Webtrends Jeff Seacrist Talks Next Generation of Streams, New Big Data Exploration Tool

Many organizations struggle to understand how to best leverage analytics in their digital marketing initiatives. They definitely play a key role, but the reality is digital marketing teams are just starting to utilize them appropriately. Of course there are others who have figured it out and are doing more advanced marketing based on things like predictive analytics and real-time personalization/recommendations.

Regardless of where the digital marketer is in their use of analytics, Webtrends has a platform to help them out. And today, at their annual conference Engage 2013, they are letting customers know about a couple of new solutions: Lifetime Streams and Webtrends Explore.

Lifetime Streams

Webtrends Streams have been around for a couple of years and have helped marketers move from a historical perspective of their customers and prospective customers to a real-time activity view. According to Jeff Seacrist, VP Product Strategy at Webtrends, marketers always had a decision: speed versus depth of information. Streams, he said, has changed that. The first release of Streams offered a real-time event stream, the second provided a Session Stream (giving an in-context view of what a user was doing).

The new release is called the Lifetime stream and it’s essentially “personalization in context”. Seacrist explained that it’s the history and the now, augmenting the real-time stream with key insights about the lifetime behavior of that visitor.

That’s functionality that many analytics marketers are striving to achieve. I’ve seen Adobe making big strides towards more personalized experiences through the use of its tag management platform, and maybe even more relevant, talked to Tealium about real-time audience streams mixed with existing information across various marketing platforms. But here’s what I really wanted to know – how many organizations are here? How many are ready to use these real-time tools and how are they using them?

So I asked Seacrist. He said that many are getting started by offering more timely relevant email marketing, and building out from there. So email marketing is far from going away (not that my inbox ever said anything different). He told that the number one way to get into a shopping cart is through email marketing. Shopping cart abandonment is high and email remarketing helps a lot to reduce those abandonment challenges.

From a B2B perspective, he indicated that Streams, especially the Session Stream can be integrated with contact centers and also used with Webtrends Optimize to provide a degree of personalization on the website.

He’s very excited about Lifetime Streams. It lets the marketer take advantage of history and real-time information to create an improved model from the past (which was to essentially grab data in batches and send it to email marketing apps). It’s the difference between push and pull. Currently Webtrends has named connectors for Silverpop, ExactTarget and Responsys, as well as a universal connector for other email marketing providers.

But Seacrist is quick to point out the email remarketing is only one application of Streams.

Let’s Explore Big Data

Because everyone is talking about big data analytics. The Webtrends Explore solution provides unlimited big data exploration in the cloud. Create segments, filter results on the fly or create unlimited nesting dimensions. It leverages all Webtrends data – there are no limits on the things you can collect. Explore allows a marketer to do exploration and segmentation on both real-time and historical data. Unlike the predefined reports available in Webtrends, there are no boundaries to what you can do.

Seacrist told me that he recently attended an event where they discussed the role of big data and how it related to the analytics market. The majority of organizations at the event didn’t even have the use cases defined, many were simply focused on the technical aspects.

For Webtrends, their application leverages a cloud-based infrastructure, removing the need for IT to set everything up, and thus allowing the marketer to focus on using the data. Explore enables marketers to tap into the long-tail or obscure segments that would otherwise be missed.

It’s not a tool for everyone though. It’s aimed at the pivot-table aware marketer and above.

Having More Data Isn’t the Answer

We are in the age of data as Seacrist clearly points out. But it’s early days and having more and more data doesn’t solve problems. He said that vendors like Webtrends need to help clients improve the action-ability of that data.

For Webtrends that has meant an open approach to data (through open standards and Web APIs that connect to other platforms). Seacrist says that some vendors will try to own the space and offer everything, while others will take a Best of Breed approach (which is what Webtrends has opted for with its Action Center, an integration Hub with partners ).

I think many organizations have a long way to go before they can actionably handle a tool like Webtrends Explore. But the value a tool like Streams can offer should be something many can get started with quickly.

Most marketers need to take some time to really figure out the role analytics needs to play in digital marketing initiatives – and it’s a big role. But that doesn’t mean you can’t play with these tools to see what they can do. Do some testing, run some pilot projects, get a good understanding of the value they can provide, so that when you are ready to go that level of insight and action, you aren’t starting from scratch. That’s a good investment of time and training for the digital marketing team.

Both Webtrends Lifetime Streams and Webtrends Explore won’t be available until the beginning of 2014. Here’s a question for you? Are you ready for tools like Explore and Streams? How would you leverage them in your marketing initiatives?

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