WebTrends to Launch Data Warehouse Product

Web analytics provider WebTrends is expected to launch a new product family today that aims to make Web analytics data more useful in on- and offline marketing campaigns.

WebTrends Marketing Lab will include an upgraded version of its Web analytics product, WebTrends Analytics 8, as well as a new marketing data warehouse product. The aim is to let users dig deeper into visitor-level data, and tie it in with both on- and offline customer actions.

“We’re expanding and maturing this category beyond the ‘rear-view mirror’ most Web analytics companies have today,” Brent Hieggelke, WebTrends VP of corporate marketing, told ClickZ News. “We’re taking advantage of the Web analytics foundation to improve marketing performance.”

WebTrends Analytics 8 will add goal-driven dashboards, powered by business intelligence provider Business Objects’ Crystal Xcelsius visual analytics products. The dashboards monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), and also allow marketers to manipulate data to create and evaluate multiple “what-if” scenarios to identify which metric to focus on to reach a given goal. Its focus will be on tracking top-line performance and digging into operational analysis based on aggregate data, Hieggelke said.

The data warehouse product will analyze, organize and display specific, high-level data at the individual user level to let marketers design marketing messages for specific segments of customers. For example, a marketer could create a custom campaign targeting users who visited certain pages on a Web site, spent a certain amount of time there, and then abandoned a shopping cart, sign-up form, or other conversion event.

Those users could be reached with a special offer created to overcome the segment’s specific objections exhibited by their on-site behavior, which could be sent via online or offline methods, such as an email campaign, outbound calling campaign, or direct mail campaign. According to a recent JupiterResearch survey, emails targeted in this manner, based on Web site clickstream data, generate three to nine times the revenue as broadcast emails.

By combining Web site behavior and predictive attributes such as recency, frequency and lifetime value to nail down user “intent,” Hieggelke said, marketers can create campaigns tailored to the needs, motivations and objections of each segment.

“We’ve spent, as an industry, a whole lot of time talking about conversion rate, but that only accounts for 5 percent of users. The remaining 95 percent has been an anonymous group of visitors. Marketers need to begin to segment that 95 percent,” he said.

WebTrends Analytics 8 and WebTrends Marketing Warehouse are both available as software or as hosted on-demand services. Software will be available on March 20, and Web versions are expected April. Pricing for WebTrends Analytics 8 software starts at $2,799, and the Web version starts at $158/month. Pricing for WebTrends Marketing Warehouse starts at $1,000 per month.