Webtrends Small Business Reviewed (cont.)

Sometimes you just can’t get enough of a bad thing. Here is another rant about page view licenses, specifically those implemented in Web Trends 7.5b. After continually fighting with their support staff I came to the realization framed pages are counted as individual pages. The site we’re attempting to process contains 9 pages inside of a framed page. This means for every single page view, we’re getting 9 page views against our licensing. The site should be well under our 2,400,000 million yearly licenses, but with this calculation we’re using over a million per month!

Once I found the source of my frustration I contacted Webtrends for a solution to this problem. They referred me to their professional development department to pay to have an application written to remove the pages from my log files. It sounds like this has been a problem with web trends in the past. This custom programming from webtrends was going to be very expensive. Why not development this small “frame stripper” application and integrate it into Webtrends!

Why should I spend thousands more dollars, and tons more man hours when webtrends has already written this application before. Why not simply include their completed code with the final product? I seriously doubt it would be hard to add-on to webtrends. My opinion is they are attempting to create another revenue stream. Customers either need to upgrade to WAY more page view licenses then they need to, OR pay for custom programming to fix the application. It’s a lose – lose situation.

I completely understand their desire to make money. I also believe if you have a giant website you should pay more for analytics. I feel as a customer I’ve fallen through the cracks and been overlooked. The situation which I am in is not that out of the ordinary. The same way a website needs to be accessible using different browsers, analytics programs need to be functional on different style websites, including frames.