• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 5, 2010

Webtrends plans to releases a module Tuesday that gives marketers the ability to build and automate audience segments in near real-time by pulling in data from Web sites, Facebook Fan pages, email campaigns and more.

The add-on to Webtrends Visitor Data Mart, Webtrends Segments, enables marketers to build profiles to improve conversion rates and marketing campaigns by isolating individuals and behavior, understand habits and preferences, and more accurately define online and offline marketing programs.

Let's say a Seattle-based retail store plans to open a location in Los Angeles with products geared toward women ages 18 to 35 who like to snow ski. Similar to a search engine spider that crawls Web sites indexing pages, technology in the Webtends module searches data collected from the retailer's Web site, Facebook page, email campaigns and more. Segments builds audience files for the Los Angeles area based on this data and pours it into an email retargeting or behavioral targeting (BT) display ad platform.

Webtrends engineers began building Segments about six months ago, according to Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, vice president of marketing at Webtrends. "We held user groups and did prototypes to get feedback from customers," he says, pointing to MetLife as one company trialing the platform.

The ability to enable a marketer to identify and target segments with unique messages creates an incredible opportunity, because it's been very difficult to do in the past. For Webtrends, what once took up to two days to identify audience segments now takes minutes.

Kaykas-Wolff calls it a "huge advance" in creating targeted segments. The ability to segment audiences has been around for years, but not practical to carry out as an automated add-on to analytics tools, Kaykas-Wolff says. "You almost need the quantitative jock, the math person that sits in the back of the room and looks at all the data and builds segments to create targets," he says. "The challenge has been making discovery accessible."

Technology has enabled Webtrends and others in the advertising and marketing industries to automate processes, cut out time, and remove costs.

Companies have begun to look toward automation to eke out efficiencies and eliminate manual processes. But they're doing it with "trepidation," says John Lovett, senior partner at Web Analytics Demystified, a consulting firm. Lovett, formerly at Forrester Research, says most companies begin by automating triggers on email campaigns.

Even so, marketers still expect platform makers to hold their hand with projects rather than just letting go and allowing the tools to run the marketing programs.

"The automation helps cut the manual time it takes to look at data and customer segments, but marketers still have to manually hit the go button on campaigns," Lovett says.

If Omniture, Coremetrics and other analytics companies don't have segmentation modules, Lovett says marketers could still segment audiences by taking manual steps. Automation remains the key to cutting costs for the marketing and the advertising industries.

Aside from segmentation capability, the spring 2010 product release includes updates in Analytics for Webtrends Mobile Analytics. It provides marketers with mobile application tracking to make the integration of mobile tracking into native mobile applications easy.

Other features in the latest release include custom reporting. Marketers can automatically forward the reports to administrators. Developers also now have access to a new version of the Webtrends Data Extraction API.