Our Marketing team will be launching a campaign designed to increase traffic to our Web sites by bring in new prospects/buyers and rewarding active buyers. The campaign will entail a contest that encourages customers to consume site content and use certain site features/functionality in order to "find" banner ads with our mascot that are placed throughout the Web sites. The banners and placements will change week-to-week in order to encourage users to return frequently. Clicking on the banner ad will direct users to a contest entry form (hosted by an interactive marketing agency).

The Marketing team wants to quantify the number of users that "participated" in the "find our mascot" contest, the number of times that those users visited the site during the campaign run, and the incremental traffic generated.

I'm hoping that some other WebTrends Analytics users may be able to share some thoughts/suggestions/tips as to how this type of multi-visit, user-level campaign measurement can best be approached.

Thanks.

First and foremost: you need to have first-party cookies enabled for proper visitor history tracking. Without it you won't have any reliable user-level reporting.

There are a few things going on here, so you may want to break things down.
1) How much new traffic is coming in via the method of "bringing in new prospects/buyers". If campaign tracking isn't appropriate, pass a variable that is set with the cookie that allows you to see new visitors who have this flag.
2) I believe there is a pre-made New vs. Returning visitors report. Monitor the ratio daily for the first 2 weeks, then weekly should be enough after that.
3) Report on the entry form separately. There's a few things you may want to look at
a) the ratio of visits that have the parameter from #1 vs ones that don't
b) the average visit duration of visits that match a visit-level include filter on that page.
c) overall percent of visits to the site that include views from that page.

Hopefully some of these ideas will get the ball rolling for you.