST)… will need some calculations there 😉
Sign up here.
The interesting thing is also that WebTrends suggests reading their (annual) CMO report, which I just did and yes, I was surprised by the numbers on different aspects. (more…)
As some of you might have noticed in our last WebAnalytics.be newsletter, WebTrends will be releasing shortly WebTrends Marketing Lab. What we have been able to see so far is very promissing and we can tell that we are very excited at OX2 with this new launch that will help our current and future clients to better measure and optimize their online activities.
As you understand I cannot give you any info at this stage, but I encourage you to attend the webcast that will take place in a couple of weeks.
Also if you want to follow the buzz around this new release I invite you to check the Blog of one of WebTrends Architects: Eric Butler.
This is the blog of WebAnalytics.be, a Business Unit of OX2, a pan-European Interactive Agency based in Bussels capital of Europe.
This Blog has been created to allow our team members to share with you and the rest of the world their ideas thoughts and views on Web Analytics.
When René barged into our bedroom some 72 hours ago with my laptop in his hand, announcing Greg Drew’s departure from WebTrends, we finally understood why his name had been popping-up on searches to our blog for the last 24 hours in such an abnormal way.
Bruce T. Coleman, who has become the interim CEO, knows WebTrends very well as he was member of the Board since 1998. So even if he has no experience in Web Analytics operations, my feeling is that he understands very well the sector and he has got some ideas for the future.
These are truly fascinating times for Web Analytics.
This is exciting, my little Web Analytics Business Unit could’t be happier with the upcoming 
Yesterday, during the 
I got 
I got a mail this morning from Greg Drew, 
A few weeks ago, in a post about the different 
Some weeks ago I posted a quick comment on 
Siegert planted the scene related to our attendance of the 
This past day I've been playing around with the new born form Google: 
OX2 Web Analytics Blog 