Analytics Expert

WOW! what an eventful summer – I was so focused on our product releases of Summer ‘09 (Analytics 9!) and the upcoming Fall ‘09 that I neglected this space. I can’t argue with this priority given the results. And, from the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers, soon to be customers and partners it appears we are onto something here. These releases are the result of much hard work from the amazing and talented team I have the honor to work with at Webtrends. They clearly demonstrate our commitment to innovation, architectural integrity and our customers.

For today’s discussion I want to focus on our customers and how their needs reshaped the Engineering organization at Webtrends. Many of the innovations we have pushed out have direct customer feedback at the core of the effort. We have strived to “bring the customer directly into Engineering” so that we are designing our solutions with direct feedback from those who will leverage them. A fallacy around technical teams is that they wish to be shielded from the market – this is of course complete nonsense with the reality that engineers crave real world examples and the more we can bring our customers into the process of developing our solutions the more value our solutions will deliver to our customers.

But this simple goal – customer centricity – it is not simple in execution. Much has been written on the challenge with a seminal work being the Innovators Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. We must balance our customer’s immediate needs with their declared and anticipated future needs. And the speed of change is only increasing thus the speed of our change in our customer’s business is increase. We need to be able to receive feedback and adjust to it at an ever increasing frequency. Listening to our customers is critical, but even more critical is responding to our customers in a timeframe that is relevant to them.

As I looked at this challenge eighteen months ago I realized that for us to respond to our customer’s feedback in a timely manner we needed to change a number of core business processes at Webtrends. Prior to focusing on implementing customer feedback mechanisms and processes (which we have now built directly into our products), we focused our ability to respond to the feedback.

Let me explain – looking at it from the customer’s perspective: how do I influence a 12-15 month development cycle? I will have to time my input for the first few months of the vendor’s development effort and then I hope that my requirements remain consistent for the next 9-12 months. Not a very likely scenario with today’s pace of evolutionary and revolutionary change. Once viewed from the customer standpoint it is pretty clear that we needed to change the way we developed our products before we could truly increase our customer intimacy and centricity.

In waterfall, work is done in phases and comes together in the end. In agile, work is also done in phases, but work is released at each stage.

Starting in summer of 2008 we set out to transform the Webtrends Engineering organization to a truly agile organization. This was not an easy process – nor was it painless for our customers. But it was critical for Webtrends and we are now seeing the benefits of this transformation. By releasing every 3-4 months we have dramatically shortened the timeframe between feedback and delivery. We now respond to our customers needs in a timeframe that is still highly relevant to their business. Looking again from the customer’s perspective, I don’t think I would choose a vendor who isn’t as agile as my business…

What would the Sistine Chapel look like if it was evolved, real-time, with patron's feedback?

For Webtrends, it has indeed been a busy summer. As we enter these last few days of August, a period when all the excitement and activity that has occurred over the past few months could take a waning toll on enthusiasm, Webtrends is not winding down and simply reflecting on the launch of Analytics 9 as the “release that was.” Having fully embraced the agile development model, we continue to focus our energy on collecting feedback from our customers and innovating with our products ahead of the next release.

Phil Kemelor recently posted his thoughts on Analytics 9, appropriately titled “Webtrends: A Busy Summer for Analytics.” It was a nicely written and balanced piece. Phil’s post made note that he was waiting for more from Analytics 9 and Webtrends. As we’ve done over the last year, we are happy to take the ball from him here and continue to drive forward.

With Analytics 9, the foundation has been laid on a canvas from which we’ll continue to paint. This phased approach to our product is a conscience decision and I want to reinforce that. It’s been great to see the positive feedback from folks within the industry and our customers. It’s motivating to have encouragement to introduce more powerful, more elegant, and more open products. We have heard you, we are listening now, and we will continue to deliver.

Last April, during our annual customer event, Webtrends Engage, we broadcasted the view we all had of Webtrends, within Webtrends, to the industry. More importantly we made a promise to change the way people and organizations view and make sense of their data. As the first web analytics company, it makes sense for us to take on this initiative, and since those few days with our valued customers and partners in Las Vegas back in early spring, Webtrends has announced the availability of Webtrends Social Measurement, provided a benchmark for measuring the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign, introduced The Open Campaign, acquired a leading multivariate testing and site optimization company – Widemile, and yes, released Analytics 9.

As we roll into the fall coming off one of the busiest and most exciting periods we’ve experienced as a company, we’re looking forward to delivering more on our promise.

It’s not often when you have the opportunity to be a part of something professionally sound and personally inspirational. There is something special happening at Webtrends right now that brings business and personal together.

It’s the culture here, the focus on the customer, the innovation, the risk taking. Since joining in November of last year our Marketing team has embraced iterative marketing as a concept and a practice. It hasn’t been easy but the fruits of everyones labor is coming into the spotlight right now.

Today we releaunched www.webtrends.com.

The web is a keystone for modern marketing. As a B2B marketer your websites and blogs are sales tools, information repositories, entertainment guides. With the relaunch of webtrends.com we haven’t created a glossy front end (we are very proud of our UI though!) but introduce a foundation that allows for:

1) data collection – we should always know what our customers are doing on our website
2) experimentation – never be afraid to try anything, always be ready to learn
3) community building – interact via all tools avaliable (twitter, blogs, forums, etc.)
4) contact – make it easy to help your customer and prospects get ahold of you

With all that new, there is one thing that hasn’t changed at Webtrends. We build the most powerful, elegant, and open products in the industry. Come in, we are open.

I wish that someone reminded me of that before I headed to the UK this past week to meet with the Webtrends EMEA team. In the United Kingdom, when you step into the street with only having checked to your right for oncoming traffic, there’s a good chance you’ll have an eye-opening experience. My pedestrian escapades aside, I was actually exposed to another eye-opening experience when I got to see first hand the impressive level of coordination our European teams have achieved in coordinating successful web analytics programs for our customers across so many different boarders.

Webtrends is a global software company, but we execute locally. Whether you’re tracking page views from visitors in Portland searching for Kettle chips or mentions of Barclays from Twitter users located in London, we’re constantly striving to initiate business processes and build technologies that allow for our customers and our business to operate most efficiently where they are – regardless of geographic location.

At the core of Webtrends’ mission, customer success, is our people’s ability to connect with our customers. What I found, and believe unique to our global operations, is that we have an incredibly seasoned team with tenure that dates back nearly a decade. As such, our customer relationships are deep and often blur the line to personal. It’s safe to say, the importance of good customer relationships transcends borders.

The web analytics market in the UK and Europe is still in growth mode. That said, some of the most advanced customers of analytics tools operate out of the UK and Europe. From the work I’ve seen Webtrends involved in across several of our customers in EMEA, analytics is definitely at the core of many successful enterprises.

The duality of the market is exciting. Advanced enterprises in key verticals provide a great foundation to model success from and in turn help the market grow. There is still room for growth that could help these organizations get the most of their analytics investments. In particular, the implementation of a maturity model in an organization using analytics, or one considering analytics, has the potential to greatly advance the cause for analytics regardless your geography.

If you take just one thing away from this post, it would be that when thinking about web analytics and its growth throughout Europe, it’s important to keep your eyes open. Good thing to keep in mind when you’re crossing the street in the UK too…and be sure to look left…too.

One year ago today, I stepped into the role of Webtrends CEO and president with one primary goal: To reassert this company’s focus on the success of our customers. Twelve extremely busy months later, I’m writing to you to recap how we’ve delivered on this promise.

Some might point to the record profits we’ve recorded in recent quarters, despite the challenging economy, as the clearest indication that customers are realizing the value of Webtrends products and services. But I’m equally proud of our showing in The Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q3 2009 report, in which we received the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any vendor.

These outcomes can be directly tied the investments we’ve made in our core technology, along with new capabilities we’ve added to help you address changes in online marketing. Here’s a recap of some of these investments:

Extending our mission. The demands of digital marketing extend far beyond your web site. For this reason, we have broadened the focus of our company beyond web site analytics to helping you acquire customer intelligence (Forester’s Introduction to CI) that spans your online and offline investments. In April, we introduced Webtrends Social Measurement to help you track and participate on the blogs, video channels and the other online social media conversations that are increasingly shaping perceptions about your products and brands. Earlier this month, we announced the acquisition of what we consider to be the strongest testing and site optimization service available today. The rebranded service, Webtrends Optimize, will be available in the coming weeks.

Reasserting power. As we’ve expanded our mission, we’ve remained committed to Webtrends’ core differentiators – most notably, the power of our technology. Analytics 9, the newest version of our web analytics product, is built on Webtrends On Demand, a software as a service (SaaS) platform that can scale to meet virtually any spike in site activity without reporting delays or losing data.

Introducing elegance. With the release of Analytics 9 earlier this month, we’ve also turned what many considered to be Webtrends’ Achilles heel into one of our greatest strengths. The new Insight interface raises the bar on user experience for all analytics products. No longer do you have to click around to find what you’re after. It’s all there right in front of you. Click on any metric, the underlying data pops up. We assembled a very talented team of UX designers to create this highly intuitive way of interacting with your data. Look for more improvements in user experience throughout our products in the coming years.

Expanding openness. While others continue to maintain walls around your data (charging fees for you to access it and limiting your choice of outside service providers), we have extended our leadership in the area of openness. Earlier this year, we introduced a self-service access API that lets you get your data out of Webtrends and into other marketing programs and applications for easy integration and analysis. An industry first, we are not charging you to get access to your data via these APIs. You don’t pay a penny to access your data, which is the way it should be. Earlier this month, we introduced a similar collection API, which lets you send data from mobile applications, devices and other standards-based sources to Webtrends’ hosted collection service for processing and analysis alongside your web data.

Helping you assess your marketing maturity. For years, analytics and customer intelligence companies (us included) have developed increasingly sophisticated measurement and analysis tools without providing a roadmap for how or when to add these tools to your analytics arsenal. Webtrends’ new Digital Marketing Optimization team filled this void earlier this year with the release of the first vendor-agnostic framework for assessing measurement skills, staffing and best practices across all of your digital marketing channels. Check out the Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3). You can complete the assessment online and receive your scores for free.

There’s more I could share, like the terrific new campaign we recently launched that pulls back the covers and shows you how Webtrends and its partners work together to take on the toughest marketing challenges. But I think you get the picture: Webtrends is primed to help you achieve true enterprise-wide understanding of your customers like never before.

Alex Yoder,
President and CEO

Just two weeks from now, August 18 to be exact, it will have been a year since I took the helm of Webtrends. I have to admit that there have been some changes in me personally over that period of time. I now have much larger bags under my eyes and I no longer giggle when my assistant answers the phone, “Alex Yoder’s office”. I ask myself, “What of substance has changed over the last year and is it all worth it?” I gotta say that the answer is unequivocally “YES”!

Think of August 2008. Webtrends just started on its fourth CEO in less than a year. In the two years prior, the company had gone through two CFO’s, three VP’s of Sales, three VP’s of Development, three CMO’s and the employee churn was almost 18% in one quarter. Ironically, burnt orange probably represented the mood of the place more than the brand. Webtrends, the onetime patriarch of the web analytics industry had been dwarfed by a blitzkrieg of colorful pie charts, marketing extravagance and empty promises.

What does one do when stepping into such auspicious and daunting circumstances? I hate to say it, but it ain’t rocket science—you go back to what got you there. For me, that’s the fundamental principles of honesty, integrity, clear and open communication and just hard work. It’s putting your customer out ahead of every other priority and making sure that the entire business is aligned behind that focus. It’s telling your customers bluntly that the software industry and web analytics itself is mature enough that they should expect more. They should expect solid, clean products. They should expect uptime, not downtime. They should expect great service and support backed by a sincere desire to help them get better.

It’s helping everyone understand that they have had a good day if they can answer yes to the question “Did I make this a better place for my peers to work and for my customers to do business?” Yes, yes, yes! It’s being willing to put yourself out there in front of and make commitments that you are going to keep.
We heard it! We hired a world-class user experience team that would fully integrate all aspects of the user experience and fundamentally change that approach. We hired experienced, trusted, diverse and talented executives and then I made a commitment to them—I will only consider myself successful in this position if we have the same people sitting at this table in two years. Suddenly, a lot of the very talented people who had left the organization started coming back—more energized than ever.

We focused on our strengths and where the industry is going, the demands that are being made on our current products and the customers that we have been the most successful retaining. We found that we have long been the most powerful solution in the space and have done nothing to help promote that notion. We felt strongly that true openness (technology, culture, values, community) is critical to the future of a successful technology company—the willingness to truly collaborate with our customers and community. We opened our doors to countless local interest groups and causes. We relaunched our brand and focused behind the pillars that we knew were important: Power, Elegance, Openness. Since we are the only truly hosted software solution in our space, we have long been known for our power. The flexibility and depth of insight that inherently comes with a hosted software solution has allowed us to attract and retain customers with the most sophisticated needs and who are typically on the higher-end of the marketing maturity lifecycle.

Our space has long been mired in the confusion of what to do with all of the data and how to leverage it to truly impact their digital businesses. While others focused on lollipop reporting, we hired experts from the agency world and volunteered their expertise to develop a vendor agnostic framework to help guide a broader understanding of what marketing maturity really looks like.

In April 2009 I stood in front of our customers, the press, analysts and our board and committed that we would deliver on our new user experience vision by the end of June 2009. At that same event, we were running paper prototyping with our customer base—none of the code had yet been written! I sat down with Jim Sterne immediately after my opening remarks and he said, “Alex, you realize that you just made a commitment that you now must deliver on? No one in technology does that”. I said, “Yep, and the entire organization is committed and standing behind that promise”.

Well, it’s been almost a year. We hired almost an entirely new executive team (all of which are still here), have the strongest sales organization in the nine years I’ve been around Webtrends, relaunched the brand, were the first to bring social measurement and web analytics together, have the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the Forrester Wave, have delivered on Openness via standards-based architecture as well as both inbound APIS and outbound API’s that are free to use, delivered the industry’s only visitor-centric data model in a hosted AND on premises solutions, were approved for the industry’s only first party cookie patent and THE patent to collect commerce data from a web page, released the new UX on time and in the process started to the whole new Webtrends revolution. Oh, I forgot, industry’s best MVT, site optimization and targeting platform to perfectly compliment our leading-edge ad director search optimization platform to the portfolio and we have nearly 7,500 customers that we’re excited to help take their web presence to the next level.

Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY!!!!

Welcome to the new Webtrends. Welcome to the revolution.