Version 8.5 Analytics software released
Applies to: Software
In case you didn’t know, WebTrends 8.5 Analytics software is going to be released any minute now. If you’ve missed the hype, here are the main reasons to consider upgrading:
1) An updated GeoTrends database, hurrah! This GeoTrends news is absent from the general WT announcements about 8.5 but we Outsiders think it’s worth top billing. We hope to see fixes for the problems of Chantilly Virginia (source of all AOL hits) and the Marina Del Rey California (source of many hits that really start in Asia), but we’re not holding our breaths. Even without those fixes, we WANT it. It is not compatible with previous versions and must be used with 8.5. More later.
2) Calculated Measures. For measures that are already in a report, you can easily create new columns consisting of math manipulations of the other measures in the table. For example, you can divide Views by Visits to get a Views Per Visit calculated measure in a Pages report, or a Pages Viewed Per Content Group calculated measure in a Content Groups report. You can also easily move columns around. Slickly done and useful. (But even with this we still can’t figure out a way to make Exit Ratios, boo)
The calculated measures can be created two ways:
- built in to the definition of a custom report
- created on the fly whenever you have an existing report open. And, once you’ve created on-the-fly measures, you can save them in a bookmarked version of the report. This last is a stroke of genius on somebody’s part at WT.
Note: at this time Dynamic Unique Visitors is the only existing measure that cannot be part of a Calculated Measure.
3) Much more efficient User rights administration, consisting of two big changes.
- When you edit a User’s rights you can quickly select which Profiles and Templates they have access to, by going through lists of profiles and templates right there in the user Edit function. No more tedious opening of individual Profiles and Templates in order to give a new user access!
- You can create “Roles” consisting of collections of privileges and rights, then assign these to individual Users. No more lengthy re-creation of combinations of privileges for every new user. (But, if you were on top of things, you would have already created something like Roles using dummy User accounts, copying them when you add a new person. You did do this, didn’t you?)
4) For SDC (and for server logs for clever people), a set of new WT.* parameters, dimensions, and out of the box custom reports designed to deal with Web 2.0 information:
- RSS feeds
- media clips
- RIA button events such as “play” or “zoom”
- consumer generated content events such as posts and comments.
There’s no magic in these and it’s usually up to you to program all these events to get the events into SDC. But at least they’re in the WT.* lexicon with some structure around them. Watch for a WT-sponsored Lunch-and-Learn next month that will hopefully give more information on how to do that programming.
Oh, by the way. We’ve heard indirectly that some RIA players are working with WT to automatically send some of these parameters. This is the kind of partnering we need more of!
5) Much better support for Japanese and Simplified Chinese
6 comments
Hallelujah! Calculated measures will be so awesome! I am anxious to hear of others’ experiences as they download, install and use.
Hi Rocky,
Quick question: is Bounce Rate included now, or is it one of the calculated measures (i.e. still needs to be configured)? I have begged WebTrends to make it a fully integrated part of the reports, as it is in Google Analytics, for years now.
I am curious to know what is the problem you refer to when you mention Chantilly and Marina Del Rey. Here, in Canada, what I noticed about 2 years ago was a problem regarding Chantilly, more precisely the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). I had noticed that, although a visit was said to be coming from that organisation, a DNS resolution was giving ISPs from Canada under IANA, making that traffic appear as coming from the USA whereas it was in fact coming from Canada. I have seen that over and over since then, to the point that I always warn my Canadian clients to be careful before they conclude they get so % of visits from the USA. In one particular case, they thought they were getting 15% of the visits from the US, when in fact, after factoring the IANA problem, it was only 3%.
At that time, I called the IANA, in Chantilly, and asked why many visits from Canadian ISPs were showing under their name (and thus from Chantilly, Virginia). They said that if an ISP didn’t change the default contact information when purchasing new IP addresses, the IP would still officially appear as belonging to IANA in some database. Now, add to this that IANA is operated by the ICANN, and you get your Marina Del Rey traffic as well.
Anyway, I don’t know to what extend all this is reliable, but that’s my story so far. I have seen many times WebTrends reports, “Organizations”, showing IANA, and then Canadian ISPs under its name (rogers.com, bell.ca, mc.videotron.com). Very strangely, however, WebTrends tech support could never reproduce the problem…
Hi Jacques,
No. No bounce rate. And we haven’t been able to design a custom report that would have, for a given URL, both the number of views or entries and the number of single page visits or exits. Any two of those in the same report would give us something to work with.
The Chantilly and Marina Del Rey problems are difficult because AOL is also in Chantilly and Reston, and ARIN is in Chantilly, and IANA is ….
Anyway. Aargh.
When you were talking to tech support about this, were you both using the same GeoTrends version?
No Bounce Rate??? Whaaaat?? Is it me or the people in Portland are not listening to the market?? Too bad then. Darn too bad…
Good question. I beleive they were, but I am not sure. Again today, while giving training, I could verify the case with IANA and ARIN as well with Canadian ISPs showing as coming from thoses organizations. This makes the “US Traffic” very unreliable for Canadian sites…
I am missing another information and I wonder whether it isn´t available at all or whether I haven´t figured the “how to”:
can you create a column identifiying “short visits” (e.g. providing the percentage of all visits shorter than 10 seconds)?
I´m painfully missing this measure…
Falk – good question. We have a new post related to this: http://www.webtrendsoutsider.com/2008/tracking-the-time-spent-by-single-page-visits/
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