WebTrends Dinner Recap
Posted by Florian Pihs at 3/23/2008 9:59 AM and is filed under Analytics Packages,Web Analytics Wednesday,WebTrends 
In the most well attended web analytics event in Beijing yet, our group of local Web Analytics practitioners met WebTrends' Sean Browning and Colby Cavanaugh in Bed Bar to talk about WebTrends activities in China.
While this post cannot do justice to the rich discussions going on during the event (you have to BE THERE to get the full flavor), I will try to summarize to key points here, as a quick reference to all those who attended as well as for those of you who could not join (but hopefully drop by next time).
Attendees
Topics
While this post cannot do justice to the rich discussions going on during the event (you have to BE THERE to get the full flavor), I will try to summarize to key points here, as a quick reference to all those who attended as well as for those of you who could not join (but hopefully drop by next time).
Attendees
- Our honored guests from WebTrends (including Ronghai Consulting, their local reseller)
- Agencies: MRM Worldwide, Ogilvy One, DMG
- Clients and Entrepreneurs: Nokia China Interface Lab, Jonathan Zhou, Olandio (ex Baidu)
Topics
- WebTrends China Strategy: WebTrends is managing its global expansion through a regional partner network. Sean and Colby's reason to visit Beijing was a regional North Asia parter event, hosted by Ronghai. WebTrends sees this as a key advantage to drive a fast global roll-out with localized service, quick response times and fast adoption of local business practices. It certainly seems to have worked in China, judging from the client list on Ronghai's website (which interestingly uses Google Analytics, instead of WebTrends) and my experience with their response times and unique set of trainings and services.
- WebTrends & Double byte characters: One support
questions that kept popping up was WebTrends' support for double byte
characters. We had discussions with our clients that indicated
WebTrends might have problems tracking pages that have certain double
byte characters in their page title. Neither Ronghai nor the WebTrends
team could report mayor tracking issues (apart from some display
issues in the interface). Some problems might occur based on customized
JavaScripts used for certain clients. As with Omniture SiteCatalyst,
customization can be a blessing and a curse. We will be looking into
that.
- Clients in China: While Ronghai's client list is impressive (incl. China Mobile, China Telecom, Air China, China Merchants Bank), proving that Web Analytics is much more prevalent than I imagined, actual use of the tool is still limited. Most clients do have a reporting infrastructure in place, but rarely optimize their site or advertising based on analytics insights.
- Companies that are not clients (surprisingly): Non of the larger local e-commerce players or portals in currently a WebTrends client (nor could I detect any other standard solution using WASP). Most of the large sites use custom made solutions based on server logs and Oracle databases. Maybe I should not be surprised, neither Yahoo, nor Google nor MSN use standard tools.
- WebTrends is a strong supporter of Web Analytics Wednesday's.
With Eric Peterson being a WebTrends alumni, thats hardly surprising.
The next question through is, when will WebTrends take of Web Analytics
Demystified's role as WAW Beijing sponsor? I will keep you posted on
this one
- Last but not least, WebTrends is going coming back to China. Rest assured that I will let you know more details, when the time comes.
Trackbacks
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7/31/2008 6:21 PM
Web Analytics in China wrote:
Those of us using Omniture in China have been facing a big problem optimizing search campaigns. Baidu's search terms were encoded correctly only 50% of the time (I am being generous), the other 50% we got obscure characters that mean absolutely nothing. That results in all keyword related reports (most popular keyword etc.) delivering wrong results. Paid search might be exempted when you use campaign ID's to tag the keywords. Anyways... after escalating the issue to Omniture forever ago (sorry guys, it had to be said), a solution is at hand. The problem has apparently been on Baidu's side. ...
Hi Florian, thanks for mentionning WASP! One thing to be aware of: WASP can't detect purely log-based solutions (nor custom, home-made ones). So if some of those sites uses Webtrends without any tags, WASP won't be able to detect it. However... we could argue that a company using Webtrends without any tags is probably one where the web analytics maturity level is still low and under the control of IT.
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Thanks Stephane for clarifying. I understand that WebTrends (like other vendors) does have pure log file tools. From what I see, log files only analytics is very limited in its application, so I agree with you judgment in terms or maturity. Regardless, I would love to know who does log file analysis in Chinal, since it would help grow our analytics community here. It seems impossible to tell from the outside who is using such tools, so I have to rely on the power of good old fashioned networking, it seems
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Hi Florian,
Perfect Summary! Just to add one comment on Chinese double-byte characters displaying issue.
Per our testing, seems a solution is figured out - If we do the following settings in WebTrends Ondemand UI, the Chinese characters can be displayed in most of the reports (e.g. Search Keyword Report).
1. Select Preferences -> Language -> Chinese (Simplified), to show parts of Chinese;
2. Select Preferences -> Language -> Use Unicode (UTF-8), to show other parts of Chinese.
However, this is still not a perfect solution, since it cannot show all the Chinese characters at 1 time...
So users will still need to manually consoliate the Chinese characters displayed in 2 steps together into their reports.
Anyway, we may benefit from this first before the issue is solved officially. :)
Leon
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Thanks Leon, your input is always highly appreciated. Based on your comment I understand that the Search Keyword in WebTrends report is not working Chinese characters out of the box. Do you know if WebTrends is working on fixing this?
I assume that WebTrends actually has the same problem as Omniture, that Baidu is not handing over the correct encoding of the search terms. That should mean however that Google and Yahoo search traffic show up correctly. Can you confirm that?
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Hi Florian,
Sorry I don't know this. Hopefully someone from WebTrends can see this and reply us.
Thanks.
Leon
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Hi Flrian,
Thanks for host the Party,your blog has becomes an easy way to know what's going on in Chinese Web Analytics market;),what do you think I invite some of my customers like people from China Mobile or China Telecom join the event? I am sure they will just love the Web Analytics atmosphere there.
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Hi Wu Yong, that would be great. Please let me know about the number of people for the room reservation. Any idea how to mix the English speaking and Chinese speaking crowd would be appreciated.
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Hi,Florian,I think I will just invite 1 or 2 people this time,mabye more if they like it.And I am also worrying about the Engish speaking problem,some of them just too shy to speak English,but I am sure they understand ,I think we should have more coordinator to mix them with some certain topics and maybe help to translate a little bit.
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I will ask some members of my team to join, they can help with the translation. But I guess that is just a short term solution. Lets brainstorm during the meeting if we can find a better solution.
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Hi Florian,
This is my first visit to your site. I work for ChinaCache, the largest CDN provider in China at their new US HQ in Los Angeles.
I am very interested to see whats going on in the web analytic space since it is very relevant to our business.
Thank you for these insights. I hope next time I visit my HQ in Beijing I can attend a meeting.
-David
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Thanks David for joining the community. I am looking forward to catching up when you are back in Beijing. I looking forward to learn more about the relationship between web analytics and CDN. Please do me a favor and let your colleagues in Beijing know about this blog and the Web Analytics Wednesdays. It would be great for them to join in, too.
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Hi,
Web analytics has very big relation with CDN,when I worked for WebTrends,some of my customer use CDN from China Cache,most of them are government owned webisite like People daily,cctv.com,you know WebTrends use two different kind of log files, one is web server log and one is called SDC log(collected by tag the Web pages),when the customer use web server log files,WebTrends almost never satisfied them,because it very hard to get the SDC web server log file on time, we used to try to let them use SDC,but the PV when they use SDC was about 1/10 then use web server log,that's almost an non-acceptable solution for them,so far,they still haven't find a good way to solve this problem,I am sure we can communicate about this issue if we have chance to meet.
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Thanks Wu Yong, your long term experience in China's Web analytics market is invaluable. Getting reliable server log data is a global challenge for users of log file based analytics solutions. This has been one of the reasons why JS tags have become the industry standard. Take a look at Avinash's post on the topic for more background.
While I don't know WebTrends solution well enough to understand the differences between SDC and "normal" server log. It seems that process issues and turnaround time issues are abound in web analytics in China. That is one more reason to have a solution that automatically collects your data e.g. JavaScript tags. While this may not be an option for some of your clients. It is something to think about when recommending an analytics solution.
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Hi Florian,
I will definitely forward the blog to my Beijing colleagues !
Wu Yong- We'd love to talk to any web analytic company to try to solve some of those problems. We also have some global advertising and media companies who have similar issues with this so your example is quite common.
Thanks
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Hi David,I am sure there's a lot of things we can talk in this specific area,welcome to the event when you back to Beijing,and maybe China Cache could host one time of the Web Analytics Event,it's good for everybody share the experiences.and the Event is become more and more popular in Beijing.
Florian, the different between SDC and Web Server log files is because those website are cheating,you know what I mean?
Wu Yong
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webtrends supports double byte..at least for v8.0d. Not sure about 8.1a but seems fine.
it's not fully supported out of the box, however you have to request for a double byte coversion string plugin to get it work. (8.1a seems to have the problem resolved)
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