You can, by the way, tag your RSS feeds to be tracked as a campaign in Omniture. Just add tracking codes to each URL in your RSS feed. Below is part of the the MovableType template for the ATOM feed for this blog - note the ?cid=rss codes as in each URL.

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>?cid=RSS_C360_blog_title" /> <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="<$MTBlogURL$>atom.xml?cid=RSS_C360_blog_title" />

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>?cid=RSS_c360Blog_<$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$>" />

Any SiteCatalyst users who have other tricks or implementation tips, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We held our first formal internal Intro to Web Analytics/Omniture SiteCatalyst training session today, and while I did a poor job of time planning (we only got through about 1/2 the planned 90 min presentation in a full 2 hours) the conversation and interest in continuing to push analytics to the center of our work was great.

There were 15-17 people in for most of the session, including everyone from members of the sales team to account managers to the search team to strategists to new-to-Omniture analysts to a person from our finance dept. (We've grown a lot lately, and I've not posted enough about that - will catch up there soon.)

Preparing for this was interesting, in that it caused me to try and define the role and potential for the kind of web analytics and analysis we strive to provide our clients in a way that only some blank PowerPoint slides and a deadline can.

At the core I think web analytics should assist in four areas - optimizing marketing resources, satisfying visitors, improving the site, and increasing revenues. Many of those are inter-related but each drives a hierarchy of questions which the analytics can help answer.

We talked a bit about having the right expectations with web analytics in relation to a project, how it was a long road from tagging to reporting to analysis to insights and finally to actions. And beyond preparing for that time-frame, how to think about web analytics software as a tool that enables a larger process where questions result in answers which beget more questions and only after a whole bunch of those cycles can you start to form opinions and then get to the work of starting to figure out what to do about it. Then of course worrying about how to convey the ideas and share with others (particularly time-pressed managers) all that data in a useful context to someone who didn't go through that process.

This is only a bit of what was touched on, and all that was before we even got into SiteCatalyst! You can see why we ran over time! But I thought it was important to set the tone before we looked at the software that this isn't a 'quick answer lookup system'. It's easy to get that impression but I think it leads to either disappointment or massive underutilization.

We did finally get a bit into SiteCatalyst, touring the core aspects of the interface and trying to establish the pattern by which it is used, at least in relation to generating basic reports. To summarize and help newbies consider all of their options I came up with this list:

1. Develop the question
2. Find right report
3. Set correct time-frame
4. Display relevant metrics
5. Configure The Graph
6. Sort appropriately
7. Sub-relate (optional)
8. Compare or Trend
9. Wish for more data/relations
10. Print
11. Email
12. Bookmark
13. Schedule
14. Set Alerts
15. Add to Dashboard
16. Share

What did I miss on this list? Comments appreciated.

Tomorrow we finish what we didn't today, getting through lots of sample screens and reports covering all the program basics. Next week we'll take a quick tour of the many advanced features.

Want a free seat at the class? Come work with us!

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just before the Omniture Summit (OMTR) began, the company announced a new professional certification for SiteCatalyst, and that initial tests to gain this certification would be offered during the conference.

Commerce360 Web Analyst Andrew Orsini was among the first to take and pass the test, earning his Omniture Certified Professional status for SiteCatalyst. Andrew had already been certified as an Omniture Certified Professional for Implementation.

Andrew was the first full-time web analyst to join Commerce360, and while he's since been joined by several others he's been the lead in our implementation work and worked on analysis for many of our clients. Congratulations to Andrew on both of these certifications.

“In today’s competitive environment, online marketers are looking for a way to distinguish themselves with current or potential employers,” said Steve Wellen, vice president of client services at Omniture. “The Omniture certification will assure businesses that the professionals they are hiring or staff they have in place have the highest levels of expertise. We encourage individuals that regularly use or plan to use Omniture solutions to gain these respected credentials.”

I too sat down to take the test while at the Summit, but some problems with the WiFi signal in the hotel resulted in the cancellation of that session. This disappointed certain people who thought it would be great fun to tease me were I to fail that test (I had perhaps given the indication that there was no chance of that...). But I'm glad to report that I was able to retake the test later, and while it was sufficiently difficult that I'll admit to being a bit nervous when hitting the final 'submit' button, I did also pass and gain my OCP : SiteCatalyst certification.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As usual, Jeffrey Eisenberg got me thinking. He was commenting on an interesting post about the cost (and intellectual ingredients) of developing a single landing page, and offered some ideas about indirect costs associated with that page (analysis, testing, etc.) which should also be considered when measuring ROI. He ends challenging agencies to defend their own ROI.

Why isn't there an easy way to collect the fixed and variable costs associated with a web page and then look at the ROI of that web page? Or a campaign?

In Omniture SiteCatalyst it's possible to use SAINT to assign the landing page associated with each keyword in paid search, and then see the expense, revenue, and ROAS. But assigning landing pages to tens of thousands of keywords is A LOT of work. The software knows which landing page each paid click arrived at - couldn't this be automatically populated? (hm, rule-based classifications, there's an idea...)

The problem is harder for other traffic sources. Even if you know the variable costs associated with clicks coming from other sources it can be very hard to get that data into the system. And assigning values in SAINT classifications against the tracking codes doesn't help because you can't do calculations against that data. I'd imagine Omniture Genesis connections properly pass this data from email and some other sources, but it's impractical to assume that you have that level of integration for all traffic sources.

A default classification of variable cost for each tracking code and fixed cost for each campaign name - both of which could be mathematically operated on as calculated metrics - would address this issue.

The idea of assigning a fixed cost to a campaign and having it automagically allocated across all of the activity for that campaign would be very interesting. What if we could see the ROI for a campaign based its direct variable costs, these variable costs plus direct fixed costs, these fixed and variable costs plus an allocation of staffing costs, etc? The numbers may be scary but the honest evaluation of these programs would be quite interesting.

The idea of a page having a fixed cost associated with it is interesting too, although in many cases assigning the combined fixed costs at the campaign level would be sufficient. However it's implemented there's little doubt there is a 'real world gap' between the available reporting in most current analytic software and the way marketers really consider and evaluate these campaigns. Implementing more complete cost accounting would go a long way to close this gap.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Commerce360 is pleased to be a sponsor for the 2007 Omniture Summit this coming week in Salt Lake City. Four of us will be roaming the halls - Lucinda Holt, Mike Smalls, Andrew Orsini, and me.

We also have a booth in the exhibit hall area. We'll be talking about how we work with Omniture clients to get the full potential from SiteCatalyst, SearchCenter, and Discover - as well as our complete marketing services offerings. But we'd also appreciate the opportunity to meet and say hello to our blog readers!

The past three years at Summit have been very informative, a lot of fun, and a great chance to meet Omniture users, partners, and staff. This year the event has outgrown the ski resorts where it has been held in the past, with 800 attendees expected. The agenda (pdf) looks great, and with so much going on in the Omniture world we're looking forward to learning a lot this week.

Daytime events aside, we hope the hot tubs and bars of Salt Lake City are ready.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After giving the team the requisite long-weekend after a big product launch, it's time to start requesting additional features in Omniture D2 :-)

Playing with the Site Analysis view for a little while and it's hard not to get addicted.

The 3D view is such a clear way to display and understand relationships between pages and underlying metrics. While the default X-Y metrics are page-depth and orders, another pairing I have found interesting is Page Views and Revenue (participation).

Using these, highly visited pages position themselves near the top of the chart, and high revenue pages to the right. So pages clumped at the upper-left are popular but non-producing, while pages at the lower-right are profitable but could use more traffic. There's lots to think about as you scan where your pages fall.

Which brings me to feature request #1. I'd like a 'smart' way of adding pages to the Site Analysis view. It would be great to be able to automatically add the top 5 or bottom 5 (ok, make it a user configurable number) pages from any defined Page Group based on how they would position themselves along the current X or Y axis. So in my example above, I'd like to be able to add the top 5 (or bottom 5) pages from the 'Categories' group that deliver the most (or least) revenue based on participation. Or the top/bottom 5 based on page views and see where they fall in terms of revenue.

Right now on a site with tons of pages, scrolling through the picker and trying out each one - while cool - can become slow and tiring. What I'm looking for (initially) is the winners and losers. As someone said at the NYC launch last week: "Let software do what software does best". Surely the software can find the winners and losers better than I can.

Bonus implementation idea: Let me draw a square region on the page and fill in all the pages that would land in that region.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Without claiming this is an exhaustive or even a well ranked list, here’s what I like best so far about Omniture D2 (Discover 2.0): (note see earlier post for a broader overview of Omniture D2)

• The ability to mix traffic, path, and commerce data freely. The distinction between these in SiteCatalyst is arbitrary and based on the legacy code base. It’s great to have that constraint lifted.

• Instant segment filtering. On the site analysis screen, the funnels, and other screens that don’t work like the report panels, you can instantly limit the data to any definable segment by just dragging a segment tag up the segment bar near the top of the page.

• Page groups. For funnels (and probably some other pages) you get to define named groups of pages and then apply the group where before you had to use an individual page.

• Unlimited nested metrics. This is the core of what the Report Panels allow, and while it can be easily over-used, it’s really powerful and makes it possible to find the answer a lot of otherwise unanswerable questions.

• The ability to customize segments. If you only want ‘purchasers’ to be people who bought more than 5 times, or to create a segment based just on people who purchase one particular category, you can.

• Dynamic and informative graphics. This capability could be blown-out tremendously, but the interactive pie-charts do a good job of making the information inside the data clear.

The interesting thing about this list is that it isn’t too different from my top 5 wish list for SiteCatalyst. That sounds like great news – my wishes have been granted. Except they haven’t. SiteCatalyst still has none of these capabilities, and I have a feeling it’s going to be even more frustrating to live without them there from here on out.

This gets to the core of some of what I haven’t quite come to grips with yet - the relationship between SiteCatalyst and Discover 2. Omniture positions it as ‘the next level of analysis’ and therefore a premium product and a targeted solution for ‘more complex problems’. There is certainly a lot of truth in that, but it also seems like quite a bit of spin or wishful thinking.

The truth is that D2 just solves certain web analytics problems better than SiteCatalyst, and does so because it was built later on a different platform and using newer technology. Certain core features are clearly advanced, but ironically when you look at D2 vs Discover 1 there are just as many features that are simply enhancements of existing stuff (such as new funnels and new page flow) as there are radically new ones (like Site Analysis). Omniture is walking a fine line in calling this a different product and charging for it incrementally – and substantially.

In some ways this is a great way to solve an age-old software development problem. Switching core code and underlying platform is nearly impossible to do in ‘mid-air’. Having Discover evolve from V1 to V2 and hopefully V3 as a stand-alone product from a development point of view provides us with the latest technology and makes the migration gradual and rather easy.

This is not to say that the two products substantially overlap today. SiteCatalyst is still full of features and reporting capabilities that Discover 2 doesn’t provide. Having SiteCatalyst exist enables the D2 guys to not have to spend time re-inventing everything so they can do all this cool new stuff – I get it. But a version or two down the road it’s hard to imagine that they don’t come back together.

Or perhaps the products just get rationalized better, one as a reporting plus a little analysis and the other as a hard-core analysis tool – but both delivered in a common interface and on a common platform. It’s easy to see how a very nice two-tier solution could be coming another version or two down the road.

These issues aside, I can’t imagine a serious SiteCatalyst user not wanting/needing Discover 2. It completely changes your relationship to the data, because the powerful interface lets you move through the data in so many directions at once – changing the reports, metrics, segments, time frames and visualizations all within a single interface. I was able to use this to discover and clearly document some very significant marketing issues for a client last week that I would have never been able to really know or certainly prove without D2.

I give Omniture a lot of credit for breaking off the team and resources to built D2. While it causes some temporary issues, I’m really glad to see the next generation of website analytics coming from inside Omniture rather than outside. We’ve made a substantial commitment internally and on behalf of our clients D2 gives me confidence that over the next 5+ years we’ve bet on the right team.

---
PS: If you’ve got questions about D2 please feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll answer them as best I can.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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).

Continue reading "Omniture Discover 2.0 (D2) Announced" »

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today Omniture (OMTR) announced the acquisition of TouchClarity, a software services firm which provides automated on-site behavioral targeting. This is a very significant acquisition because it highlights a move beyond web analytics as referenced in their recent adoption of the phrase ‘online business optimization platform’ as the way they describe the role they want Omniture to play for their customers.

It’s a great vision as it addresses both conceptual desire to have a master dashboard and control panel for all of your online marketing issues and the practical pain of having to deal with disparate systems from separate vendors. If Omniture is ultimately able to develop/deliver tightly integrated components for a wide range of the important services, and create a robust way to enable 3rd parties to smoothly connect their software via the Genesis API, the advantages for both Omniture and its customers would be tremendous.

Today’s reality is a highly frustrating mess as the core systems upon which an online business must depend that work almost entirely independently and often provide either conflicting data or disparate data that can’t be connected. We’re constantly forced to either wrestle disparate data sets to the ground (we win some, lose some), guess at connections, or just admit that we ‘can’t get there from here’.

One would think that sitting with complete web analytics data plus full access to reporting from an affiliate network, the email vendor, the video server, Hitwise/Comscore, SEO tools, CRM, multivariate landing page testing tool and oh-yes-the-legacy-back-office-slash-accounting-system would give a complete and detailed picture of an online business. Reality is not so pretty.

Continue reading "Omniture Acquires TouchClarity" »

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bob Dylan said that 'too much of nothing, can make a man ill at ease' and that can certainly be the case in SiteCatalyst.

When you view many standard reports, including just about all of those produced in the Finding Methods, Campaigns, and SearchCenter menus, the largest numeric value is assigned to None. This is accurate enough - when looking at a report of paid search keywords for example the None value reflects the visits or revenues that didn't come via any paid search keyword.

But these large None values can be disconcerting in the tabular data and just plain mess up the charts by ruining their scale. (Click the graphic to enlarge)

There are two solutions we've found. The first is to simply sort on a metric where None isn't the largest value - this pushes the None value to the bottom and knocks it out of the chart. Often that is enough to produce reports that satisfy.

The trickier solution is to use the Advanced Search dialog box, and enter None into the 'None of these words' option. In other words, find results without the word 'None'. There are a few reports where this doesn't work, but it usually works great. Bookmark your new None-free report and you're done with none.

We hope this trick is someday made obsolete by a simple toggle up in the yellow options area which would eliminate none, and/or by an option in the Display Options to universally turn off the display of what we usually find to be excess data.

{{ This is one of an occasional series of tips, tricks, and ideas for Omniture SiteCatalyst. Comments and additional suggestions are welcomed. }}

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While SiteCatalyst offers a wealth of reports and a lot of data, it isn’t unusual to wish you could access relationships between certain data elements that are for some reason not provided.

For example, if you can see a list of referrers (or referring domains), and a list of popular pages, isn’t it natural to want to know which page each of the referrers was pointing too? Or since you can see the list of search engines that sent you traffic and a list of keywords that produced visitors, wouldn’t you want to see which keywords were generated by each search engine? And if you’re paying the surcharge to get geosegmentation so you can find out which states or zip codes your visitors are coming from, wouldn’t you want to know which pages or keywords the visitors from any particular area where using?

I’d admit that I wanted all of these and more, but didn’t know how to get them.

Version 13 of SiteCatalyst introduced the Admin Tab and buried in there is the ability to turn on 2-item data correlations – which provides the solution to all of the wishes listed above and more. Using this feature you can define connections between any two data traffic elements, and then look at either element within or sub-sorted by the other.

When enabled, you get that little grey, yellow and green overlapping circles icon shown at above, which produces a fly-out menu of your correlation options. Choose one and you get a report listing just the correlated data for the item you've chosen. A 'Correlation Filter' option also appears in the yellow bar area above data reports with active correlations. This enables you to define multiple correlation filters simultaneously to view data - show me all pages where engine = google and statue = CA, for example.

Continue reading "Omniture SiteCatalyst Tips : Correlations" »

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're an Omniture SiteCatalyst user, you should be familiar with ClickMap, a browser plug-in for IE or FireFox that creates visual overlays to show you which links on your website are being clicked. ClickMap makes it easy to see and understand how visitors are interacting with navigation options you provide on your web pages - and I've never seen a case where that information didn't create an urgent desire to make some obviously needed changes.

But ClickMap has some 'hidden' capabilities. With a simple phone call you can enable a visual display of Revenue, Cart activity, Conversion stats, and more. Now beyond just seeing what links users are clicking, you can see which links are making you money. And if you thought clicks were motivating, what until you see dollar signs (or the lack of them).

The reason for the phone call is that, apparently, tracking and calculating this incremental information takes up processing power and storage space and so the good folks at Omniture don't bother tracking this stuff unless you ask them.

I'm sure a huge number of accounts and users don't even use ClickMap and so I can understand why the want to avoid burning cycles on data that isn't ever going to get looked at. On the other hand, recent experience suggests that many accounts don't even know these capabilities are available and therefore miss out on something that is a very great and obvious benefit of SiteCatalyst. A little 'prefs' button with the ability to enable additional tracking options in a simple 'ClickMap Admin' dialog box sure would be nice.

One of my favorite uses for ClickMap or RevenueMap is to instigate the death of the big dumb graphic. You know, those 16:9-style images that take up half to two-thirds of the pixels on a page while 'defining an image' or 'romancing the brand' or 'setting the tone' or whatever other inane justification is put forth, proving nothing more than the person in charge used to work in either paper-catalogs or at an advertising agency.

RevenueMap tests the will of these people by putting their superstitions up against good old fashioned greed. Looking at these fabulous images showcased for what they really are - huge areas of your web page where you are making absolutely no money - barriers which force visitors into the horizontal or vertical navigation bars which they're proven to detest as their only means of escape (except of course the every-present BACK button).

Of course it's also extremely useful in less philosophical situations. A typical catalog directory with a 4 × 6 grid of product images looks very different when you suddenly see that one or two items are pulling in huge percentages of the revenue and three or four are completely bombing. Is the problem the product, the offer, the promotion, the photography, etc - who knows. But this data visualization starts those questions being asked. Is there another product that could become 'promoted' into one of these more visible slots which would take better advantage of the space? Suddenly it's becomes a priority to figure that out.

ClickMap/RevenueMap is a great tool, and even better when used in tandem with Next Page Flow (which is conveniently accessible right from the ClickMap tray) which gives you an equally visual but altogether different view based on where visitors go. Follow these paths, or use PathFinder or Fallout to learn what becomes of people who take the various paths on a page, and you can usually find some prominent links that just never lead to very good outcomes. So why leave them there?

With Revenue enabled in ClickMap, and the 'Display Conversions' option selected, we get this informative box telling us how much we made, how this use of pixels did relative to all the others on the page, and what each raw click turned out to be worth. Note that all the numbers in this example have been changed to respect confidentiality (in case you recognize that jacket).

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Omniture today releases an update for SearchCenter, version 2.3 which is primarily aimed at improved compatibility with the various paid search engines. Here are the listed features:

• Additional Search Engine Support: Ask.com has been added to the high profile line up of search engines supported by SearchCenter. With these additions, SearchCenter now supports 8 primary search engines and 40+ total search Web sites throughout the content network.

• Multiple Currency Support: As companies employ multi-national search marketing campaigns, the ability to manage those campaigns from a single interface is becoming more important. SearchCenter 2.3 now supports the use of multiple currencies for reporting and management of search engine marketing activities.

• Support of Yahoo! (Panama) Release: SearchCenter has been updated to support the enhanced functionality of the new Panama release of the Yahoo! search engine that is scheduled for release in Q4 of 2006. Whenever you decide to migrate to Panama, SearchCenter will provide you with a powerful tool to manage your Yahoo! search marketing campaigns.

• Enhanced Exception Handling for Google: SearchCenter 2.3 has been enhanced to support the management of exceptions in regards to the Google search engine. This enhanced functionality streamlines the management of trademarked and other controlled keywords and text ad content.

• Support of Google Site Targeting: SearchCenter 2.3 now supports the use of the Google Site Targeting feature which allows the search marketer to choose which content network sites will display their ads.

We continue to add new clients to those we're managing with SearchCenter, and are glad to see timely support for Panama and other changes the engines are making. We've been testing 2.3 for a couple of weeks, and have just begun to import ASK campaigns and are getting our first MSN API-keys later this week. Watch this space for reviews on how SC performs with these newly supported engines.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weds evening Omniture hosted quite a swanky 'user group' meeting at the Forbes Gallery in NYC. There was great attendance with about 100 existing Omniture users representing many large and well known companies. (Check out dates for Omniture Cafe meetings in other cities.)

It was clear the Omniture users have quite a pent-up demand for information and a community. It didn't take 2 minutes into the first presentation for the audience to begin asking questions and sharing work-arounds and requesting features. That could have gone on for hours - and been very useful and informative.

But the agenda called for a series of presentation from both Omniture users and Omniture staff, and so we learned a little about how the product is used in the real world and some 'inside' information on current and future happenings at Omniture (it was an NDA event so I can't share too many details.)

I was pleased to have been invited to share some of our experiences, and pulled together what would have been a solid 45 minute presentation - but the agenda allowed only about 15 minutes (which I knew in advance, so the over-stuffing was totally my fault). Still I was able to share a bit about how we approach both implementation and ongoing analysis, and discuss some of the tough spots we got into and how we managed to wiggle out of them.

The most interesting part of preparing the presentation was stopping to think about our 'Analytics Philosophy'. It don't think I was able to fully or accurately define it, but here's what I came up with:

Continue reading "Omniture User Group Meeting" »

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Omniture SearchCenter version 2.2 ostensibly offers support for MSN AdCenter, but when you try to enable your AdCenter account you're asked for an API-Token which it turns out is only available by request from MSN (you won't find word of it in the AdCenter interface or even on Google).

I don't know yet how easy or hard it is to get one - the word is you have to have a sufficient monthly spend on MSN. BTW: This fact doesn't appear in the SearchCenter User Guide (v2) or the KnowledgeBase.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this release, we are providing new tools designed to increase your productivity and effectiveness. New features and functionality include;

The industry’s first portfolio of Business Optimizations: Business Optimizations package best practice expertise and technology into discrete offerings that help you achieve faster time-to-value from Web 2.0 technologies including:

• Social Networking
• Blog Value
• Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
• Dynamic Search
• Visitor Interaction Profiling

The industry’s first self-service administration console. The Online Business Administration Console helps you increase productivity and respond to business change more quickly through a graphical, self-service configuration tool.

Key features of the console include:

• Management of user access and permissions for individuals, groups and functions by roles and entitlements
• Fast and accurate creation, configuration and management of thousands of report suites which includes pre-configured suite templates tailored for specific industries and site types
• Support for the deployment and management of multiple currencies and languages
• Automatic generation of collection code by application type, including Web pages, wireless devices and rich Internet applications
• Open access to external systems through a Web Services API and software developer kit to automate all administrative functionality

That first item sounds great - looks like they're starting to address the 'death of the page' and the way in which blogs and web2.0 will/may replace it. The new Admin console looks great too (They've posted a training video on that one so I was able to take a look) and will save those who admin SiteCatalyst implementations a lot of time.

I hope we're safe in assuming that blog support and new admin tools do not a full digit upgrade make, so that leaves a lot more surprises for tomorrow. Here are a few random items from my personal wish-list:

• Completely revitalized charting. We currently have the charting equivalent of MacPaint - I want Photoshop.
• The ability to override date ranges stored in dashboards. Those dang things take way to long to create for every date range I want covered.
• Automatic treatment of Natural Search as a campaign via Paid Search Detection. If you tag all your other traffic sources, why leave organic search out of the reports.
• A toggle switch to turn 'None' off. Why do I want the data not included in what I'm looking at overwhelming my charts?
• An easy way to add a group of pages in a single slot in Fallout Reports. It would make landing page testing (and lots of other occurances) way easier to deal with.

These and a few dozen more important needs were discussed at the Omniture Summit in March, and I can't wait to see what the "New Features Fairy" actually has in store for us. I'll post some reports and thoughts as soon as we get a look.

Update: 12:35am EST, and Version 13 now appears in the log-on pull down menu, but when attempting to log in, 'access to that version' is not yet enabled.

Update: After using Version 13 for a day, it looks like the Admin features and web2.0 support ARE just about all that is there. I've added the 'Release Notes' after the jump. I hope to speak with someone at Omniture on Monday and better understand this release, and post more thoughts.

Continue reading "Omniture SiteCatalyst 13 Release" »

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Omniture SearchCenter has had something of a tortured history, first released in in early 2005 as a 1.0 version that was essentially a really bad mock up of a potential application, and then again in early 2006 as a 2.0 version which was essentially a very poor beta.

But the company and the teams assigned to it persevered, and half a dozen painful months later they turned version 2.1 into a stable if still unimpressive application. Today version 2.2 hits the streets, and to their credit they’ve included the #1 requested feature from a ‘User Advisor Council’ meeting held at the Omniture Summit this past March: bi-directional synchronization with the search engine management consoles. It’s worth noting that this feature didn’t even seem to be on their roadmap when the users made clear what a priority it was.

The Sync feature allows PPC managers to make keyword, campaign, or bid changes directly in the Google, Yahoo (and now MSN) interfaces and then sync these changes back into SearchCenter. Previously once you began using SearchCenter, you had to make all changes via the SC interface. And the SC interface is far from intuitive or efficient. Also, since the engines are constantly adding new features, SearchCenter users were perpetually behind, forced to wait until Omniture moved these capabilities into the interface.

There is still a lot of work to do on Omniture SearchCenter, but the company has dramatically extended the resources assigned to the project, and they’re hard at work on version 3.0.

The challenge is that SearchCenter needs tremendous work on both the management and the reporting sides of its capabilities. The improved paid search reporting that SearchCenter enables today is the reason we choose to use it and recommend it to our clients. But there is far more breadth and depth of reporting, and a lot of report formatting and navigational issues that could be dramatically improved. I personally hope they focuse 80% of their efforts in this area, and make work on campaign and bid management a clear 2nd priority.

There are several reasons I advocate this approach:

1. The engines themselves have pretty good interfaces for keyword management, bid changes, and campaign organization.
2. SearchCenter has to replicate and implement management functionality against Google, Yahoo, MSN and other engines – meaning the workload per feature is very high.
3. Omniture is never going to keep up with four changing management interfaces in terms of features, it’s a perpetual game of catch up.
4. Omniture’s strength (in SiteCatalyst) is as a reporting system. They don’t help you to manage your website or marketing campaigns, they report on them. I think this is the right model for SearchCenter too.
5. Reporting alone is a huge and important task. It will take them another year or two to really nail it at its full potential. Any effort on management takes away from that.
6. The reality is that the entire current keyword management interface in SearchCenter is a UI and logical disaster and needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.

So the choice they face is between doing something rare and valuable and directly in their expertise sweetspot, or something that at best duplicates existing functionality and at which they’ve proven rather incompetent. Doesn’t seem like too tough of a management decision.

The one exception (and there may be others) is bid automation. Conceptually that is a value-added feature, although I contend their current implementation has some critical flaws. But more importantly, with Google and Yahoo adding features like day-parting and position targets, isn’t it likely that they come in with very good to great business rules for bidding and make this feature unnecessary as well?

So we’re very glad to see Omniture SearchCenter 2.2, and congratulate the teams there on listening to their customers and getting the product to this stage. We’re looking forward to version 3.0 and beyond, and hope the listening continues.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the great unheralded features of SiteCatalyst is the Omniture Dashboard Player, which allows you put a slideshow of your website analytics stats in a resizable window.

This enables you to keep up with what's going on your website while doing other tasks, or even set up a display to share web stats with people in your office - helping to create a metrics-based culture for your site. The player can display any images from SiteCatalyst dashboards - so you can see long term trends, todays' stats (in essentially real time), and 'reportlets' which have progress speedometers and thermometers.

After re-installing the Dashboard Player today, I received an error message saying that the MSVCR80.dll was missing. (Note that I'm using the Office 2007 beta and that may be why.) A web search taught me that this is a piece of the Microsoft .NET framework, and that apparently lots of programs have problems finding this dll. I'm not sure if it was an old one that MS no longer uses but 3rd parties have come to rely on, or why this is common. In any case, I also found a website where you can download the MSVCR80.dll. Then just copy it to "Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/OFFICE12" folder and all is well.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my pet peeves about SiteCatalyst is its insistance on including data for the 'None' category in just about all of the 'Commerce' reports. For example, when requesting a summary of inbound traffic generated by natural search engines, the report below is presented (click to zoom), in which the non-organic traffic completely overpowers any sense of the relative performance of the natural search engines.

The relative strength of the search engines alone can be seen in the Traffic Reports section, but not with revenue numbers (and lots of other data points) attached. There is a way to see the relative strength of the engines in Commerce, by simply sorting by some variable where 'None' ranks low, as shown below, but the axis percentages still take the 'None' data into account.

A trick that works in some reports, is to use Advanced Search to include only data elements that do not include the word 'None' but that trick doesn't work on this report.

Anyone know another way around this? Else let's hope Omniture adds a toggle box to turn on and off the inclusion of 'None' data in this and the many other reports where this problem occurs. This was a relatively popular request at the Omniture Summit session run by CTO Brett Error in March. It would be great to get some feedback as to how this, and other requests made there, are working their way onto the future release schedule.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our friends and partners at Omniture went public today, and we congratulate them. BusinessWeek takes a purely rear-view-mirror financial view, while TheStreet.com provides some more thoughtful analysis.

Commerce360 is an Omniture Platinum Level Partner (although they still have our old Precommerce Group logo on their site), and we've been actively using SiteCatalyst for almost two years. Our decision to use and (to the degree possible) standardize on SiteCatalyst and their SearchCenter product has been based on both the technical capabilities of the product and the business requirements of this kind of partnership.

On the technical side, it's the extensive capability to customize SiteCatalyst to specific client needs that we find the most beneficial. Our favorite features include:

• The virtually unlimited support of custom variables for traffic, commerce, and 'success' events
• The ability to highly customize reports (changing visible data columns, defining calculated metrics, defining custom A|B comparison timeframes)
• The many available methods of accessing data and reports (bookmarks, dashboards, email alerts, site overlay, desktop player, and excel-integration)
• The ability to 'subrelate' just about any data element - meaning you can see sales revenue sorted by traffics source with a secondary sort on products sold, or see revenue by product category with a secondary sort by campaign.

On the business side, the company and people of Omniture have been consistently impressive. Growing a sales and support organization as fast as they've been growing, and with the technical depth of a product like theirs is very hard. As a personal 'worst case scenario' for sales or support people who aren't up-to-snuff, I have only complimentary things to say about the many people we've worked with at Omniture. Someone there knows how to hire and/or train for a software and service organization. They also know how to stock and operate a hot tub at 1am, but that's another story...

There are plenty of challenges for Omniture. I could (and have) written feature request lists a hundred miles long, scaling their infrastructure to maintain performance needs to be a priority (they handle more analytics page tracking than all other competitors combined, so it's a big job), and there are dozens of very important 3rd party integrations that really need to be a priority (athough their new API should help spread the workload on that one).

But most importantly the senior team has the right philosophy about what web analytics is and how it needs to become a unified marketing dashboard. They're attacking the problem in a substantial way appropriate for the size and complexity of what lies ahead. I'm glad to see the capital markets provide them with additional resources, because I'm highly confident that the tools and capabilities we'll see as a result will benefit all online marketers (or at least those of us who are Omniture users) in both the short and the long term.

We really believe analytics is the driver of great online marketing, and I look forward to writing a lot more detailed posts about how we use SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter to drive marketing programs for our clients.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our partners at Omniture announced yesterday a new tool to improve the quality and complexity of tracking user behaviours in Flash applications. (Read the new release).

It's called Omniture ActionSource, and per the release:

Historically, developers have had to manipulate data through both JavaScript and ActionScript in order to generate Web analytics reporting on their Flash-based applications. Not only was this two-step process complicated and cumbersome, but the integrity of the data could be compromised during the translation process from one language to the other, rendering unreliable results. With native ActionScript tracking, Omniture ActionSource eliminates the programming communication barrier—capturing data directly from the source to provide true and accurate metrics, while also simplifying the analysis processes. Because ActionSource is independent of any JavaScript interaction, this method not only provides precise and easy reporting, but also enables the portability of applications across Web properties. AutoTrack, a key feature of ActionSource, allows Omniture customers to measure Flash activity without the need to code individual elements of the Flash application. Omniture AutoTrack can listen for click action to determine if the click is related to a button or movie clip activity, then automatically capture and send that data for reporting—something no other solution has been able to accomplish.

According to Clickz, the technology also enables Omniture's site overlay technology, ClickMap, to disply the clicks within Flash applications.

The way the web is presented is changing radically, as video proliferates (increasingly in flash players) and AJAX ads more dynamism to how pages behave. It's great to see Omniture dramatically addressing the evolving needs of analytics users.

{Hat tip to Random Analytics}

Bonus Link: Next Generation Web Analytics.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)