theclickscount.com

thinking its odd that #Omniture does not support or have a plug-in for flash version detection http://tinyurl.com/qvjjmj

Take this situation you drop bounce rate or any other metric along side pages in Omniture. Now you want to sort on bounce rate and see the highest bounce rate at the top. Typically when you do this you will see some of your least popular pages. There could be 1,000’s of pages with 1 or few page views. Now there are two problems here low page views/ visits means that the data is not very useful and its unlikely that you care enougth about these pages to do anything about them. 

The truth is the pages you want to look at after your top 50 or so are somewhere in the middle of the list. Now if I could say show me the pages sorted by bounce rate that have visits between 1,000 to 5,000 in the timeframe that would be useful. Sure you can download this data to excel and spend time with it there but we should be able to do this with in sitecatalyst.

Reading how to patch #Omniture to detect new search position information from google http://tinyurl.com/q7orvt

Today Omniture released a set of minor bug fixes for version 14.5 of Sitecatalyst :-

Maintenance Release Notes (05/14/09)

• Improved dashboard reportlet persistency.
• Improved emailed dashboard display.
• Improved ability to reset ExcelClient reports.
• Improved report display discrepancies when downloading, emailing, and scheduling.
• Fixed an authorization issue in Advanced Delivery Options.
• Improved Participation metric behavior.
• Improved data correlation breakdowns in Pages report.
• Improved time zone setting for scheduled reports.
• Improved performance on the referrers and referring domains reports.
• Improved speed of SAINT upload.
• Enabled p= to use as query= in a search query string.
• Added the option to set emailed reports encoding to None.
• Added support for Typed/Bookmarked for users that have instances enabled in commerce.
• Improved display of revenue numbers in ExcelClient.
• Improved long page name display in ExcelClient.
• Added Pages breakdown to Products > Categories report.
• Added labels for all events in ClickMap.
• Added custom events for ClickMap demo mode.

Googles new URL format passes additional data about the search results positioning in the results list. This means that there is some useful data there for analytics packages to tap into which will give richer reporting for Google organic search session starts.

Previously the only real way to find where your site was positioned in Google for a search term was to do a search and look for your result. I pretty tedious exercise for anyone considering to do this for a large percentage of their natural keywords.

Sitecatalyst 14 has a feature all search term ranking. Which appears to offer this functionality. For those who want to check this out go to search keywords report then use the green magnifying glass to correlate to all search page ranking. So it’s good to see Omniture doing the work to make this data available, but I have a feeling we could do this before? Is this marketing spin or a new feature? Anyone want to comment on this?

The integration is available to all new and existing sitecatalyst customers.

Update : The offical line around this feature is available here http://blogs.omniture.com/2009/05/08/tracking-organic-keyword-rankings-in-google/

This week I had the pleasure of getting some hands on time with Omnitures Viral Video Measurement tools. The service integrates directly into sitecatalyst and can be found under the standard video menu, the option is called video sharing. The tool differ’s from the standard offerings in sitecatalyst in the sense that it is actually an interface for integrating reporting on off-site content aka viral video. The component parts of the tool consist of a search interface which will do a meta search across popular video aggregators based on keywords. 

Omniture Viral Video Tool

Videos are displayed along with any associated meta data such as total views, author, comments and user ratings. Included on the page is a embedded player to preview any video found with search. You can save a search which adds it to your video sharing homepage which indicates if new videos arrive that match your search terms. 

Where this gets interesting is that you can select single or multiple videos and add them to a watch list. You can add as many watch list as you like. Once this is done Omniture will periodically poll the source data from the relevant video aggregator and actually create a report in sitecatalyst which tracks the perfromance in terms of views, comments, average user score etc. Most of the standard dashboard and report controls are present with the exception of alerting, so this data is ready for integration into the rest of your reports. 

The solution is simple and effective, an impressive value add to organisations who invest in online video. You don’t need to be using the standard sitecatalyst video reports to take advantage of this service. It points to a potentially exciting direction for the sitecatalyst tool where integrating non-standard analytics solutions to measure what’s happening off site with out dealing with data sources could be a powerful thing. Hopefully Omniture will consider integrating their developer connection twitter hack into a fully fledged integration like this one. Better still open up this reporting framework for off site access to data to the developer connection community and let the world create interesting integrations that are easier for customers to take advantage of. 

Nice work and check it out if you get a chance.

Alas this was not done in Omniture but in Google analytics. Not really fair to compare the integration process between adsense and Google analytics with Omniture, but there is a lesson to be learnt there ease of use goes a long way. You could argue that Omniture has Genesis, so how easy do you want it to be? Well thats true apart from complete ambiguity around pricing and the repeated warnings that Omniture will hold you responsible for your companies financial stability should you continue to integrate a Genesis partner. Genesis is easy but my bug bear is that I can’t integrate DFP in Genesis and now that Google own the Dart for Publishers platform I fear we will never see this integration.

I want to pass multiple values for multiple products on a single page. When I am referring to multiple products I don’t mean products as in the e-commerce world, I mean s.products the only variable in Sitecatalyst that can take multiple values on the page.

Take this publishers example I have stories and stories can be about more than one topic and include more than one company. So I tag the story with multiple topics and a couple of companies. So far so good I can achieve this within Sitecatalyst. Most obvious thing to do here is use s.products in conjunction with categories and I can pass these values.

e.g s.products=”themes;music,themes;phone,company;apple,company;nokia”

So in the above I am setting a themes category which contains the themes music and phone and a company category with apple and nokia in there. So what’s wrong with that? Well since all values in there are essentially products I have an issue I want to correlate themes with companies in the same way I could with products and an e.var. The issue here is I can’t correlate across products. 

So I am stuck. Who can help me? Any suggestions?

After 5 point releases Sitecatalyst 14 is finally pulling into a usable shape, but is this simply too late. It launched with a major user inteface overhaul employing ajax and other trendy techniques but failing misarably from a usability perspective. Now we see the launch of version 14.5 and its just about a usable platform. Adoption of this version has been painful so should Omniture dump 14 and bring in a leaner meaner more in tune with the market version 15 aka windows 7. 

If Omniture did one thing for the next release it should be to allow segmentation live within sitecatalyst without the need for datawarehouse. Segmentation is where all the gold is in terms of insights into your analytics data and in this day and age its not acceptable to wait for a segmentation report for multiple hours or days. We know there is the over priced discover application and to be honest we could do without all that functionality in favour for simple, instant and live segmentation of data in the sitecatalyst 14 user interface. The power of reporting on segments to the business using this tool would be immence. This is an area that the old school analytics packages are playing major catch up to the likes of Google analytics and Index tools which both offer that functionality for free. 

Its time our premium analytics packages supported live segmentation by default its the life boold of the analyist and mad that this is packaged as another product. Like MS Vista sitecatalyst 14 has been riggled with bugs, missing functionality and out of step with the market. A quick release of 15 with segmentation would fix this. So come on Omniture accept that 14 is a dud and move on and more importantly catch-up with the rest of the world and give us live segmentation free of charge in the next release.

Enhancements

• Added the Date Range to dashboard reports.
• Added Publishing List Override to the Edit Reportlet page. This feature prevents a publishing list from overriding the report suite used in the reportlet. 
• Added an improved format for displaying a CSV report. 
• Updated Web Services API with ReportSuite.GetIPAddressExclusions,  ReporSuite.SaveIPAddressExclusions, and ReportSuite.DeleteIPAddressExclusions.
• Added Video Sharing (beta), a report that displays video usage across common Web video sharing sites.
• Changed the layout of Breakdown menus so that they are patterned after the main report menus in SiteCatalyst.
• Improved Back, Forward, and Refresh behavior, letting you step back and forward through incremental report configuration changes.
• Added the ability to tie metrics to products in data sources integration. 

Improvements and Fixes

• In the Scheduled Reports Manager, you can reset reports scheduled via ExcelClient.
• Fixed a JavaScript error regarding the date range on bookmarked data extract reports.
• Improved the reliability of reportlet placement in the dashboard.
• Fixed Total row cut-off in report tables.
• Improved the save reliability of reconfigured reportlets.
• Fixed a bug in the trended view of breakdowns.
• Improved shared calculated metrics across report suites for ExcelClient.
• In Data Extract, we fixed ExcelClient’s report list to match SiteCatalyst’s when building the list.
• Fixed a mixed content warning when downloading a report in IE6.
• Resolved a login issue in the developer portal.
• Fixed an error in the Account Activity report in the Admin Console.
• Trended page report now returns Daily granularity as expected.
• All appropriate classifications now display in the Classifications Manager.
• Improved the tabular version of the Next Video Flow report.
• Fixed the display of Japanese characters in report notes.
• Fixed Overtime reports to display the complete date range in the graph.
• Fixed an Access to Resource error in the Scheduled Reports editor.
• Fixed a persistency issue occurring in Fixed Dates in a dashboard.
• Improved the Company Summary report to use the proper currency.
• Fixed an issue in which calculated metrics were being classified as traffic metrics in the reporting API.
• Fixed error issued when using report suite functions in the admin API.
• Added Romania to Geosegmentation reports.
• Fixed date-enabled classifications not displaying in the Classifications Manager.
• Removed invalid classifications from the Classification Manager.
• Fixed totals for orders in Customer Loyalty reports.
• Fixed an issue in which the SAINT upload was not refreshing.
• Improved filter persistency in bookmarks.