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Wednesday, May 31, 2006

WebTrends ODBC Driver and Yahoo! Maps

The WebTrends ODBC driver is a great feature of the WebTrends Marketing Lab in my humble (and biased) opinion. It's pretty powerful, especially when pulling data from the WebTrends On Demand service. So I thought I'd update my WebTrends-Yahoo! Maps mashup to take advantage of the flexibility of the ODBC driver. Check it out with your own data!

Here's how the U.S. and Canada traffic (visits) looks for insideanalytics.blogspot.com:

Feel free to download this spreadsheet to use if you'd like to map your own data. It has a few macros built in to allow you to refresh the data from WebTrends, and upload it to Yahoo's slick mapping service. I've been testing with WebTrends On Demand data, but it should work find for those of you using WebTrends software too.

The general idea is as follows. You install the WebTrends ODBC driver, and create a data source called "WTODGeo" to match what this spreadsheet is using as a default. The WTODGeo data source connects to the profile you want to use. Then you enter in the Time Period you want to use in the spreadsheet and refresh the spreadsheet with your data. Then map it using the macro!

There are more specific instructions in the spreadsheet.

I'm using the Yahoo! maps "simple" api for this only because it's VERY easy to use, and gets the general point across without much fuss. Their Flash and AJAX api's are definitely worth a look too. If someone would like to make this map even better...be my guest!

This isn't a WebTrends supported spreadsheet. Just my own creation. Use at your own risk. If you have trouble with it, or have any questions or feedback, feel free to drop me a line at elbpdx @ gmail

Quick Update: Note that even if you do not use WebTrends, you can still download the spreadsheet and use the data I have inside the spreadsheet to see the Yahoo! map. After downloading the spreadsheet, just skip all the other steps and use the macro to map the current data. It's worth it to see how easy Yahoo! maps is to use!

Filed in: analytics, visualization, map, mashup

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5 comments:

  1. Eric -- This looks fantastic! Can you elaborate on where to find the WebTrends ODBC driver?

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  2. Hi Mike, thanks for the note. In WebTrends 8, navigate to the "Install Components" area in the Administration Console. You'll find the ODBC driver in the list of components. Let me know if you have any questions about it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks! It works like a charm. For future reference, you either need to be an Admin in WT or have ODBC rights enabled for your user (there is a new line for this in the user rights list). I'm going to start using it today after I figure out how my reports are named in SQL. Is there any documentation on this? I can't find anything on "ODBC" in the Customer Center...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Eric, fantastic!

    Now can we build this into our next release? :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. There is an odbc document in the middle column of the Resourses section

    ReplyDelete

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