Earlier this week the Board of Directors of WebTrends Inc. announced the appointment of Alex Yoder as the company's new president and chief executive officer following the resignation of Dan Stickel. I had a chance to catch up with the new WebTrends CEO to ask him about how he plans to lead WebTrends going forward.

[Manoj]: You have been a long time employee of WebTrends, how will this help you in providing strategic direction for the company going forward.

[Alex Yoder]: I have spent 7 of the last 8 years of my life focused on the success of WebTrends and its customers. I have personal relationships with all of our largest customers and have been responsible for the acquisition and retention of many of those same clients through past periods of struggle and imbalance. I have managed and grown our largest partnerships and helped to evangelize the needs of those organizations and their customers throughout our product, marketing, services, support and hosted operations groups. Also, having come from the inside of WebTrends, I literally know every employee in the company. I have built a reputation for clear, open and honest communication, without fluff, or ego, with the central focus consistently centered on the success of our customers and the integrity and pride of our employees. We have a solid strategy and direction. My goal is simply to enable our success and to drive the organization through clarity, simplicity and passion.

[Manoj]: What has changed most in the web analytics space in the last few years?

[Alex Yoder]: What I’ve seen change most in the web analytics space is the sincere evolution of the digital marketer in terms of their sophistication and need for truly relevant data for their organization. Gone are the days when 1,000 generic out of the box reports work effectively. We are seeing very sophisticated analysts use this data for real business decisions. There was a time when sophistication was confused with difficult and simple was confused with generic. Sophistication is required today. The ability to easily create highly customizable views of the data is required without needing to indulge development in a tag change with every step. Also, more and more the data itself is required. Marketing and BI are gradually coming together and there is an absolute requirement that the underlying data itself be easily available to put into real-life scorecards and benchmarks, and to feed other systems, such as CRM and email. This function is simply not available in broad-based, mass market solutions.

[Manoj]: Why are components such as Ad Director important in WebTrends' offering?

[Alex Yoder]: The fact that WebTrends is involved in client organizations at a strategic level already is only the first step. We also need to be able to continue to provide value to our customers through actionable, results-oriented technology so that we can maintain our edge as the leading provider in marketing optimization solutions. Remember that, while we have a rich heritage in web analytics, we are truly a marketing optimization company. The plain fact is, there is no other solution anywhere in the marketplace that compares to Ad Director, where an organization can automatically optimize as well as leverage human insight—it is simply unparalleled. Ad Director is not only a keyword optimization solution, but also an ad-serving and retargeting platform, which allows us to evolve our story about closed-loop marketing. We intend to continue to deliver solutions of this magnitude to our client base.

[Manoj]: How do you plan on keeping WebTrends innovative, with so many different products, you don't just compete with analytics providers anymore.

[Alex Yoder]: Thanks! I’m happy to hear you say that (based on my last response). We really don’t want to compete solely with analytics providers any more. There are many mass-market web analytics solutions that are highly inflexible and provide very shallow insight into the underlying business questions—there is not a huge future in that arena. Frankly, why would you pay for it if you can get it free from Google? We are definitively not one of these solutions. There are areas that we can provide significant value-add that include the underlying analytics framework, but ultimately solve much broader challenges for the digital marketer by identifying unique individuals and providing a framework for remarketing. We believe in scoring visitors and measuring engagement dynamically, as well as enabling the closing of the online and offline loop.

[Manoj]: How will you incorporate your experience from Touch Clarity into how you will direct WebTrends

[Alex Yoder]: Well, I will make sure that we don’t leap before we look in terms of acquisitions! Frankly, much of the underlying approach behind Ad Director is very similar to that of Touch Clarity. The focus is around automated optimization, so I have a clear understanding of that space and how it complements the appropriate analytics solution.

[Manoj]: Mobile Analytics seems to be a popular topic these days, is this something WebTrends will begin looking into?

[Alex Yoder]: ABSOLUTELY!!! We are very focused in this area already and have been engineering solutions that will enable easier tracking of activity on mobile devices—taking us well beyond the comprehensive mobile reporting that we already do. We will be announcing enhanced capabilities in this arena shortly.

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