Intelligent Enterprise

Web analytics vendor WebTrends released Marketing Lab 2 early this month, an ambitious effort that seeks to raise the analytics value of the product while improving usability.

The introduction of WebTrends "Score" and WebTrends "Visitor Intelligence" are the featured upgrades to Marketing Warehouse Version 2.0. Score lets you set values on events in order to measure engagement. While the idea of setting values is not ground breaking, analysts who currently spend time doing this offline in Excel will save time by setting values within the interface and having reports generated natively.

Visitor Intelligence makes it easier to create segments and multi-dimensional reporting from the product's "Marketing Warehouse." Using SQL Server 2005, the UI lets you use drag-and-drop functionality to select a specific number of cubes upon which to filter data and generate custom reports. The UI is well organized, and its graphical approach, powered by Ajax, may make it more accessible to analysts.

Existing customers of the Marketing Warehouse will be upgraded to Score and Visitor Intelligence at no additional cost. Clearly, WebTrends hopes that these new services will incent other customers to upgrade to the Marketing Warehouse, which costs an additional $1,000 per month (see related article on options and other cost drivers in Web analytics deployments).

The UI work exhibited in this release does a lot to unify what had been disparate parts of the WebTrends offering. As readers of this review know, previously you needed to access Dynamic Search, Analytics, and Marketing Warehouse separately. These are now all part of a single interface, a seemingly minor improvement, but one that should help analysts who use the tool on a daily basis.

Phil Kemelor is Vice President of Strategic Consulting Services for Semphonic, a Web analytics consultancy. He is also a lead analyst with CMS Watch and consults with enterprises looking to select Web analytics technologies or apply best practices.