Omniture SiteCatalyst alerts, the how and why?
Following up from the previous post on 7 habits of omniture highly effective omniture sitecatalyst user, this post focusses on sitecatalyst alerts and how it can be used effectively.
Alerts and Targets are most under used functionalities of sitecatalyst. Alerts are those intimations that you get if there is unexpected (you can define what is unexpected) change in your critical metrics.
While Targets are those metrics that you can set as goals for different metric for your website. They can also be used in combination at the end of the month to determine whether a PPC guy has achieved his/her goal against the targets ? and Obviously Alerts can have you notify that.
How to set up sitecatalyst Alerts?
Setting up alerts is a one time effort, here are three simple steps to achieve it
- Run the report you want to set an alert to
- Click on the alert icon in the toolbar
- Enter a friendly name, frequency, criteria (rule) and where you want it delivered (email, mobile)
So what are the purposes and why you might want to use the alerts functionality ?
1.) When your sites often change ? and your omniture tags also changes often ? you might want to ensure that tagging for your key business metrics remains as expected.
2.) If you are doing lot of SEO activity you key business metrics changes gradually , if you would like to track them at Granular level, alerts is a great tool.
3.) There are times when you might be doing analysis and still few changes small and unpredictable , might have been pushing your few metrics to the north. You definitely want to claim credit for it. Wouldn’t you ?
4.) Suppose you are executing an A/B testing experiment and One version might be doing very poor. Set alert for every version and be informed.
Trust me, if you use alerts and something happens to your site (God forbid) , You would be the rockstar to know it earlier !
Omniture allows these alerts to be sent to your wireless device as well as text message.
Few more tips on omniture alerts
- Use several email accounts to send alerts by comma separated. Most people who even use alerts don’t know this.
- Create a standard deviation of your metrics for a given period and set alerts based on your metrics movement above and below std deviation.
- Categorize your alerts in by types :
- Health check alerts which gives you daily change updates on your metrics
- Analysis requirement alerts : this gives you opportunities to dig deeper in to areas where change was substantial
- Always create following alerts
- Revenue
- Visits
- Conversion
- Referrers Alert
However there’s not set rules, the above is just an example. To keep it simple just have alerts for all your KPI’s.
Another way of using Omniture alert! 
Let’s assume your running a marketing campaign ( let’s say it’s a viral marketing campaign) and it takes off! it takes off big time and you get unexpected visitors say 10 times more, ok is your server ready to take that load? here’s where alerts can help too.. in conjuction with your IT team (set a treshhold limit) set a alert to notify you if the pageviews/visits increase after a certain level in that way your close to alteast avoid a 404 for your visitors and appropriately balance the load on your servers
Podium is yours now ! Do you have innovative use of alerts functionality of omniture ? have you ever been able to find something interesting happening on site ?
7 habits of highly effective omniture sitecatalyst users
A web analyst using omniture sitecatalyst is overwhelmed with data, There are some great features which probably makes life easier if your a omniture sitecatalyst user. These features are the ones which are available within the omniture UI
Here’s an overview of all the 7 features, this post covers an intro to all the features. Look out for detailed posts on how these features can be used effectively on daily basis.
Click on the picture for a better view
1.) Omniture Alerts:
Alert Configuration window
As a Web Analyst one is supposed to keep track of the KPI’s and also of course another important metrics.
Omniture alert feature offers exactly the same, it helps you keep a tab on all those KPI on daily, weekly and monthly basis.
When you setup alerts, you can configure SiteCatalyst to check your Web site statistics at the end of each day, week, or month. If your metric reaches a high or low value that you set, or if it changes by a certain percentage (either up or down) then Site Catalyst sends you an alert.
2.) Omniture Targets
Setting Targets feature in omniture is great!, it helps you measure your performance against benchmark. Target is very helpful for marketing campaign effectiveness,
When you set up targets for all your KPI’s sitecatalyst shows both the actual and your target giving you a single graph overiew of your perfromance.
3.) Omniture Bookmarks
Bookmarks are like shortcuts to your reports, very helpful when you create custom reports using calculated metrics.
4.) Omniture Data Extract tool
One of the best tool, helps defining your own “X” and “Y” axis and configure the report the way you want it. You can filter as per your requirements. This tool let’s you schedule as per your requirement.
5.) Omniture filtering ( reports data)
The Filter is of great help if your site has large number of pages, it seamlessly helps you to filter “the data you need”. In the advanced filter section you can use operators to look for that one page or that one section of your site.
6.) Omniture Ranked and Trended View.
Omniture sitecatalyst allows reports to be viewed in two formats, ranked and trended. Trended view feature is great and must use for a web analyst to get a holistic picture of the report.
7.) Omniture Calculated Metrics
Calculated metrics is of course one of the leading features of ominture sitecatalyst, this feature helps you create custom metrics according to one’s business needs. This indeed is one of the feature a web analyst uses or needs to use on a daily basis.
P.S: All the above screenshots are from SiteCatalyst version 14.0
Ok! so that’s about it for now, am i missing something ? So what’s you favourtie features in sitecatalyst? Feel free to addon via comments
Launching Web Analytics Community and Mobile Analytics Blog
Here’s a quick update to all the readers of this blog. After couple of events held at bangalore there was a strong opinion of having a forum, a platform for the all aspiring web analysts to connect to industry experts(rather experienced folks) and share knowledge. It was also decided after a small poll that a forum ( community) is the best way to do this. Hence Web Analytics Community was born.
Web Analytics Community: A Platform for Web Analysts
India boasts of being the 2nd nation in the world with largest mobile subscribers, and with rising gprs penetration and 3G hitting market soon, internet is just fingertips away. This paved the way for another section totally dedicated to Mobile Analytics. This blog aims at getting latest information from the Indian Mobile market and also throw some light on mobile analytics technologies, players and measurement and analysis strategies. So here’s presenting
Mobile Analytics Blog: Tracking Mobile Market and Mobile Analytics in India
Credit goes to all those who gave feedback during WAW Bangalore and also all those who reached out to me personally.
Ok What’s next ? a Job Board, tutorials ? Videos?, You get to pick
As always your feedback on the new site/content or anything is most welcome!
P.S: Web analytics India is a small team of Passionate folks and we are looking for “volunteers” who would be intersted in helping out the team to write, moderate and take active role in web analytics community. We offer no incentive except for a name in the About Us page , if that excites you Click here
Online Automobile Industry in India and Web Analytics Status
Alright! so after really enjoying writing about Online Travel industry in India, it’s time to switch to the Online automobile market in India.
India has been the scene of some of the most frenetic deal-making, big expansion announcements, and new car launches in the global auto industry. Consider that in the last few years alone General Motors (GM), Fiat (FIA), Honda (HMC), Nissan (NSANY), and Hyundai have announced Indian investments valued at roughly $1.5 billion.
And recently TATA , India’s biggest vehicle maker bought British brands Jaguar and Land Rover.
Ask any auto executive, and he or she will tell you that outside of China, India is the most intriguing emerging market opportunity out there. And US-based consultancy Keystone-a subsidiary of LaSalle Consulting Associates-has forecast that India will become the world’s third largest automobile market by 2030, behind just China and the US.
The projected size for China is 62 million and for US 23 million. The size of the Indian vehicle market is forecast to cross 20 million (assuming a consistent GDP growth rate of 6%) from the one million plus vehicles sold in 2004. This amounts to a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 12%.
So Before we go ahead and review few leading sites in India, here’s a look at how internet and review sites help a customer/prospect take decision
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It’s time for us to review the major players in online automobile industry in india and their web analytics status.
Gone are the days of used car lots and car showrooms, depending on whether the purchase is an old or a new car. Now all one needs to sit back sip a cup of coffee and take a look at the brand and the type of car you looking for!
There’s been many sites which have come up in the last couple of years which help you look up for new and old cars and give you a sneak preview of lot of features now mind you this is apart from the “company” brand sites advantage being you get “expert opinion”, customer reviews, ratings and comparison to other models in the same category.
Carewale:
A very “simple” UI as their tagline goes!, i love the way the Carwale team is used the whitespace and good mix of RIA and other great features. Coming to Web Analytics and the tool used, Carwale uses Google analytics and pretty much seems to be the default code from GA. The Tabbed browsing looked but looked into code to see if it’s being tracked it wasn’t!. Hopefully they’ve set some goals and tracking campaigns
So there lies “enormous” oppurtunity for Carwale to be a step (mile) ahead from other competitors and web analytics can help them be there. Hopefully they are listening
Carazoo is a clean and simple site and undoubtedly clear competition to Carwale, It’s got some great features and wonderful search and UI. What attracted my attention was how they offer feeds a way for user to come back, and a blog. You can also register to become a member. Some really neat features
Web Analytics Status: Carzoo uses Google Analytics ( ga.js) and to add to it Quantcast. So which probably helps them understand traffic and demographics. There are lot of Internal Campaigns run to register and download wallpers etc and seems to be tracked via adserver. Oppurtunity exists to track RSS and Blog readers to understand effectiveness of these features.
Gaadi.com has an amazing interface!, nice graphics with some wonderfull features. Now there are some great features couple of them include the recommendations and also valuations. This coupled with other great features make Gaadi.com leading site
Web Analytics Status: Gaadi.com uses Google Analytics for their site, It’s intresting that gaadi and other sites have different engagement section (forums, pictures, news, blog) and also finance, insurance and my gaadi. There’s huge oppurtunity to track how these section help in site goals by effectively using Google Analytics.
Indiadrive is one of the sites which comes up in most “natural” search resluts, certainly very seo freindly. Apart from four wheelers it does offer more information and reviews on latest two wheelers. Indiadrive caters to two different segments and indeed a simple and effective site.
One intresting thing which i probably must say is different is it’s Car Pool efforts for different cities ( how often would you see that on a car review site?)
Web Analytics Status: Suprisingly none exists, even google analytics (atleast for the pages i viewed). This leads to a fair assumption that they depend on logfiles. However a combination of both does no harm. Hopefully they are listening and set up Google analytics
CarDekho is another site which has some neat features, apart from normal things you would expect at a car review site. CarDekho drives community and also has good comparison features.
Web Analytics Status: CarDekho uses Google Analytics (old), and seems like just to measure and collect traffic information. They can move a step ahead in analytics by using other rich features in google analytics.
In the next post! again related to online automobile industry in India will focus on the latest trends and marketing efforts done in India. This will then be followed by KPI and best practices in web analytics! Stay Tuned.
What do you feel about the automobile Market in India?, will it grow or it’s just the hype ? Pen down your comments/feedback/critics
