June Dershewitz on Web Analytics

Movie Review: Untraceable

Last week San Francisco Web Analytics Wednesday took a trip to the movies.  Just how often do we get to see a blockbuster film about web analytics?  Well, if Untraceable is the best Hollywood can do, let's hope it never happens again.

Fact: 60% of all Untraceable audience members were Web Analytics Wednesday attendees, but only because our theater was nearly empty.  At least this made it easier for us to heckle without worrying that we were disrupting anyone else's experience.

Setting:  Scenic Portland, Oregon.  Familiar territory for me because I grew up there, it's also the noted home base of WebTrends and Web Analytics Demystified.  The only office shown in the movie, however, was the FBI's cybercrime unit.  In terms of product placement, the good guys were using Windows, the bad guy didn't use any recognizable software.  FBI bookshelves contained only plain white binders, none of the web analytics books we know and love. 

Gore: A sick and twisted individual builds torture contraptions to kill his victims by way of a web site.  The more viewers he gets watching the live webcam, the faster his victims die.  He's even thoughtful enough to install an LCD readout in the torture chamber in order to track real-time viewership.  As news spreads, the killer's site grows in popularity and the carnage accelerates; it's word-of-mouth marketing gone very, very wrong.  Nasty bloody scenes feature high-wattage light bulbs, battery acid and one very sharp rototiller.  I hid behind my popcorn bag the whole time.

Plot: Completely transparent!  One astute viewer among us correctly guessed the whole plot halfway through the movie.  A title like "Untraceable" would suggest the bad guy had a knack for covering his tracks, which he did, but there were still some major holes in the plot.  We spent the entire show devising ways to isolate the perp based on his actions.

Bottom line: Worth Netflixing, I suppose, if you can tolerate a serious bloodbath.  But honestly, get The Silence of the Lambs instead.  Untraceable stole everything from Lambs, right down to the movie poster.  Granted the original doesn't have anything to do with web analytics, but as far as the genre goes it's light-years better.

Rants and Raves about WebTrends Visitor Intelligence

Three weeks ago I attended the WebTrends Engage conference; not long thereafter I wrote this chatty post about the great party, my penthouse suite, and then a little about one of the new WebTrends products, Score.  Here it is, 3 weeks later, and the commercial web analytics vendor world has undergone a major upset - WebTrends has given 4 top execs the boot in the wake of Omniture's acquisition of Visual Sciences.  It will take a while for the dust to settle.

Current drama aside, I'd like to share my thoughts on WebTrends Visitor Intelligence (VI).  At Engage I sat through a couple of hours of live demos as well as a small-group private session.  Overheard while I was there: 

"Most marketers wouldn't know what OLAP was if it jumped up and bit'em in the butt."

Is that so, marketers?

VI is an OLAP tool.  More precisely it's a browser-based drag-n-drop reporting interface for visitor-level web activity data stored in a relational database, aka WebTrends Marketing Warehouse. 

If you choose to integrate external customer-level data into Marketing Warehouse you can pull attributes like gender and income and age - and whatever else you know about your customers - into VI.  Can you imagine being able to easily drag gender or income or age into any web activity report, either as a dimension or as a filter?  Can you imagine being able to easily drill all the way down to the visitor level on any report?  Isn't this flexibility something we all want?

The VI and Score live demos at Engage were packed to capacity, even at the end of a busy conference day in a city full of recreational distractions.  Based on that observation I'd say, yes, there's considerable interest in a) WebTrends' new products, and b) visitor-level web activity data in general.

Queryable visitor-level web activity data is nothing new.  As an industry we've been doing this for years, but it's been the exception rather than the rule.  If there's any hope of bringing visitor-level detail into mainstream use, I think WebTrends has made a valiant effort with VI.  If, it turns out, it's simply too expensive and too cumbersome to ever gain traction, why on earth do we keep trying?  When are we ever going to get it right? Answer me that, vendors (when you're not busy cannibalizing each other).

Although I don't want to go too deep into the nitty-gritty details of VI, I do want to mention a few likes/dislikes:   

Like

• Available as both on-site and hosted solutions.  If you've got privacy concerns, great, get the on-site solution.  If you lack IT resources, great, get the hosted solution.
• Relational database back end, making external data integration possible.
• Simple Excel export from VI - no SmartReports.  Right on.  SmartReports aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

Dislike

• WebTrends Analytics will continue to exist in parallel with VI.  There are some reports you can only get in VI and some reports you can only get in Analytics.   Sounds confusing.
• I don't believe VI will meet complex segmentation needs, especially when it comes to path-based questions like, "Give me the visitors who did x and then later did y."
• SDC page-tagging is a requirement for VI - so VI is not an option if you use logs as your data source.

VI is a great start; I would love to see it get adopted and successfully used.  My fellow bloggers Jacques Warren and Anil Batra also attended Engage and have posted their reviews of VI.   Aaron Gray and OX2 have both mentioned involvement in VI proof-of-concept projects; I look forward to hearing more about their experiences.