Web Analytics Posts Round up May 30
Filed under: Google Analytics, Omniture, Omniture, Web Analytics
Ok here’s more reading for all you web analyst out there. Some great articles worth spending some time on.
Web Analytics Industry:
- Web Analytics in Awkward Phase; Forrester Asks Humiliating Questions About Its
Changing Body - Web Analytics – Who is Omniture’s Biggest Competitor (Phil Kimelor)
Omniture
- Tracking Organic keyword by ranking
- Engineering Services Omniture: An article which’ll help you understand when you need to reach out for custom tracking or tweaks
- Video Reporting in Omniture
- Event Pathing – Omniture SiteCatalyst
Google Analytics
- Using Google Search suggest to monitor your brand and keywords
- Understanding Correlation in Google Anlayics
- Top Ten Myths About Google Analytics
- Youtube Brand Channel Tracking via Google Anlaytics
- Tracking Social Networks in Google Anlaytics
- How to Create Twitter Profile in Google Analytics
Landing Page Optimization
Optimizing Website and Landing Page Copy
Adwords:
- Improve ROI with New Adwords interface
- 6 Tactics to Maximize your Adwords Investment
- Managing Keywords and Search Query Report
Usability
Other Prominent Blog posts/Article
- Verified by Visa: A conversion rate killer
- Social Networking: A different kind of friendship
- KPI for small business
- 300+ Tips for Ecommerce Professionals
Here’s some video worth watching!
Useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Small Businesses – Avinash Kaushik
Google Analytics Strategy:
Google Analytics features: Pivoting & Secondary Dimensions
Happy Reading!
Omniture SiteCatalyst Resources
It’s been some time now i’ve been willing to write this, there are many who have reached out to me for resources, tutorials, help and documentation for omniture. There’s little written or blogged about on Omniture and it’s feature set.
Here’s a list of blog posts and articles which’ll help you get started or know more about omniture implementation, reporting features.
Omniture SiteCatalyst Offical Blog: This Blog authored by Adam Greco is great to get started if your new to omniture. Here’s the topics he’s covered so far. This is one blog u “must” follow and refer back for some intrinsic details and also live examples he gives.
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Traffic Variables
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Success Events
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Conversion Variables – Part 1 & Part 2
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Traffic Data Correlations
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Conversion Variable Subrelations
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Classifications a.k.a SAINT
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Counter eVars
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Excel Client
- Omnitiure SiteCatalyst Campaign Tracking
- Omnitiure SiteCatalyst Pathing Analysis
- Omnitiure SiteCatalyst DataWarehouse
- Omnitiure SiteCatalyst Advanced Segment Insight (ASI)
- Omnitiure SiteCatalyst Segment Builder Best Practices
- Omnitiure SiteCatalyst Products Variable (s.products)
Follow Adam Greco on Twitter
From Web Analytics India Blog: These posts are from our blog, a mix of posts on best practices information and omniture feature sets.
- 7 Habits of highly effective Omniture User
- Omniture Alerts, The how and Why
- Omniture Targets and Bookmarks, The How and Why
- Omniture Summit 08 Day Three, Future Change Request
- Omniture Summit 08 Day Two
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Excel Client Update
- Power Strategies for Web Analyst Using Omniture SiteCatalyst
From Stephane Hamel Blog Immeria
From Faithful Web, Here’s Advanced Implementation Certification Examination Tips
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Advanced Implementation Day One
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Advanced Implementation Day Two
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Advanced Implementation Day Three
- Omniture SiteCatalyst Advanced Implementation Certification Examination Tips
From Wezside Omniture SiteCatalyst Flash Tracking
That’s for now all the great posts and articles available on omniture sitecatalyst. If you do know more posts or articles out there feel free to addon via comments.
Omniture Targets and bookmarks, the how and why
Ok Continuing to cover the 7 habits of omniture user, here are two more featues which are must use. This post covers the how and why you should use ominture targets and bookmarks.
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 overview of your performance.
How to setup omniture targets?
Ok here’s how you can quickly set up Targets
In Omniture Sitecatalyst 14.0, Click on My Account–> Targets (Manager)
Add Targets, here are fields description and some tips!
- Make sure your in the reporsuite you need to set targets for, that’ll be autopopulated
- Create a friendly target name ( Add to Cart daily, Daily Orders etc)
- In the scope section, select if you want to apply to all site or select default or custom target scope. For more granularity select the type by clicking “select item”
- Period: Select the period, and for granularity you can select day weekly or entire period. Now it’s suggested you use daily or weekly ( example daily order value, daily orders, orders/visit and weekly visits to certain section etc)
Accountability Matrix:
Accountability matrix is optional, but if you do want to use it go ahead and define the “X axis” and “Y axis” for your report.
Other useful tips:
- Omniture Sitecatalyst allows you to download all your targets in form of csv
- You can upload targets using the default template on omniture sitecatalyst
- You can also upload accountability matrix using the default template provided.
Why would you need targets?
- Tracking KPI: If your business team has set benchmark ( highly recommended) for all your KPI’s, Target can be set for all those to help you understand how your performing compared to benchmarks set.
- Marketing Campaigns: if you plan a marketing campaign for coming holiday season and want to understand the effectiveness of it either by comparing to last season or setting new benchmarks
- Traffic: If you plan to track visitors to your site and compare it to your expected results or compare to last year/season traffic, target is a must use
- Specific Metrics: Let’s assume your running a dedicated campaign for a certain city, and your capturing that in prop/evar, you can set target to see how your campaign worked in terms of traffic and conversion
End result of a Target in Omniture Sitecatalyst
Omniture Bookmarks:
Bookmarks are like shortcuts to your reports, very helpful when you create custom reports using calculated metrics.
How to set up bookmarks?
Open the report you want to add in your bookmarks and click on the bookmark icon in the toolbar. Make sure you create folders for specific section, this is quite helpful when you want to segregate reports.
Why would you need bookmarks?
- Bookmarks can help you get quickly to a report, it can be default or a calculated metrics
- Help segregate your acquisition, marketing, engagement and conversion report in one go
- Share it among your team/colleagues
P.S: The other posts in this series.
Do you have innovative way of using targets or bookmarks, or some out of the box use of omniture targets and bookmarks, Add on via comments!
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
