Webtrends Reviews

Pros

Great company culture. The people are friendly, genuinely interested in what they are doing, and passionate about customer service. That's actually pretty hard to find these days. Alex Yoder is extremely approachable, as is most of the executive staff. That's also hard to find. There's a lot of really, really creative thinkers and technical masterminds here. I've worked with other analytics vendors' products and can say that Webtrends' products are far more customizable and powerful, no doubt, and I'm very proud of that.

The compensation is very adequate and fair. The benefits are great, not many companies of this size keep the employee contribution of health insurance so low. You're going to be hard-pressed to find it this low anywhere except a giant corp like Intel.

Cons

The IT team are great guys, but I have to say I've wondered if there is a question of competence somewhere in their team infrastructure. I've never worked anywhere that had random office network or phone system outages as often as we seem to. (I'll admit the frequency has gone down a lot in the last 6 months, and I know the team has been doing a lot of upgrades since then which seem to be helping.) IT chose our new voice conferencing tool, which is unreliable and regularly embarrasses those of us who conduct calls with clients. Like disconnects and echoing. The last service was horrible, too. Having this poor of conferencing has never happened to me at any other company, either.

I've been here between 1 and 2 years, and while I'm not looking to advance any time soon, I do get the impression that there isn't a whole lot of room for that. You get very pigeon-holed into your role, which can be an awesome thing to build skills and focus on perfecting your performance. I can see how this could be a 'con' eventually. There are employees who haven't had a raise in 2+ years, despite good performance. The company seems to be doing much better in the last couple of years so I agree with others that this is worthy of concern. There seems to be new people hired regularly. I think it creates some dissonance between veteran employees and new blood; when you're new, you can just feel that your team members know you're getting paid way more than they are despite their undeniable seniority and proven skills.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't start fire drills every time someone in sales or tech support says a customer sort of sounds unhappy. It throws people under the bus by placing their names directly in the inboxes of executive staff and that increases stress levels so much that it makes it more difficult for the people who actually do the work to resolve the original issue/concern. In other words, have a little more faith in your employees and don't cause the domino effect of flipping out. You need to trust that your team members genuinely care about resolving client concerns as the people managing the client's contracts.

Pros

the company offers decent benefits and work life balance and is positioned well in the market provided the company can better organize

Cons

very high turnover, lack of internal communication from top down and between departments, frequent changes of direction due to changing vision and personnel

Advice to Senior Management

the leadership would do well to stitch together departments with a common vision and goals, tasking departmental managers to coordinate between and put in place strong operational managers

Pros

Webtrends is a close knit group of exceptional individuals working towards a common goal. We take pride in our work and the integrity of our company. You will find a high percentage of the work force has 5+ years of employment.
    Webtrends is/has weathered the incredible financial disasters of last few years without lay-offs or pay cuts.

Cons

Webtrends has experienced a fair amount of growing pains over the years. This has negatively impacted the momentum on a number of occasions which has required a re-tooling of the leadership and guidance in our market space.

Advice to Senior Management

A few less cadence callers and a few more rowers for the boat.

Pros

Good product, technology and good people to work with.

Cons

management style needs to be more positive and engineers deserve more respect.

Pros

Friendly coworkers and a very supportive mentality, team lunches are a common theme for cooperative relationship building
Great clients. I am convinced the only reason any clients stay with Webtrends is because of the client services provided rather than what the product offers. If Webtrends were to do a survey, a majority of the clients do not know how to use the software
It’s currently a hot industry to be in and you won’t have trouble finding another job once you’re out

Cons

No crossfunctional product training between Webtrends Ads, Optimize and Analytics
High turnover. There’s always someone leaving every month
No career growth. This is a job and not a career, there is little to learn once you’ve been there for more than 6mths to a year since company doesn’t train and doesn’t promote
Employee compensation is way below industry average for the same positions giving little incentive to stay for long term employees

Advice to Senior Management

There’s a reason people are leaving and it’s a very simple formula, 1. Compensation and Zero Career Growth. If Webtrends want to retain talent and build a product that works, they’re going to have to learn to invest in its current employees and not have to keep hiring new people to replace the ones that left that have no idea what’s going on to make your products. That would probably explain why the development is slower than the industry average, morale is low and a product that is far disconnected to what clients want. Knowledge is lost every time someone leaves.

Pros

The people at WebTrends are wonderful. Most are genuinely supportive and truly care about the product and the company. Co-workers will pitch in and help in any way they can even if it's just to stick around and provide moral support or get some evening food. Very little backstabbing, gossip, or other drama you'd find at other companies at the peer level.

Cons

In 2008, the management team was a revolving door of temporary/new VPs. The leadership team has stabilized in the past 2 years so there is no need to comment on past events.

Advice to Senior Management

No comment.

Pros

Great Technical Support team
Great Engineering team
Great clients
Industry is exciting if you make the most out of the place

Cons

Career growth does not exist at this company
Despite company growth, there has been no employee compensation in 2 years
Highly stressful environment
Expect to work in silos if not within Support or Engineering group
Mediocre product management, not focused on long term

Advice to Senior Management

Company is to flat. Give employees more growth potential. This includes personal development, mentoring ability, and career growth. Allow teams to work more cohesively. Perform decent company wide reviews and put together employee satisfaction action plans to improve organizational structure. Pay more attention to what the teams are doing across the company and stop focusing purely on product all the time. Senior management focuses on product 99% and employees 1%. Direct management focuses on employees very little and instead focuses on covering their own butts!

Pros

it's now owned by webtrends, which is a big plus from the previous management team

Cons

management team was horrible, and didn't understand the industry we were in

Advice to Senior Management

learn more about advertising and search before getting back into the market.

Pros

Hot space...as companies turn marketing spend away from more traditional forms of advertising, they are investing in technologies that help determine the value of the interactive side

Cons

6 VP's of Sales departed in the last 36 months, 3 CEO's departed in the last 32 months. Three CFO's in the last 3 years. Loosing deals to Omniture left and right

The product only somewhat does what it's advertised to do. Clients/customers very dissatisfied. New CEO has never been more than an inside sales manager in his career until he was promoted to CEO in the last 90 days. They have burned through (at one time or another) nearly every talented coder/programmer in the greater Portland area over the last 10 years.

Clearly the VC is positioning the company to be sold

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your people for once. Admit when you are wrong...both to employees and customers. Stand up to the VC and remind them that their job is to capitalize...not run the company from San Francisco. Smart managers hire smart, talented people then let them do what they were hired to do.

Pros

Great people to work with and good learning opportunities

Cons

Currently calming down from a transition period

Advice to Senior Management

Support the people doing the gruntwork. Listen when they start to raise flags on projects early in the process.

Good handling of the transition periods thus far