This 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...

A lot of people have lost their jobs over the last few months, and a lot more probably will. Most people in analytics know that there is more demand for skilled Web analysts than there is supply. So, would you say that experts in analytics have recession-proof jobs by default? I keep seeing a lot of articles and content poping up on the Web about recession-proofing your job. Most of them say that you need to appear indespisible (perception is reality, right?) as well as be more of a jack-of-all-trades. Here’s a podcast from Harvard Business Review on this: Harvard Business IdeaCast 110: How...

Several companies have released as of lately social networking applications targeted at business users as opposed to the general public. Some of these companies/applications include: Since I have become a regular (maybe addict is a better term) user of Twitter, I find that I now rarely use e-mail, and I haven’t even logged into an instant messenger program in weeks. The idea of microblogging seems to just work better for collaboration and communication than does email or IM. On Twitter, I made a comment about Present.ly being more like e-mail 2.0 than just another Twitter clone: http://twitter.com/jasonegan/statuses/926264496 Shortly...

So I was thinking the other day about how eBay has recently alienated it’s entire community. A few years ago, eBay was truely on the forefront of understanding what the next great thing on the Internet was going to be. That is, community. Of late though, eBay has made some poor decsions that have significantly impacted their own community in profoundly negative ways. A few months ago, eBay first changed their rating and review system in a way that angered many loyal community members. Next, eBay started veering away from what used to be it’s real business advantage, creating a consumer-to-consumer...

Followup to “Pages Aren’t Worth Anything” from Jason Egan on Vimeo. This is my first attempt at a video post here, so this might be a little rough. They should get better though! Summary: Pages aren’t worth anything, but what you’re selling is. Testing and optimization should replace analytics in determining how effective a page is at conversion. You should me optimizing and measuring the worth of your marketing accumen as opposed to some HTML. Look at a page or site this way. It is a marketing and sales tool. How good is it at marketing and selling? How good are...

I’m sure that some of you will disagree with the title of this post as soon as you see it, but hear me out (read me out?). Wether you are in publishing/content or straight up e-commerce, your pages are not making money inherently. Many executives and busines owners always have one of the two following question: “How much revenue has this page made?” “How well is this page converting?” To preface the rest of this post and explain the title of this post, I am going to say that pages do not make money, and they do not convert. Crazy, I know. But, what does make you...

As I have said in a previous post on this blog, being successful and being good at your job are two different things. Some have said via comments and Twitter, that this is sad but true. However, I disagree. This is simply a fact, and it is up to everyone to just recognize that there is a difference and learn how to best take advantage of this and become good at your job and AND successful at the same time! Since I work in e-commerce and Web analytics specifically. I’d like to start an open discussion on how to be both. First there’s being good at your job. In terms of Web analytics,...

I’m not sure of others’ experiences, but ts has seemed to me that most of the time I provide a very insightful analysis to management and they are very pleased, the inevitable followup on their part is, “can we start getting this every week?” So while Web analysts want to provide analysis as opposed to becoming report monkeys, are we just creating more work for ourselves with our great analyses? More importantly, how do we get management to stop turning every analysis into a “regular report?” I think that the answer here is 3 fold: Learn how to set management...

I’ve wanted to document what I’ve done with Omniture Data Sources for a while now. Data Sources is one of the most powerful features of Omniture, with very little practical documentation. Data Sources allows you to upload any data and integrate it into SiteCatalyst (and Discover) reporting. The real power lies in the fact that you can upload offline data about transactions that were completed online. For example, most e-commerce businesses have returns and cancels. With Data Sources you could upload your data for returns and cancels and see it in reporting for marketing channels as...

Looks like Apple has taken a page from Twitter’s playbook regarding the 2.0 update for the iPod Touch: Twitter in case you didn’t know: