Since there are so many ways now for an Omniture customer to manipulate their data (standard data collection, APIs, processing rules, VISTA rules, marketing channel processing rules, etc…), I thought it’d be helpful to share this graphic (credit to Omniture) of the order with which data is processed:

First off, I am not privy to the upgrade timeline and what’s involved there in terms of who gets upgraded and when that happens. That being said, I think that it is important for everyone to be aware of both the benefits of upgrading as well as the customer-side factors that might slow down the decision to migrate. I will also preface this with the fact that I am excited for every client that I work with to get upgraded, as the new features and implementation capabilities will greatly increase what they can do with their analytics investment. SiteCatalyst 15 Migration Benefits: The new context...

A big deal was made at the Omniture Summit of the segmentation available in SiteCatalyst 15. While the advantage of this feature is obviosu to everyone, I do not consider this to be the most significant part of the upgrade of SiteCatalyst to version 15. I consider the greatest new feature of SiteCatalyst 15 to be two things, that when put together, could change how every implementation of SiteCatalyst is undertaken and managed on a regular basis. These two things are context variables and processing rules. Below, I will detail what context variables and the processing rules are, and then discuss...

SAINT Classification is one of the most useful features of Adobe SiteCatalyst. However, most company’s that use the tool use it simply for the ability to upload single dimensions for a key. For example, if a company is uploading SAINT classifications for marketing reporting and analysis for paid search, they will often upload classifications such as the following for paid search tracking codes: Search Engine Name Paid Search Campaign Name Paid Search Ad Group Paid Search Keyword Phrase Paid Search Match Type While all of this information is critical for the effective analysis of paid search...

Updated on November 3, 2011: Apparently custom reports cannot be copied to other report suites, not can they be shared with other report suites. So in essence, if you plan to customize the UI across multiple report suites with custom reports, you will have to duplicate your efforts for each report suite. I highly recommend that you go to the Omniture Idea Exchange and “promote” the request to make custom reports able to be copied to other report suites: http://ideas.omniture.com/t5/Adobe-Idea-Exchange-for-Omniture/allow-to-share-custom-reports-across-suites/idi-p/5763 Original Post: Without...

Omniture SiteCatalyst is without a doubt one of the best Web analytics solutions out there. However, like all analytics solutions it be can difficult to implement when you are not a dedicated programmer or you do not have the available programming resources at your disposal. Many times Web analytics and other people that are responsible for the Web analytics function within a company will also not have access to server-side code to implement better page names and to set events and variables when you need to in certain circumstances. And this is where the Omniture SiteCatalyst plug-ins enter the...

All visitors are not the same, they can come in through different marketing channels, enter your site at different pages and view different parts of your site. One of the great things about the Web and the tools that we have, is that you can not only know that your visitors are doing different things, you can measure and then act on it. TV for example has to rely on sampled, panel services (i.e. Nielsen) where you might make an estimation about the different groups of people that saw your ad. On the Web, we know what visitors viewed and exactly who viewed it! If you have a robust analytics solution,...

Most of the blogs and literature that you will see on the Web about site optimization is going to be about e-commerce Web sites. The reason? Anyone can understand your results when you say you’ve increased conversion rate by 20%, thereby seeing an incremental lift in revenue of $100,000 over the next 30 days. The case for optimization here is pretty obvious. This doesn’t mean that content sites and publishers that aren’t selling a product on their site should not be optimizing their sites. One common excuse on the part of a lot of content and publisher sites is that they are not...

So yesterday there were press releases from both Omniture and WPP announcing their partnership, and the $25,000,000 common stock investment by WPP in Omniture. You can see these respective press releases here (they’re the same really): Omniture: http://www.omniture.com/press/635 WPP: http://www.tinyurl.com/wppomniture  I think that this was very big news, and that it will impact both Web analytics practitioners and other vendors alike. As I see it, here are a few (a very short, brief list) of the ways this partnership might affect us practitioners of Web analytics: With Omniture training...

One of the most simple questions asked in analytics is, “How much money are we making from our paid search campaign?” The problem is that there are many ways to answer this question, as well as many factors from the Web analytics side that can created different answers. As a Web analyst working within a team of more traditional SQL-using, data analysts, explaining how an analytics solution answers the above question can be challenging. The 3 primary variables that are a part of a revenue attribution methodology include: The order with which the campaign credited with the sell occurs...