Kissmetrics vs. Webtrends Analytics

[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.

Incentivized

Scenarios 1. If you want to use web server log files as input to your web analytics, then Webtrends will provides a good product, with great ease of implementation. Don't even think about being cheap on hardware, and make sure Webtrends runs on real servers, not in a VM environment. 2. If you want to use Data Tagging, similar to Google Analytics or Site Catalyst, Webtrends has a powerful product, just be prepared to pay. 3. If you are new to Web Analytics, but it is the strategic direction, start with Webtrends on Premises. Questions to Ask 1. What are you trying to accomplish? 2. Can you place a dollar value on the benefit that you expect/need from Webtrends? 3.Can you live with Webtrends running SaaS?

• Kissmetrics has a fantastic dashboard where you can see all relevant metrics immediately after login.
• Kissmetrics was extremely easy to implement in our site and it works across different platforms.
• After the initial setup, managing and creating new events to track is super simple.
• You can monitor live usage. This feature allows you to monitor user interactions as they are happening and as events you are tracking are triggered. You can see exactly what users are doing real time, which is really a very cool feature. At the time, this kind of realtime monitoring was not possible with Google Analytics.

• Webtrends Analytics makes complex situations understandable to a non-technical audience. The vast capabilities and ways to slice data is both a great tool, but can also cause a user/users many hours of frustration.
• Visual data display is clean, to the point, and not overly convoluted with unneeded variables and standard (defualt) settings. Everything the end user sees is customizeable.
• Exports of raw data collections was easy and accurate. Once the parameters of data collection are finally set up and working, its easy to get what you want from the UI and is delievered in a variety of options.

• The biggest issue, is that I have lost faith in the accuracy of the data.
• There have been a few examples of the system producing what looks like spurious data. I triangulate the data using Google Analytics, and on a few occasions, there have been very wide discrepancies that indicate a potentially serious problem. For example, Google might indicate 1,000 page views, while KISSmetrics indicates 5,000.. This is not a constant problem, but it has happened enough where my faith in the data is shaken.
• It really doesn't matter how good the front-end functionality is if my faith in data accuracy is not 100%.
• A/B testing is much more difficult than it needs to be. It is possible to structure the product to enable A/B testing, but this involves reading a bunch of help files and writing some code. I would have expected this to work out-of-the-box. In Google Analytics, for example.you only have to enter two URLs and then it works. This was a surprise.

• Webtrends is not great at providing statistical data for analysis. You need to enable Log File Delivery or create an analysis export to perform this. This could theoretically be done with Streams.
• Webtrends has difficulty identifying multi-visit users due to the inherent fragility of cookie-based tracking.
• Webtrends Analytics does not provide Pathing capabilities for segments, only for the aggregate. However, this can be worked around with Scenario functionality selectively fired by a tag management system.
• Segmentation by high-cardinality parameters tends to cause issues with table limits. Even after scrubbing and scrutinizing data, we commonly see up of 10K rows per dimension. Due to this, we use Webtrends Analytics to roll up data into larger segments and export all of our log data into our database for heavy duty number crunching.

I used KISSmetrics on a daily basis whilst a summer analyst at a language-learning software startup company called Voxy. To my knowledge, the company continued to use KISSmetrics. I am no longer at Voxy but we were pleased with KISSmetrics.

The obstacles to renewing are 1) finding people to manage it who know it well and 2) frustration because of the lack of on-the-fly analysis. Usually, renewal prices are reasonable and the cost of switching to something else when you have a somewhat complicated setup far outweigh the renewal costs, especially if your implementation is sound and your reports are humming along. A lot of renewal decisions are going to hinge on the new product that will start to roll out this month.

For basic operations, the product is relatively user-friendly, considering how complicated a topic data and analytics can be. The engineering integration work is very straightforward, and building standard report types is pretty easy. However, there were a few rough spots. Event mapping and some of the deeper account settings are not well explained. And the Power Reports functionality is just utterly, impossibly confusing

If I could give it a 0, I would. Not having an intuitive user interface made it impossible to convince non-analytic business users to use the tool on their own. Even as a seasoned analyst, frequent calls were needed to get what should be simple tasks done. Account managers don't understand the tool either, and have to refer you to technical support

In a year, we had trouble logging-in just once. But even then all tracking data was later available once the site came back up. also, the system down notices were very informative - they explained the reason for the downtime and were constantly updated with progress in getting the problem resolved.

It is much better than average. Down time usually occurs because of a need to refresh the server on our end.

Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.

The v9 admin interface and v10 reporting interface work as well as expected, but have a tendency to be pokey, especially for bulky reports and whenever you're connected to wifi. I much prefer using the REST API for all reporting for this reason, which simply dumps out the data and doesn't bother with the user interface.

Everytime that I've needed or contacted support, I've received a quick response and timely help! There was even a major issue we had with connecting Unbounce into Kissmetrics. They brought in multiple people and worked with us for hours to make sure we could figure out the issue and get everything running! I have no complaints about the support team!

Incentivized

The Webtrends Support Engineers are expert at what they do, and we get to speak to someone on the support team quickly. They provide great solutions when available, and when there is no solution, which can happen, they describe work-arounds.

Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.

The in-person training was comprehensive enough to get you started, but I strongly recommend having a more experienced person when beginning with the tool.

I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.

Webtrends provides several free webinars over the course of the year, many of which I would expect to pay for. The people providing the webinars seem to have a good feel for real-world application of the product.

In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that

Careful planning and patience. Use a non-public test site to fine tune tags and reporting. Despite best laid plans, there will be surprises when you collect the data, run the analysis and begin generating reports using the tool. Perform a tag audit to ensure tags fire as desired.

It has been a while since I demoed Heap and Optimizely but the main points that stick out in my head are that Kissmetrics had more transparent and cheaper pricing. Kissmetrics offered all the same functionality, and at least from my personal experience, the staff at Kissmetrics was easier to work with and nicer to interact with.

Incentivized

Webtrends has its work cut out for itself considering you have the behemoth Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium having a strong offering and brand recognition for the price of free. After reviewing the paid service I'd suggest you start off with GA as a cheaper alternative that is just as robust, if not much more flexible in regards to the reporting and goal tracking needs for our company.

Incentivized

• Improved product
• More insights into users
• More insights into marketing channels and their performance
• Must admit that the live stream was a little bit addictive the first couple of weeks, but it's a necessary evil when you launch new features :)

• Webtrends has had a positive impact on site visitation because it allowed us to understand the sources by domain for site traffic and find out ways to increase visits from those domains.
• Webtrends has also allowed us to understand areas of optimization on the site, which has had a positive impact on the overall user journey on the site, likely leading to longer site duration and engagement.