Webtrends: 20 Years in Business and Focused on the Customer

by Barb Mosher Zinck | January 30, 2014 11:20 am

This month, Webtrends celebrates 20 years in business. That’s pretty good considering the changes that have happened in the analytics industry over that time period. It can’t be easy to stay relevant and continue to evolve a platform in this market. We took some time to talk with Bruce Kenny, EVP Product and Engineering at Webtrends about its own evolution and the future of the analytics market.

4 Generations of Analytics

Kenny walked us through the four significant generations of digital analytics, providing a great view of just how much things have changed.

The Early Days

This was when it all started, when Webtrends started. It was the birth of the webmaster and site analytics. Analytics came as box software and basically it analyzed traffic from web server log files – “is the site up? How many hits did I get?”

2nd Generation

The industry was coming out the dotcom boom bust, and the digital presence of a company become much more important. This is when marketing entered the game, and software as a service arrived. During this period web analytics really took hold and the competition got heated.  It was also during this time that we saw the rise of the web analyst/digital marketer .

3rd generation

During the third generation between 2007-2013/14, Kenny said it was more about multi-channel and digital intelligence. This is where the explosion of channels (mobile, social) appeared and a companies’ digital presence was core to the business strategy. Marketers were becoming more data aware, and the complexity and the challenges increased, as did the opportunities.

In many ways, many organizations are still here, and as Kenny point’s out, all the needs of each generation still exist. It’s more about growing the complexity and the opportunity.

4th Generation

This is the generation that Webtrends is excited about – customer experience optimization. Kenny said we are coming back to it being about the customer – in the moment is critical, in-context. And finally he says, after years of the industry being rear-view mirror focused, looking at what’s happened to inform the past, marketers can now take action that’s in context and in the moment. Predictive analytics play a big role in this generation.

How Much Has Webtrends Technology Changed Over Its Lifetime?

Twenty years is a long time for a technology to exist. How much has the Webtrends platform changed over the years? Kenny says it’s a lot of evolution as customers needs and maturity increased. They added a lot of capabilities. But as each generation occurred, typically a new – leap-frog technology was required to move the platform forward. Kenny cites Webtrends Streams as a perfect recent example. He said that real-time analytics had been around for a while, but it wasn’t action-oriented. They had to rethink how customers could take action on their data.

What About the Company Mindset Overall?

Kenny said that like most challenges, there was more than just technology to deal with. Over the years Webtrends has been through a several corporate makeups, ending with Webtrends as a public company. It was later acquired by NetIQ (out of the boom bust). Unfortunately, that company was very IT-centric but the market had shifted to the marketer. It was a challenge for Webtrends and this, Kenny acknowledges, is where Omniture’s dominance was seen because Webtrends was still focused on only a section of the market.

In 2005, Webtrends was purchased by an equity company, Fransisco Partners. This is when Webtrends started doing a lot more innovation. They were able to chart their own course, and now feel they are ideally situated for success.

Integration is Key to Webtrends Success

A core component of the fourth generation of analytics is integration and Kenny says that a single vendor can no longer solve all of a customer’s problems. This is why they are working with a number of other marketing automation solutions. Their desire, willingness to integrate and partner is a core asset of Webtrends.

Webtrends is really one of the last standalone analytics vendors. Omniture was acquired by Adobe, and many content management vendors have either acquired analytics technology and integrated it into their platform, or they have built their own (think Sitecore here). We wondered if Webtrends saw this ‘platform’ approach as a concern. Kenny said they see it as an opportunity rather than a challenge. He noted that Forrester and Gartner both point to the 7 year industry tech cycle, saying that we are coming out the suite (one size fits all) phase.

Webtrends’ decision to be a specialist – the best at optimization and measurement – is proving to be a great strategy, Kenny said. Everyone that isn’t Adobe is working with Webtrends. They are seeing a lot of challenges with the large marketing clouds, and this is an opportunity for them.

Openness has been a core tenant for Webtrends. Openness means they are open to work with any data out there (social, mobile, etc.), but also that they can integrated with solutions on a number of fronts. For example, the integration done for Streams-enabled email re-marketing. Webtrends integration’s with ExactTarget, Silverpop and Responsys are unique where Webtrends owns the integration and is pushing data into the partner platform.

What Will 2014 Bring?

Kenny said Webtrends saw this 4th generation coming and they will continue to build out the offering they introduced in 2013 – the lifetime journey is the drive, the in-context of now (the session) and the lifetime of their journey (customer history). With that knowledge, Kenny says you’ll see science become critical and we should hear more in 2014 about how Webtrends is using predictive analytics to understand and take action, looking into the future to support the customer journey.

Kenny says you always want to make things straightforward and consumable for marketers. But for the data-aware marketer, which is the norm today, they are working with data and they get it. Webtrends sees the appetite for sophistication and capability as insatiable, and they will focus on enabling these marketers in different ways.

The big theme for Webtrends is focusing on the customer – it is the theme for many organizations this year. There’s a lot of insight driving that. It’s not longer about a single channel, but how the customer is engaging across all touch points. Kenny says it’s the return of the marketer focusing on the customer, not on the channel. He believes Webtrends is well positioned to lead this next generation.

Today every company, every opp, every campaign – there is a level of “everyone is learning.” Like most vendors, Webtrends has customers at each stage of digital marketing journey and they understand that. Kenny points out the cycle of  “expert to novice, novice to expert”, where a marketer might master a certain technology, then something new comes along and they are learning all over again. But he points out that for many, their intellectual agility allows them to learn quickly.

Marketers do have a lot of opportunity to leverage digital analytics to truly support the lifecycle of each customer journey. Some are more prepared for that than others and it will be fun to watch and see how different companies learn and grow their marketing practices.

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