It made more sense for Avinash Kaushik to come up with the Top 10 Web Analytics Blogs, last year, when he was establishing his own; but this time it created more controversy than anything else - and a couple of good laughs.
"..WebTrends Score lets companies create their own scoring system for measuring the value of activities on their websites. For example, making a purchase can be worth 10 points, viewing a video 5, or requesting more information 3. These scores can be applied retroactively and allow companies to create their own metrics to decide the effectiveness of a campaign. There is no metric for measuring time spent on a page, but you can track individuals activities over a day, week, or month.
WebTrends Visitor Intelligence is a tool for correlating the relationship of different events within a visitor experience, such as tracking people who put products in shopping carts but didn't buy and compare their activities across a variety of other variables including offline transactions, frequency of purchasing, etc. This kind of cross tabulation lets you get inside the numbers to see opportunities and weaknesses in your marketing strategy and website design. It lets you find out what people with undesired behaviors have in common, and what separates them from your best customers, valuable information indeed. WebTrends developed a new UI for this application including the ability to annotate reports, and has standardized on it for the entire product suite. "
The first module seems pretty straightforward, but surprisingly, no analytics vendor that I know of, till now, actually did it. I'd have wanted as much when I was working on Engagement Metrics on IBM's Home Page, last year.
The second module, Visitor Intelligence, is a bit more complicated and I've not seen it (and have not worked with a really high end version of WebTrends yet).
"..The industry has debated the most effective ways to measure visitor engagement, whether page-based or time-based, but visitor engagement is not something you can measure using only a stopwatch," noted industry guru and consultant Eric Peterson, CEO, Web Analytics Demystified, Inc. "WebTrends Score offers a unique method to explore visitor engagement using criteria that makes sense to individual site owners, a reflection that 'engagement' means different things to different sites and that the components of engagement change from site to site and from campaign to campaign."
WebTrends Score is a patented technology solution that evaluates visitors' online behavior by quantifiable measuring the level of engagement or interest they have in content, products and services. By establishing rules that assign values to specific visit and visitor activities, marketers can go beyond conversion to evaluate the success of their efforts using realized and potential customer value. Score values can then be applied to consumer targeting activities, such as email, site personalization, offline direct marketing, as well as to campaign enhancement such as automated paid search optimization. This allows marketers to effectively target consumers and improve campaign performance.
After reviewing WebTrends Score, Jim Sterne, founding president of Web Analytics Association and director of eMetrics Summit said, "Not only is this right on the money, this is the money."
"…The FCC took real but incomplete progress this afternoon,” said Rick Whitt, Google’s lead policy exec, in a conference call Tuesday afternoon, lauding the openness conditions but lamenting the omission of rules enforcing wholesale access to the spectrum. When asked if Google would still bid on the spectrum, Whitt said Google “didn’t say it wouldn’t,” meaning that Google will make that decision at a later date.
"..the 700 MHz auction rulemaking is finally in, and as expected the commission adopted some of the open-networking proposals championed by Google, but not all. While Google carefully lauds the FCC for its action in a post on the company’s public policy blog, both Google and other observers (like the analysts at Stifel, Nicolaus) are guessing that the fine print in the rules (they will likely be published in a couple weeks) will make it extremely hard for any new national provider to surface. Official releases now are on the No info yet on theFCC site; the rules passed on a 4-1 vote, with commissioner Robert McDowell, the new friend of the incumbent telcos, as the only commish against Martin’s plan. "
