theclickscount.com

So we can get reports from s.props e-mailed or downloaded by the hour. This could be really useful for generating up to minute cool on page features such as tag clouds powered by popularity. Or a list of what people are searching for within the last 60 mins. However the big blocker to developing a nice fast moving feature along these lines is the fact that I can’t generate a report for the last 24hrs. I am forced to choose between Today and Yesterday which obviously have uses but no good for the above use case.

Sitecatalyst 20.3h code release can now nativiley detect the additional info retained in the new Google referring url. Googles change is being tested on about 10% of the Googles searches. The key difference here is that Google are adding the keyword and the position in the results your search result appeared in. This means that Sitecatalys can now correlate search terms to search positions. This is incredibly useful info, for example you should now be able to report on and alert on changes to your search ranking position in Google for your popular keywords.

Check out the blog post over at the Omniture blog.

Update : See post below stating that this code update does not support the additional search result placement cd=!

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/

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?

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.

I use sitecatalyst on a regular basis and what frustrates me the most is just how much of a handicapped tool it is for real world analytics. Sitecatalyst gives the impression that it will be useful but then disapoints so easily. A Omniture staff member once told me that the Omniture consultancy team do not use Sitecatalyst, they have access to and pretty much exclusivley use the very expensive Discover tool. It also appears that Omniture use Sitecatalyst as an upsell platform for their Discover tool. So I thought I would share with you some of the common problems we encounter in Sitecatalyst. Some of these points are feature requests, interface changes and bugs but they all have one thing in common the ability to infuriate the user. 

1) Sitecatalyst cannot display any segment data what so ever! Take a look at Google analytics and I can define and show up to 4 segments on a standard report it takes me 10 seconds to set this up. Sitecatalyst has datawarehouse feature which is itself a chargable addition to the standard package. Now datawarehouse allows you to build a segment then wait a few hours for an excel sheet to come back with some data. Then if I want to see the same data for a different segment I can repeat the process. There’s no way for me to compare this data in Sitecatalyst this is all done externally by pull this data together by hand. 

2) Excel client can’t deal with Segments so I can’t automate pulling multiple segments together in an excel sheet in point 1. 

3) The boardroom ready reports are not ready for the boardroom. Try building a big dashboard and downloading a PDF version of that file. The formatting will be slightly strange but also some headers will overlap and become un-readable.

4) At least in version 14 where an evar has a none value and is associated with a product there is no way to remove the none value and have the totals in the product adjust accordingly. We can do a filter does not contain none but the numbers don’t change. It may be a bug but its been there for 4 point releases of version 14 now. 

5) Publishing lists are useless, on release of version 14 a big deal was made around this functionality which should allow you to distribute the same master dashboard for different report suites with out having to re-build the dashboard. It does not work and has not been fixed in 4 point releases of version 14.

6) Why do I have to create a default metric for bounce rate and other common metrics? Why can’t we put this metric against useful items such as search keywords, referrer types etc etc

7) Why can’t I trend on useful items such as referrer types! Can do this in excel client but why should I?

Percentage change alerting is almost useful but when dealing with percentage changes across a large amount of values I get some text in a e-mail in no sort order either by the value or the percentage change. There’s no option for an csv file just this plain text e-mail which is not useful.

9) Monthly forecast has gone in version 14

10) Contextual performance against last month and year is only available on some report types and some graphs

11) We can do stacked graphs but no 100% stacked graphs (these are very useful when reporting to clients and you want to provide comparitive performance without providing numbers).

12) The only way to report on google news performance is to look at all referrer url’s and then do a filter for news.google why? referrer is an exceptionally long report to run.

13) Why does the excel client time out when pulling larger and more usful data set. E.g I can’t event pull in top 50 search terms month on month in excel with out time outs. 

14) Having multiple data blocks on an excel worksheet causes all data blocks to fail. 

15) Why do I need to set-up a plug-in to establish if a visitor is new or returning. 

16) Just when you need it Sitecatalyst reports never have a total colum.

17) The video reporting integration may not upload a persons viewing information until they visit the site for a second time. What happens if they dont no data for that video play.

They fix and improve a load of things in the process… bye bye whitespace in your dashboards Publishing Lists still useless :( 

SiteCatalyst 14.3 provides the following enhancements and improvements:

Integration with Test&Target

• Optimize site performance by analyzing your Test&Target campaigns in SiteCatalyst.
• Compare different tested experiences using SiteCatalyst success events.
• Leverage SiteCatalyst traffic variables in Test&Target for targeting, profiling, steps, and conversion.

Integration with Omniture Survey

• Survey v1.5 combines the power of Web site analytical data with survey responses to help drive marketing and remarketing strategies.

Limited Administration Permissions

• You can grant non-admin users specific administrative rights, such as editing classifications or naming variables.

Reporting API Enhancements

• Access video and mobile reports via the Web Services API.

Redirect Tracking

• Redirect tracking for mobile link and podcast tracking.

Improvements and Fixes

• Improved dashboard look, feel, and functionality.
• Enhanced readability in charts.
• Enhanced correlation/subrelation functionality for mobile and video reports.
• Added video report functionality: Hourly granularity for Video Views reports, and report smoothing on Video Segments Viewed reports.
• Added a new and improved Advanced Scheduler for scheduled reports.
• Added the ability to rerun failed scheduled reports.
• Improved calendar functionality for comparing date ranges.
• Improved rendering for Excel downloadable/scheduled reports.
• Fixed advanced filter persistence.
• Improved data extract functionality for the Natural Keywords report.
• Improved the adding calculated metrics experience.
• Improved downloading for Pathfinder reports in Excel format.
• Improved localization in Bubble charts.
• Improved Video report granularity.
• Improved the CSV report download.
• Improved creating public bookmarks.
• Improved the Referring Domains and Referrer Types reports.
• Improved the Mobile 5×5 breakdown report.
• Improved handling of half-width Japanese characters for property and eVar values.
• Improved handling of plain text reportlets.
• Improved pagination in the Admin Console log.
• Improved the mobile SiteCatalyst client.
• Improved the localized login page.
• Improved the Schedule Report Manager.
• Improved interoperability in Visual Studio for Web Services API.
• Improved single sign-on.

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!