Recently I connected with WebTrends' Director of Product Marketing Matt Langie in order to get some more insight on version 2 of their Marketing Lab product. In the latest version, WebTrends introduced two new additions, WebTrends Score and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence. WebTrends Score allows you to assign a score to different visitor interactions on your site and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence takes the 'engagement score' (as well as visitor behavior) and allows you to deliver customized website experiences to your visitors. Here's how it went....

How long has your development team been working on WebTrends Lab 2?

For the past 18 months, we’ve focused on building out WebTrends Marketing Lab 2, including two new solutions, WebTrends Score and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence, and a number of other enhancements. However, the genesis of these products can be traced back much farther. In 1999, we were a bit ahead of the market as we applied for a patent on scoring web visitor behavior which was granted in 2005. The latest generation of WebTrends Marketing Lab 2 (ML2) now offers marketers a flexible method to evaluate web sites and marketing campaigns based on the visitor engagement they drive, in addition to leveraging visitor’s affinity scores for targeting purposes.

Similarly, with WebTrends Visitor Intelligence, we’ve always believed marketers’ analysis efforts should not hampered by the limitations of their solution. In WebTrends Analytics, marketers can create new metrics and combine dimensions that aren’t already pre-built in our solution. With WebTrends Visitor Intelligence we’ve greatly expanded on this flexibility as well as our analytical sophistication. Marketers and business analysts now have a full-featured, multi-dimensional analysis and reporting solution to perform real-time visitor segmentation and targeting based on cross-channel, customer-centric insight.

What encouraged your team to develop the additions of WebTrends Score and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence?

Placing the consumer at the center of marketing is what WebTrends Marketing Lab 2 is all about—especially our unique visitor targeting solutions with WebTrends Score and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence. More and more marketing dollars are flowing online from all types of businesses, not just those that conduct online transactions, but from major brand marketers and B2B lead generation sites. In order to gauge the return these investments drive and optimize results, marketers need metrics that go beyond page views, visits, revenue, and time on site. They need results information based on factors that matter to their business objectives, which often requites incorporating information from multiple channels.

In addition, we’re witnessing a global revolution in marketing. Consumers are clearly in control, not just due to the choice the Web offers, but due to the fact they themselves are leading discussions of brand with their peers with the spread of social media and Web 2.0 technologies. At the same time, they are bombarded by more than 3,000 largely irrelevant marketing messages every day. We as marketers have a responsibility to ensure that we’re listening and responding to our customers needs in a way that is personally relevant and engaging, in order to nurture those relationships over time.

Is Marketing Lab 2 targeted to a specific target customer base or for all WebTrends users?

The solutions that make up WebTrends Marketing Lab 2 include WebTrends Analytics, our flagship analytics solution; WebTrends Dynamic Search for automated optimization of paid search campaigns; WebTrends Visitor Intelligence for multi-dimensional, cross-channel analysis and real-time visitor segmentation; and WebTrends Score, which is the industry’s only patented solution for measuring engagement-- revealing the true value, interests and engagement of visitors.

Clearly, any business that hopes to have a significant, profitable online channel needs ML2. There are certain industry verticals that we expect to gravitate towards some of the more advanced solutions based on the need for deeper visitor and marketing intelligence. Some of these include retail, travel, financial services and consumer packaged good firms. The marketers that most clearly understand the tremendous value of the new solutions we’re introducing in ML2 tend to come from a direct marketing discipline, though we fully expect this type of expertise to become a core requirement for any marketer.

What factors make up the WebTrends Score for a given website?

The power of WebTrends Score is that it allows marketers to custom assign values to visitors’ actions, measuring their engagement with content, products or services, in ways that make sense to that organization’s business and marketing objectives. A travel website may be most interested in scoring pageviews on Carribean destinations, an automotive brand website may want to score site activity on minivan safety or sports car performance pages, or a media site may want to measure engagement of visitors viewing online video or other Web 2.0 content.

Furthermore, this media site may want to place a higher score multiplier on registrations for its newsletter or RSS feeds during a visit, versus the number of pages or content groups viewed, as those actions send a stronger signal about the value of those visitors. Or perhaps this site is building its community-oriented features and wants to place the highest value on those visitors contributing to the peer-to-peer dialogue.

What's the biggest benefits users can get from WebTrends Visitor Intelligence?

Marketing and business analysts now have the ability to combine an unlimited number of online and offline dimensions to drive deep comprehensive analysis, in addition to segmenting visitors on the fly and generating lists of visitors to fuel targeted marketing efforts. Another core value of WebTrends Visitor Intelligence is providing an unparalleled level of flexibility and collaboration tools to share deep marketing intelligence across the organization, deriving answers to questions that previously could not be answered, and leveraging the full capabilities of our open, enterprise-class relational database based on Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

What is the pricing model for WebTrends Marketing Lab 2 - for new and existing users?

The pricing model for ML2 is based on a usage model which closely matches the business value derived by our customers. We are not publicly disclosing specific pricing at this time.

What kind of competitive advantage does WebTrends Marketing Lab 2 give WebTrends over some of its main competitors?

We now have leading capabilities to go beyond what people think of as web analytics, including patented scoring functionality that speaks to core functionality needed by the market. The flexibility offered by both of our new solutions will enable those marketers just beginning to evaluate marketing performance the ability to gauge results in their terms based on their business objectives. Business analysts and the influential community of web analytics professionals will truly appreciate the power of these solutions and, as a result, derive greater value for their organizations and clients. In addition, as a solution suite, WebTrends Marketing Lab 2 offers comprehensive capabilities for all of the core marketing intelligence needs of today’s most demanding organizations; from comprehensive performance metrics for all roles involved in online marketing, to solutions that automate the optimization of resource-intensive tasks such as paid search marketing, to solutions that enable them to attain deeper marketing intelligence to grow visitor engagement, loyalty and profitability. One additional advantage is our use of a single data collection tag to simplify implementation and ongoing tag maintenance and customization.