Tracking and analyzing web traffic may not be as exciting as it used to be, but dont tell that to NetIQ Corp. This week, the company will announce its first release of the WebTrends product family since it acquired the products creator, WebTrends Corp., earlier this year.
While the WebTrends products have been rebranded with this release, there are enough functional upgrades to indicate NetIQs continuing commitment to the Web analytics platform beyond just enhancing its systems management products. Yet some of those new features—such as analysis of hits from WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and Palm OS phone browsers and streaming-media files—will likely be of limited value to most sites.
The upgrade centers on WebTrends Reporting Center Series, formerly known as Enterprise Reporting Server, the companys flagship product targeted at the midmarket.
Reporting Center Series features a new dedicated Service Provider Edition designed for Internet service providers own analysis as well as to allow them to offer Web analysis services to customers. This edition complements eBusiness Edition for Web reporting and Enterprise Edition for business and marketing analysis.
New features across all editions of Reporting Center Series include enhanced custom report creation, automatic customer profile creation, analysis of streaming media on Web sites, and analysis of site hits from Palm OS and WAP phone browsers.
Kanth Gopalpur, vice president of e-commerce at Djangos Music Corp., in Portland, Ore., said the streaming-media analysis is something his company would take a look at since the companys site (Djangomusic.com), which sells music and movies, could use the new feature to see if the MP3 music samples on its site help it to sell more CDs.
“Thats one of the things that we want to do,” Gopalpur said. “As always, theres the question of is it worth it. But its something wed like to dabble in.”
Gopalpur said he had little interest in tracking hits from WAP phones and Palm OS devices. “Its still too new a market,” he said.
NetIQ, of Santa Clara, Calif., has rebranded the other WebTrends products besides Reporting Center Series. WebTrends Enterprise Suite is now WebTrends Analysis Series, which provides basic Web reporting for sites with static pages and low data volumes. WebTrends Live remains as the hosted version of this product.
Meanwhile, WebTrends high-end product CommerceTrends, which has the most advanced analytics in the product family as well as marketing automation and data integration capabilities, is now called VRM (visitor relationship management) Solutions.