I first saw Omniture Discover 2.0 (or D2 as they affectionately call it) about a month ago, and have been playing with it for about three weeks. It’s an extremely impressive and useful tool in many ways, although I must admit there are many aspects of it and implications of it that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around yet.

In this post I’ll describe many (but not all) aspects of the product, and in the next I’ll offer some initial thoughts on what it all means.

D2 lets you access and look at data from Omniture SiteCatalyst and Omniture SearchCenter in new and very interesting ways. While it is entirely a compliment and extension of the core reporting capabilities of SiteCatalyst (and even the Excel Tool) in many ways it makes you wish that it was a replacement for them – it’s so much more fluid and dynamic and responsive.

The interface is striking in many ways – starting with the very cool Site Analysis screen which shows selected pages of your site in a dynamic 3d representation on a X-Y axis chart, complete with flow animation in the arrows which link the pages.

(Note you can click on this and all images in this post to zoom for more detail)

There’s an incredible amount of information packed in this display: the height, width, and color of each page-cylinder tell you the number of visits, page views, and revenue participation of each page (at least initially, you can assign other metrics to these attributes). The page’s position on the Y axis tells you how deeply into the site the users (on average) encountered that page, and the X axis tells you how many orders where generated by page visitors (you can change these assignments too). The thickness of the arrows between pages tells you how many visitors followed that path. And if all that isn’t enough you can rotate the whole space in 3-dimensions and zoom in and out freely. This baby has sizzle.

But sizzle aside this is very useful. Instantly you can see which pages are producing traffic but not revenues. (Drop a bunch of different category pages on the page for example, and the winners and loser pretty much line up left to right.)

There are nearly-equally cool visuals and capabilities for fall-out funnels (with the ability to define groups of pages as a single level), next page flow (with the ability to interactively follow the chain endlessly), and virtual focus groups (which let you watch animated versions of the complete paths of selected individual site visitors).