Webtrends Explore Let’s Marketers Dive Deep into Their Customer Data

It’s been a little over a year since Webtrends announced Webtrends Explore, its big data exploration product. Now, after rolling it out to its over 750 on-demand clients, working on improvements (including usability), Explore is generally available to the world.

Webtrends Explore is part of the Analytics On-demand offering, there’s no extra cost. It’s a complement to the existing analytics tools, not a replacement. Really it’s meant to provide marketers and data analysts a dive deeper into their customer data to find key insights and make better decisions.

Steve Earl, Senior Director of Product Marketing, explained that Explore is designed to solve three key challenges for marketers:

1. Marketers are swamped with data (the volume, velocity and variety challenges).
2. Marketers must grow their skillsets to include analytics if they are going to make use of the data.
3. And, they need new tools and strategies to manage all this data and actually do something with it/drive actions from it.

Dive Deeper into Your Data with Explore

So how do these challenges apply to what Explore brings to the table?

Explore is not about pre-built reports, it’s ad-hoc exploration of first-party data (the customer’s own data from its systems). It’s designed to be usable by both marketers and advanced data analysts, and the tools are meant to help them get an even better picture of customer behaviors. With this information, marketers can optimize their channels and experiences in a way that best improves the customer experience.

Explore, Earl told me, enables unlimited exploration of your data. Segment on the fly, drill down to the lowest level possible – whatever you need to do to find the information you need. You can set up reusable segments, measures and other analytics, but you don’t have to. It really depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Max Spector, Webtrends Product Marketing Manager, ran me through a quick demo of Explore and it does appear to be very user-friendly. It was easy to set up segments, create and modify ad-hoc reports. I could see the value of this tool.

And here’s the thing, marketers need to understand the data to improve customer experiences. There are lots of examples of how data can improve content marketing, campaigns, mobile experiences, that’s why the “new” marketing is called “data-driven marketing”. It’s about making changes based on real information, not just best guesses and hallway conversations. This is the best way to improve marketing’s impact on customer experience.

Of course, this type of tool isn’t simply for marketing, it’s for sales, customer service/support – it’s applicable across the customer lifecycle. Data can tell us so much, we just have to get access to it in a way that isn’t complicated and doesn’t require a genius analyst. That’s what tools like Explore can do.

Marketing is changing dramatically. In a recent whitepaper from Foundation Capital, Ashu Garg said that spend on marketing technology will grow ten times in the next ten years. Analytics will be a key technology during this period as marketers work to improve experiences and get a handle on the ROI of their spend. Webtrends has been around for a long time and the company has been smart enough to adapt its solution to meet the changing needs of marketers and others. What we need to see now, is marketers adapting/growing their own skills to take advantage of what this technology offers.

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