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...

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...

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...

Now that Omniture has APIs and WebTrends is doing more sophisticated things with their tools that have ODBC connections, I was thinking, should we Web analysts consider adding to our skill set? Primarily, should we begin to add programming abilities to our skill set? Things like APIs are great, but only if you have the ability to create applications that access these APIs. Should we Web analysts start learning languages like PHP, SOAP and XML so that we can create our own applications? Also, most popular Web analytics technologies are based upon JavaScript (from the implementation side anyway)....

With all of the APIs that are out there for Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., I can’t say that I surprised to see that Omniture has now started a contest to see what creative developers can do with the Omniture APIs. I received an e-mail the other day that stated that the first prize would receive $10,000! That’s right, $10K. The interesting thing here is that the deadline for entry into the contest is some time in early February, before the 2009 Summit, where the winners will be announced. Not a lot of time to develop something new if you haven’t already started. I think that...

This post is just to note a couple of things that I have discovered recently about Omniture dashboards. I hope that this might be of help to some of you that use Omniture. Faster Omniture Dashboards File this one under what is most likely common sense. But, I have seen many Omniture SiteCatalyst dashboards take forever and a day to run, or you will see the “unable to retrieve data” message. I at first thought that this might be due to the fact that I had seen this most often on dashboards for Omniture variables that were using 20 – 30 classifications. Maybe using that many...

So I have access to the new updates to Google Analytics now. My first impressions of the updates are very positive. The two big additions (aside from the API) are the custom reports and segmentation. The custom reporting actually went a little beyond my expectations. The big thing here that Google has done is that you can create reports that are very deep (4 levels or so) and that you can correlate across different report dimensions easily. Now Google just needs to implement more variables and events to take this to the next level. The segmentation works well too, but it’s a little clunky...

Okay, I’m not trying to make this an Omniture blog, but they keep releasing products/services and acquiring companies at startling rate the last few weeks. That being said, I received an e-mail from them this morning about launching a beta of something called the “Omniture Developer Connection.” At first glance, this appears to be just a repository for documentation on Omniture’s Web services. One BIG thing that I did notice, is that: There is now a Discover API and accompanying documentation! This is great to see, and I hope that Omniture gives some more attention to this...