"Conceptually, it's brilliant," said Jim Sterne, founding president of the Web Analytics Association. "Not only is this on the money, this is the money.

"Time on site tells you how long someone was on your site," Sterne added, "but they might have been on the phone, or they might have been angry or distracted. The deeper they go into your site, the more engaged they are. Now you can see where they come in and where they go and assign a weight to each page."

Sterne gave the example of a conference Web site that might assign different scores to key pages such as the agenda and the registration. Rather than having to go through a specific user's path and interpret its meaning, the WebTrends Score tells you who is most engaged.

"If the person scores 100, they're engaged. Now I know where to spend my ad money," Sterne said.

In addition, Portland, Ore.-based WebTrends just introduced WebTrends Visitor Intelligence. It allows marketers to create on-the-fly behavior-based segments across multiple channels and visits.

For example, marketers could examine visitors who recently added a product to a shopping cart but did not complete the purchase--and filter results against those visitors' lifetime value, offline transactions, and geographic locations, to determine the best way to communicate and engage them.

"As Web sites get more complicated and customers touch the business across multiple channels, organizations are challenged to measure and optimize the online experience to be relevant and in context," said Bill Gassman, research director at Gartner. "To get to the next phase of optimization, business managers need analysis tools that offer a thorough view of every customer, knowing who they are and what they have done, no matter what the channel."

Both new products are included in WebTrends Marketing Lab 2.

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