Facebook Insights Delays and Changes

All analytics solutions eventually suffer through "delays". We had some pain back in the early days of Webtrends Live when we might fall behind by a few hours (the solution was originally designed to provide data in less than one hour). Facebook has consistently had an terribly long delay of a "couple of days" for their Insights data since they launched their service. They are today telling Page admins:

Insights Delays

During the past few weeks you may have noticed delays to your insights data. We're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused and want you to know that we're working to resolve these issues and make sure they don't happen in the future.

Their delays have been close to a week in recent weeks. Bummer. It's hard to run an effective Marketing campaign if your data is a week old.

They've also recently made some changes to their data...telling Page admins:

Improvements to Page Insights Data

You might notice an update to the data you see on the "Likes" and "Reach" tab of your Page Insights. We've made some changes to improve the accuracy of the information you have about the location of your audience.

Making changes to how data is calculated is always tricky.  It's hard to convey to your customers what you are doing, and it raises doubts about the accuracy of the prior data - and what else might change along the way.

My advice for the Facebook Insights team: communicate early and often.  It's always better to let folks know what's up early, and fall on your sword if need be.

Realtime Relevance

We are working on some killer technology right now to enable clever analysis of data via new streaming services (the stuff behind the realtime efforts of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn). We're building on top of what we've done to leverage realtime data in Webtrends A10, Optimize and Reinvigorate, and it's starting to really get fun.

Our Marketing team is also out in front of the conversation...here's the latest from them:

It's a good time to be at Webtrends...

I joined Webtrends in '99. The company had just gone public and we were growing like crazy. Our flagship Webtrends software products (LogAnalyzer, Professional Suite, and Enterprise Suite) were minting money, and we were just starting to get some traction with our new "online" tool called Webtrends Live (later renamed Webtrends OnDemand).

In Q4 of that year we had an internal goal to hire 100 people across the organization. We did just that...while the business was still accelerating. It was a fun time.

Flash forward to 2012. Our SaaS solutions revenue grew over 20% last quarter from the previous year, with earnings up an incredible 418%. And we just announced last week that we're going to be hiring 50 new employees - 35 in engineering alone.

The difference this time? It's not a bubble. At least not for Webtrends. We're making money, we're growing, and instead of sitting back and watching it slowly, organically, grow, we are putting our foot on the accelerator.

Want the inside scoop on what we're up to? Take a look at our job openings. A lot of great opportunities all around the company. Make sure you look at some of the engineering jobs to see what we're putting together: streaming/realtime processing, big time big data, deep data mining research, and incredible (award winning) user experience initiatives.

It's a good time to be at Webtrends. If you want to work on the latest technology, serving some of the smartest marketing brands in the world, now's the time.