This blog has moved

Dear reader,

After this blog took off as I’ve never expected , I decided to run the blog on the originial URL.

Please visit www.webanalyticsbook.com to view the newest postings and feel free to update your RSS Feed.

Thanks again for your support! Thanks to all magazines that quoted this site within the last 5 months.

WebTrends Acquires ClickShift

WebTrends Inc announced today its acquisition of ClickShift, an innovator in online advertising optimization. The acquisition brings leading edge technology and deep industry expertise to WebTrends. Rodkin and Chang, who previously founded Flyswat, subsequently acquired by NBCi, will continue to lead the team out of its current San Bruno, Calif. facility. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Interesting move of Webtrends. Clickshift recently figured out that cross-selling is an important part of PPC traffic. This means that an optimized landing page for a single product is often not the most efficient way to convert traffic. Funny thing is that Google Adwords introduced the Quality Score, which kind of requires the opposite, namely the landing page optimization for a single product. Maybe Yahoo with their new Panama rollout will do it better

WebTrends Responds to NetRatings’ Patent Infringement Litigation

WebTrends Inc responded to a lawsuit recently filed by NetRatings, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon. NetRatings, which has filed similar lawsuits against competing vendors over the past two years, filed a lawsuit against WebTrends alleging infringement of several patents owned by NetRatings. WebTrends has reviewed the claims and believes they lack merit. WebTrends intends to defend itself vigorously against the complaint.

“As the innovator and technology leader in web analytics, WebTrends is serious about its intellectual property rights,” said Greg Drew, CEO and president of WebTrends Inc. “We firmly believe these claims have no merit. In addition, as the pioneer in this industry, WebTrends has several issued U.S. patents of its own in the web analytics space. We are currently reviewing all of our legal options and will aggressively defend our position.”

 All the big 5 vendors develop more and more similar features and it was a question of time until one sues another. It will be interesting to see how this case will influence the webanalytics industry

Virgin Atlantic Airways has chosen Webtrends

The UK’s second largest long haul airline, Virgin Atlantic Airways, has chosen WebTrends to provide strategic focus to its online web and marketing initiatives in the extremely competitive travel industry.

By working closely with the team at Virgin Atlantic, WebTrends enabled multiple teams across the organization to get a consistent view of key performance indicators customized to their industry. Prior to implementing WebTrends, attributing revenue to marketing campaigns, promotions and web site content was simply not possible. In addition, the metrics that were provided were often conflicting due to multiple providers with differing analysis methodologies.

“At first we were relying on our marketing agencies to supply data on campaign performance. This presented its own problems in terms of the reliability, consistency and timeliness of the information we received,” said Patrick Odey. “After spending time discussing our needs with the WebTrends Best Practice Analyst we quickly learned how to track our own marketing campaigns across marketing partners and demand channels using consistent, accurate metrics based on the direct marketing standard — actual unique visitors. It was then possible to balance the success of all of our marketing initiatives against results and pinpoint where campaigns were losing prospects. Analyzing the response of different visitor segments to specific promotions and comparing their results to our overall averages has also helped us better understand our customers.”

WebTrends Best Practice Experts were able to leverage the extensive knowledge they have amassed working with leading travel organizations around the globe to further fine-tune the Virgin Atlantic web site, developing key performance indicators, dashboards and exclusive performance metrics scorecards to benchmark performance across initiatives. In addition, Virgin Atlantic was able to tie revenue to specific success events on the page, as well as easily segment its customer base to build promotions for its frequent flyer members and non-frequent flyers.

“Before this implementation, it was at best a guess as to how specific links were working and whether there were ways to optimize their success. Today we can view the page and see very clearly which links are getting the most clickthroughs and generating the most conversions. Equally, you don’t want pages that aren’t working just sitting there for months at a time,” continued Mr. Odey.

“Competition in the travel industry is particularly fierce, said Nick Sharp, vice president and general manager, WebTrends EMEA, said, “Over the years, WebTrends has amassed a wealth of experience and best practice expertise across leading travel organizations providing us a unique position to help organizations like Virgin Atlantic focus on the key performance indicators that matter, optimize their transaction funnel and segment their customers to better target their offers and marketing campaigns.”

Webtrends Conference 2006

Webtrends announced it’s yearly conference. The Conference 2006 will take place in Orlando, Florida from October 23rd till 25th.

Here are just a few of the things you can learn:

1. Consistent Key Performance Indicators: Identify the KPIs you need to know to manage your business
2. Integrated Marketing: Techniques and tips to consistently measure and optimize your online campaigns
3. Avoiding Traffic Jams: Discover where visitors get confused and drop out-and why
4. Relationship Marketing: Customer segmentation best practices that allow you to target your campaigns
5. Corporate Scorecarding: Data integration techniques that help you get a complete view of business performance

Registration fee is $395.

WebTrends rules the webanalytics market

WebTrends Inc today announced that in Q2 2006 the company achieved its highest quarterly results ever for WebTrends web analytics solutions with bookings growth of 30 percent year over year. Customers selecting WebTrends Analytics(TM) 8 On Demand, the hosted version of the company’s flagship solution, fueled most of the growth with year-over-year bookings increasing 78 percent. In addition, tremendous growth in international markets continues to extend WebTrends worldwide market share with WebTrends EMEA growing 108 percent year over year.

Congrats to Webtrends. Great to see that all the big 5 vendors grow tremendously.

WebTrends with new CFO

Webtrends announced the appointment of Bryan LeBlanc to vice president and chief financial officer. Reporting directly to Greg Drew, WebTrends CEO, LeBlanc is responsible for all financial, accounting, IT and operational aspects of the WebTrends business.

It seems like all the big webanalytics player are hiring and hiring and hiring.

If you are an investor and need to know more about the new CFO, keep on reading