theclickscount.com

So if you have not spotted this then its worth a visit. Omniture’s blogs are very useful for newbies and experienced users. One of the latest post there gives an overview of how to use Omniture Excel Client. This tools great for those who are used to using Excel as the number cruncher. For those users who simply don’t want to log in to SiteCatalyst. 

There are some interesting methods for Excel work group distribution that the author states they will be covering in a later post. This would be interesting as I have so far failed to get the publish list feature working correctly with dashboards. So if you are looking for a build it once, report on many report suites type distribution then this could be the way to go.

How to report on Google news visits in Sitecatalyst? I have heard this question time and time again and it amazes me that this is still unnecessaryily hard thing to achieve in Omniture. 

The problem with Google news referrals is that they come from news.google.* depending on location. So the most obvious place to look for this is in finding methods. Referring domains only does top level domains so you have stats for say google.com and google.co.uk, some of these numbers will include news.google.* but you can’t separate them in that report. Omniture does not class news.google.* as a search engines so no point checking that out. So for the user who does not have data warehouse they need to check out the referrer report.  

The referrer report is a powerful beast it contains the exact URL of every referrer sent to your site. So run this report and do a search for news.google and you should get every URL from news.google and the associated visits. If you have a high traffic site with a large number of referrers then you may start to experience issues running this report. Its typical for this report to be slow and sometimes even time out completely.

The next challenge you have is how do I trend on multiple line items to get an overall trend from Google news rather than by URL. So you can’t really do this in SiteCatalyst you need to look at running a datawarehouse report or using the excel client and doing some work if your favourite MS app. But thats another story.

Browsing through the Genesis plug ins we can see that there is a working solution for Dart for Advertisers ready to go. I can see the use for DFA but this is not much help for the publishing world and DFP. So does anyone out there have any experience integrating DFP with Omniture? 

Specifically I am looking at trying to pass data not just about the ad-tags on the page but also some of the other key info. Item one is weather a campaign ad was shown or was it remnant inventory? If a campaign was shown then what that DFP campaign was. 

This type of tracking then lays the ground work for the media space holy grail of understanding ad revenue by page and site section etc. 

There were rumours that a Dart for publishers Genesis plug-in was in the works but that’s a long time ago now and still no word on this. So if there’s any info on this topic let me know via the comments.

A few months back Omniture released sitecatalyst 14. Apart from a major interface overhaul, the other big announcement was inbuilt video metrics. This came as great news for all those sites who rely on video content or video promotional material. Traditionally video tracking in Omniture was quite tricky to implement and relatively expensive due to the need to use multiple sucess events to achieve a reasonable level of detail.

So whats the problem? So a tradditional implementation of video may call say a sucess event for the play of the video and sucess event for 50% viewed and a sucess event for 100% completed. That way with a bit of calulated metric majic you can tell how many people stopped watching between the play and 50% and between 50% and 100%. Depending on how granuala you wanted to go that meant a sucess event for every percentage marker in a video and not just an event, but a server call. The problem with server calls is they cost money.

So to get round this issue in Sitecatalyst 14 Omniture proposed to use a cookie to store the data at certain set points during the play back of a video, they event offered to store a by the second value for a complete picture of playback rates.  This is great for Omniture no processing on the events or second by second because they store it in the cookie. But you have to process this information at some point right? It’s no good for anyone if that data just stays in the cookie. So Omnitures solution processes the data in the cookie either at the end of the video play or when the user navigates elsewhere on the site. Still great until you consider the action of a user ending a video play by closing the browser or typing a new URL in the address bar. So in that instance assuming the browser does not delete the cookie Omniture will process that data on the next visit.

The problem for publishers and indeed e-commerce type slots that return visit may never happen. We all hope that it will but there’s no gaurantee that that’s going to happen. So in a situation where you are relying on Omniture video data to say predict video ad-revenue or other important stats that need to be more accurate that qualitive this could be an issue. The only option available in this case is to stick with the traditional method of video reporting. The good news for all is Omniture will be introducing a new feature in video reports which allows you to use the same preset video variables but set them to process on trigger rather than from the cookie. The bad news is this will still cost you server calls. But you can’t have everything.

The new feature is expected in the next point release available before 2009. Will report more when its released.

Have a video metrics technique, question or story you would like to share? Comment away!

The Internet is abuzz with the Google Chrome. Only been using the new browser for about 30 Min’s but it seems very fast so gets the thumbs up from me. If the cartoon is true it should be more secure as well which can only be a good thing. 

The other thing is that I thought I would check Omniture Browsers to see what the up take has been like. But alas Omniture fails or its a possible case of no one has visited my clients web pages using chrome … unlikely. So come on Omniture sort the browsers section out so we can see stats for Chrome. Maybe not the Top of your list right now but for some sites the insight into early browser usage is very important. Anyone seen interesting stats in their chosen analytics package?

Update early chrome benchmarks

Update 03/09/08 Google Chrome is now showing up in the browser report in sitecatalyst.

Update 07/09/08 Google Chrome now measured in Google Analytics

So having spent some time tweaking in site search to try and get the best set of results for any given keyword. This is quite a tedious task and also much more of an art form than a science. The perception of a good search result vairies from one person to the next. So what’s next? Well ideally before even starting to optimise the in site search experience, take the time to implement search metrics. Search metrics will show the sucess or failiure of any in site search optimisation techniques and turn an art into a science. This article explores what approaches to take using Omniture sitecatalyst search metrics.

There are multiple approaches to effective in site search measurement dependant on what features are available in the Omniture account, what search technology is in use, what the purpose of the site is etc ..

If you are using a popular commerical in site search tool, you may find that integration is already available via the Genisis platform, this should take a lot of the hardwork out of your project. For products such as Endeca and Fast Enterprise search there’s some out of the box integrations.

The Genisis search platform integrations are quite specific and often product e-commerce activity focused. So even if you are using a pre integrated technolog you may find the rest of this article useful.

The two questions we want to answer, are people converting (e.g clicking on results) and are people who click on those results completing sucess events somewhere on the site? If you are e-commerce focused you may just be interested in the latter question, however this technique will help you answer both of these questions.  The technique requires full access to the merchandising/conversion functionality of sitecatalyst. We will be using Products, evars and events, so get a basic understanding around these principles before reading on.

This example covers a typical publishing site integration. If you are implementing a e-commerce type solution you may want to focus your metrics around products, this is not the best approach for that model. The values are passed almost exclusively on a click event rather than on a page view. When a user types a keyword in the seach box and clicks on search or presses return the following info is passed.

product = “site search”

event 1= “insite search”

evar 1 =”keywords”

evar 2 = “filters applied”

Results page is served. Here you have the option of defining multiple sucess events based on the result which is clicked. One approach might work by assigning event 2 to result 1, event 3 to result 2 -3 and event 4 to result 4 or more. Each one of these events can then be passed on the click of the relevant result along with the product = insite and the correct evars.

Adding event 2, 3 and 4 together and dividing that by the number of searchs (event 1) in a calculated metric will give you the conversion rate for search.

The downside of this approach is depending on how granularly you want to measure conversion against placmement you could use a number of sucess events.

If you require an understanding of exactly what number result converts well. Consider using an additional evar at the time of click on result which passes the results position. Using an evar for positioning means with out using advanced sub-relations or data warehouse it’s impossible to correlate position against keyword.

What I like about the first aproach is that it limits the amount of information available with keywords and forces an approach where overall averages become the most important metric.  Otherwise you may find theres just too much information to analyse.

Disagree? Or have another approach to in site search in the publishing sector? Make a comment.