I've tried to stay out of the fray, so far, telling clients that they can pick whatever tracking system they want -- that SiteCatalyst and WebTrends both offer a good tracking system and we can work with whatever. Trying to do some conversion enhancement for a client who uses WebTrends today, though, has been so frustrating that I am forced to throw my lot in with Omniture.
SiteCatalyst, in my humble (professional, but still humble) opinion, beats the pants off of WebTrends. The default reports in SC are so much more intuitive and helpful. Every single thing I wonder about my current client's site requires me to jump through hoops to answer in WebTrends.
For instance: from the home page, which page is the most popular next page?
The default report that WebTrends gives me shows the most popular second page -- regardless of what people's first page was. How is that useful? And even from that default report, I can't figure out how to get the report that I really want. Clicking on the individual pages doesn't bring up the reports starting from those pages; it brings up those pages in new browser windows.
It's almost painful.
Another interesting (frustrating) example: when I look at the "referring domains" report, WT gives me five bars. One is "direct traffic," which drives the most by far, and then there's one for each of the major search engines. And nothing else. Nothing to indicate what percentage of the total traffic I'm looking at. When I clicked the button that I thought might expand the report and give me all the information, it "minimized" it for me, instead.
Improving conversion rates should be based on data. When that data is reduced to a few, colorful bars, my recommendations are similarly reduced.
I'll spare you the rest of the examples. If you want to switch to Omniture, give me a call! We can hook you up for a good price, install it for you, and help you make good decisions with the information.