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...

Reading a recent blog post from Jeffery Eisenberg (Realistic Expectations For Conversion Rate Optimization) made me once again think about how a lot of companies fail to really commit to testing and site optimization once they purchase a tool (Test&Target, SiteSpect, Optimpost, Goolgle Web Site Optimizer, etc.). Right now, I see site optimization where I saw Web analytics about 5 years ago in terms of tools and commitment. A few years ago, businesses were ready to go out and buy the biggest and best Web analytics solution out there, without having any kind of dedicated resources to leverage...

Creating a hypothesis should be one of the first things that you do when you start running A/B and multivariate tests on your Web site. Just because you have the keys to an optimization tool (even a free one like Google Web Site Optimizer), you should NOT be starting out saying, “hey, let’s see if changing this button from ‘Add To Cart’ to ‘Buy Now’ works better!” It’s vital to understand that you need to start with a hypothesis and then set clear goals before you start testing. Setting a hypothesis is not a difficult thing to do, and it will help...

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...

I received an e-mail this morning that Omniture has acquired Mercado, one of the largest players in on-site search. The funny thing here is that Omniture has only recently started selling the rebranded VisualScience product (which was formerly a WebSideStory product) for site search. I am guessing that Omniture will take the same direction here as they have with their Discover product, making the VisualScience product a “lite” version compared to their newly acquired product from Mercado. Here’s the e-mail Omniture sent this morning making the announcement: Dear Omniture Customer, We...

I was thinking today about the potential impact of social media on the traditional classroom environment. There were several thoughts that came to me about how social media is going to seriously change the education game for students that are utilizing it: It can’t be stopped. Students are going to use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. whether educators tell them to or not. In the past, the sharing of information in the classroom was considered cheating. Now, the Information Age is all about sharing and collaboration. Should the idea of sharing knowledge in the classroom between students...

Most experts in Web analytics dream of working for a business that makes data-driven decisions. Look at it as justification for our career choice. However, I think that this needs to be taken a step further: We should be concerned with creating an action-oriented culture, not just a data-driven one. Having access to advanced Web analytics tools, we can churn out meaningful analyses that management will most certainly use in making decisions. So, that means that we work for a data-driven company, which is a great thing indeed. The missing thing there is that the information isn’t nearly as...