Veteran analytics provider Webtrends opens up its Explore tool

In the world of Web analytics, Webtrends is a veteran.

Launched two decades ago, the Portland, Oregon-based company is today making generally available its Explore ad hoc data exploration tool. Previously, the tool was available only to existing clients, which include Lufthansa and Nature Publishing Group.

The tool addresses the same huge pile of data that Webtrends’ other analytics capabilities do — 1.5 petabytes of Web site clicks, online transactions, app installs, mobile data, even Sharepoint interactions.

The company describes this data collection, which adds three billion data points every day, as “the most expansive first-party data collection” on the market. First-party refers to the fact that it’s data captured by publishers and retailers about their customers and visitors, instead of being purchased data from other sources.

Explore offers more flexibility than the company’s other tools, according to senior director of product marketing Steve Earl. He told us that Explore, by comparison, was like “Excel pivot tables on big data.”

Once the data has been indexed over 24 hours, for instance, results are immediately available and can be queried as needed. This compares to the hours that were required for previous reports, when all queries had to be predefined before being generated.

“You don’t have to know your questions up front,” Earl said.

Above: A screen from Webtrends’ Explore

Image Credit: Webtrends

He pointed to one client, an unidentified provider of inflight services. That company had thousands of customer segments, categories into which it grouped its customer data. It has used Explore to conduct on-the-fly determinations of which segments produced the most sales, for instance, and to find out the kinds of devices its customers were using. Before, it would have had to define the reports up front, and the effort would have taken longer.

Other applications of the new tool include analyzing data to find out what kinds of content generate the most traffic, or generating more detailed analyses of visitor behaviors to support customer segmentation.

Earl noted that one Webtrends differentiator compared to its traditional competitors — large analytics players like Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and IBM Analytics — has been its ability to support unlimited data sets. Explore will offer new flexibility in slicing and dicing that data, he said, including unlimited drill-downs and a friendly interface.