Sarah DeAtley
information + analysis + design
July 12, 2009 at 11:40 am
filed under Web Analytics
Tagged google analytics, omniture, Seattle, weather, web analytics, webtrends
I’ve played around with WebTrends some already, but now I can compare it more to Omniture and Google Analytics. Main things that struck me:
- Things take forever to load (especially when you first open a profile because of the volume of data) and there’s no indication of that the page is still loading. This is a UI feedback issue, but still, kind of annoying.
- The dashboard (I think the same goes for Omniture too) is not easily manipulable like in Google Analytics.
- I like their way of changing the period of time viewed, that its a calendar and a drop down menu of common time periods.
- Its nice to be able to have templates so you can easily access certain reports that are targeted for deeper analysis within a profile.
- Graphs are not very visually appealing, so I can see why you’d need to create graphs and charts in Excel most of the time.
- You can create a calculated measure for a metric, such as bounce rate (I still wish it were automatic like in GA though). **OK I lied, I think you still need to calculate bounce rate in Excel because of the available fields for report queries and calculated measures.
- What is an active visit, WebTrends? I discussed this with someone for 10 minutes and we could not figure out the difference between an active visit and a normal visit. They claim its something to do with sessions, but the numbers were almost exactly the same, so who knows.
- I did like that they define terms on each report page, which is nice for a novice, but you can turn it off as well.
Ultimately this seemed about the same as Omniture, though I know there are more differences, my only preference would be for Omniture based on the UI alone. I’m sure I will develop a more detailed impression over time.
Also, Seattle? Thunderstorms, really?
UPDATE: talked to someone about active visits in WebTrends, and found out that its a metric meant to measure the users who are on the site overnight as one visitor. So if someone is looking at the site from 11:59 PM until 12:03 AM the following day, they will not be counted as 2 visitors. He also said that he doesn’t really use this metric (I didn’t think that “active visits” would comprise a large segment of users), and this made me feel vindicated.
Related posts:
WebTrends update, YWA, and epic fails | Intersections
on July 16, 2009 at 6:05 pm
[...] was kindly informed that WebTrends has a new beta version that should have a much improved user experience and features. While I [...]