More on Webtrends Openness Moves

I recently came back from New Orleans where I attended the Webtrends Engage event and watched the city anticipate the Super Bowl. See this weekend for my reports on eating and live music in New Orleans. While there I spoke again with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.  We continued the topic I started with Alex Yoder, their CEO (see yesterday's post). Jascha gave me some concrete examples of how this openness is being put into practice.

Spirit Airlines is a new Webtrends customer. They use the target capabilities in the Optimize suite to provide individualized offers to customers. The Webtrends Visitor Data Mart allows this to occur as it can take data from several sources to provide a complete picture of customer activities. Webtrends can give a company both aggregated customer data and data on specific individuals across all channels.

In the case of Spirit Air, the company can look at a customer’s prior activity and provide special fares and seating to reward their most active customers. This data scanning through the Visitor Data Mart and the special offers through Optimize happens on the fly because of the open architecture implemented by Webtrends. The ability to combine these tools on the fly also provides a useful feedback loop to conduct tests of offers and other Web site components.

Cabelas is another client. It is a large retail sporting goods outfitter that uses Webtrends Analytics 9. They can collect customer data online and bring it into their enterprise data mining tools. Traditionally, Web data was not integrated with offline data but the open architecture within Webtrends allows for this combination. This allows for the combination of online and in-store transactions so they can better reward customers in their frequent purchasing program.

It goes beyond this to allow Cabelas to better infer customer intensions and respond appropriately. For example, a customer might start to buy some camping gear online but back out. Then they might get some of the purchases at the store the next day. Now Cabelas can make a special offer to them to complete the purchase of related items for their upcoming camping trip.

If the population within Facebook was a country it would be the fourth largest in the World. This makes Facebook an emerging frontier for online marketing. It uses its own technology that does not allow for Javascript so this makes data collection more difficult. Webtrends is working to provide more access to Facebook data for its customers.

With their data collection APIs Webtrends has found a way to connect some portions of Facebook data.  A brand can set up a Facebook fan page and provide an application connected to this fan page. Using Webtrends they can access all of the data connected with the Facebook application.

To promote this Facebook related capability, Webtrends has launched a Great Data Giveaway Contest for customer intelligence analysts.  To enter, a person has to register on the Webtrends fan page, give Webtrends some information about themselves and state what they would do with the data. They also have to share this activity with their friends.  There has been a great response so far. Webtrends will now be able to look at the data from the contest entries and decide which ones to involve in sales activities.

Jascha said the use of traditional standalone micro-sites that brands set up for their customers and prospects have been hurt by Facebook. While you lose a lot of control over data collection with Facebook it brings a ready-made audience. Now Webtrends is working to provide further access to Facebook related data to support this trend. This move is part of the larger Webtrends effort to extend the reach of customer data collection beyond traditional online sources to both reach back into more old school offline sources and the many new school social media sources that keep emerging.