Why You Should Be Using Omniture Discover
Posted by Jason Egan in Web AnalyticsOct 6th, 2008 | 9 responsesThis of course only really applies to current Omniture customers or those thinking about moving to Omniture as a new customer. I’ll also preface this further by saying that I am on Omniture’s Customer Advisory Board (CAB) for Discover (On-demand).
Anyway, there are several reasons that you should be using Discover and several reasons why you need it in addition to the normal SiteCatalyst offering.
Reasons why Discover is a good supplement to SiteCatalyst Include:
- SiteCatalyst’s power is in providing reports and delivereing those reports and dashboards on a regular basis. The power of Discover on the other hand is to enable you to perform true exploratory analyses.
- SiteCatalyst has limits in terms of how far you can drill down into data, and also limts in what you can drill down to. In Discover, you can drill down to anything, as deep as you like.
- Drilling down in SiteCatalyst only works from the moment it’s enabled, and is not retroactive. In Discover, everything can be drilled down to, and everything is retroactive. So if you think of something that you’d like to look at a few months ago, you can. Everything is retroactive from the moment you enable Discover though, not before.
- In SiteCatalyst, you can segment anything by using what are called ASI segments. However, ASI segments aren’t flexible enough that you can easily change the segments definitions themselves in the middle of an analysis. In Discover, you can change segments on the fly with a simple drag-and-drop.
- Omniture Data Warehouse can deliver segmented data to you, but can take 1 – 3 days to do so. In Omniture Discover, you will get your data in just a few seconds. This allows you to see the results of segmentation quickly so that you can know how to best craft a Data Warehouse request for large dumps of data.
- There is no additional implemenation for Discover. Once it is enabeled, all of your reports are ready to go.
So these are some of the reasons that Discover can supplement your use of SiteCatalyst.
So what are the things that you can do in Discover specifically that make it a great tool for deep analysis?
- Dashboards and regular reports are often and eventually ignored. Deep analyses of segmented data allows you to create presentations of informaiton that most others will not have access to.
- Quick creation of segments . Why look at just every visit on your site, when you can look at:
- First time visits
- Return visits
- Visits that include certain pages on your site
- Visits where your help content is viewed
- Visits where no purchases are made
- Visits where people fallout of your purchase funnel
- Visits where people used internal site search
- And many more…
- Omniture Discover is fast. When starting Discover (a Java application), it imports a data set. Once that’s imported, you need only wait a couple of seconds for anything to run. When using a Web-based application (as are most Web analytics solutions), you have to make a request of a server, the server gets the data that you need and then you are delivered the information in your browser. This can leave you waiting for a report until you are frustrated.
- If you are running A/B and multivariate tests, Discover will let you analyze test results in a deeper way that can make determining the winner more clear-cut.
- After SiteCatalyst has all of your reporting and dashboards built out, Discover is the tool where true Web analysts will work on a regular basis.
If you have any specific questions about Discover, let me know. Also, if you are already using Discover, do you have any particular segments or analyses that you like to look at on a regular basis? Any tips or tricks of your own you’d like to share? Leave a comment and share anything that you have!
9 Responses to “Why You Should Be Using Omniture Discover”
Leave a Reply
About Me
Hi Jason,
You’re saying that Discover doesn’t require any particular implementation? Not even a little evar of its own? Well, I guess the reason why everybody is not on it yet is pricing. Does it add a lot?
Thanks
That’s right, Jacques. There are no eVars required to implement Discover. Discover is more like a new GUI that is dropped on your existing data.
As for why not every Omniture customer is using Discover, I’d say it’s most likely a combination of cost as well as Omniture not pushing too hard on the sale. Most people seem to be unaware of exactly what you can do with Discover. I’m not really sure of the exact cost of the tool off the top of my head. The cost is probably tied somewhat to the volume of server calls that your site is creating.
Wow! That makes it way easier to implement than WebTrends Visitor Intelligence, which requires some special implementation. WebTrends however has said that VI runs on a true relational database, which Discover is not according to them. Any comment?
Also, the low rate of adoption could probably be due to lack of human power. Those slice’n dice products need to be attended by people who are able to find valuable insights within all the possible combinations of variables.
Hi Jason,
I’ve seen sample rates across the board in report suites, from 1:50 on large portals to 1:2 on a automobile site. We’ve been told to use the data as directional, you might want to add that because I have seen a lot of confusion lack of awareness around sampling and how it impacts the numbers.
Cheers
Aman
It is true that the data can be sampled based on the amount of data that you’re sending to Omniture, Aman. I would be willing to bet that most of the sampling will hopefully be gone in the future though. I know that this is an issue for some people.
I’ve held off on biting the Discover carrot my Account Manager and others keep dangling primarily because of the disconnect between online and offline data. Jason, I know that you’ve used Transaction ID’s in Omniture to upload offline data into SiteCatalyst. Does that information transfer and work seamlessly into Discover? If so, I’ll take a new look.
Thanks for the comment, Craig! Anything you push into Omniture is indeed available in Discover. In fact, the recent update that they’ve made to their processing platform ensures that the data in Discover is no more latent (daily at this time) than it has always been. So, any of the offline data that we push in at the transactional level can be seen in Discover.
Hi Jason,
I found your blog during my search for Omniture Discover guides. It’s definitely a powerful tool, but I feel that to really get the most out of it I could use some more guides on advanced segmentation. Trial and error doesn’t seem to be a good method for learning in this case, unfortunately :p
If you know of any good advanced segmentation guides, I’d appreciate it!
Thanks!
Jason,
Would I be upload offline data that is not connected to SiteCatalyst? For example, I have gift card transactions from our POS, so I have a variety of data points (frequency, avg ticket, location/DMA, recency, etc) that I would like to use Discover to perform some analysis on. I know it appears to be geared more toward web data, but it seems like a great tool to be able to also use to process some of our offline data as well.