Omniture Excel Client: One heck of an Analytics Tool

Published February 20, 2008 by Garry Przyklenk Google Adwords, Omniture

Omniture has come a long way in Analytics in a very short time span, and although much of my experience with their company comes via technical support calls and escalating minor annoyances, their SiteCatalyst Excel Client should really be praised for it’s innovation. Many of us have become accustomed to getting metrics online through a web interface, compiling reports through Ajax or Java and having them scheduled for delivery. Omniture does away with that.

With the Omniture SiteCatalyst Excel Client, search marketers can setup customized “data blocks” that call for metrics from Omniture’s servers directly, negating the need to browse to any given report. Updating doesn’t necessarily have to be scheduled because refreshing “data blocks” can be done on the fly. Since most marketers are already comfortable using Excel to generate standard reports, assembling fully-customized fully-automated analytics reports is a cinch.

Although many analytics suites offer the flexibility of calculating new performance metrics (including Omniture through the web interface), sometimes you just yearn for the full arsenal of functions that only a full-blown spreadsheet like Excel can afford. Need a quick chi-squared calculation to test relevance, or maybe you want to calculate the standard deviation of some metrics? Obviously, that’s no problem with Excel, but I challenge you to do try that in Webtrends or Omniture.

So what kind of datablocks can you assemble?

How about a monthly spend report trended by day for any given search campaign?
I sometimes use a detailed daily report on your bread and butter keywords illustrating max CPC bid versus average position.
Don’t forget product mix, making pie charts in Excel is easy as, well… pie!

Omniture has also been so kind (or cruel, depending on your outlook) to include a sharing feature from within the Excel Client, enabling other users within your organization to view saved reports by accessing the “Workbook Library”. If those users have the requisite permissions, they can even refresh worksheets so the reports are never outdated. Again, that feature can be a blessing or a curse, so make sure to choose your permissions wisely.

All-in-all the Omniture Excel Client is a fabulous tool that has really cut down the time required to find and analyze reports. It’s also helped me generate a custom dashboard quickly with much of the more hardcore analytics data readily available only one click away. I also found it difficult to correlate several trended metrics simultaneously through Omniture’s web interface of SiteCatalyst. Many of their trended reports would only offer one metric such as Clicks or Impressions per report, making correlating metrics a hassle.

Up until this point I’ve been fairly positive in my review of the SiteCatalyst Excel Client. Far be it from me to dwell on half the story, as there are some drawbacks to using the SiteCatalyst Excel Client. Here are some of the limitations I’ve found in the current version:

There is a known bug where datablocks may not roll-over a date properly when updating. For instance, if you had a datablock setup to display metrics for the past three days and it’s a Wednesday, it will give you results for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. If you try to refresh that datablock on Thursday, it will still show you Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.

Workaround: The only way to alleviate this problem is to edit the datablock through the toolbar, and insert it again into your workbook. This can be time consuming depending on your connection speed and the sophistication of your datablock. Omniture has noted that this will be resolved in an upcoming version.

Personally, I’ve noticed that Omniture likes to keep data sessions short (around 30 minutes), however the Excel Client rarely distinguishes a forced logout on the server side. Depending on the size and complexity of the datablock, you can be left hanging for quite some time before realizing what’s wrong.

Workaround: Either get a coffee if your connection is slow, or logout and log back in.

There is also a known bug when using the Excel Client on a computer with Internet Explorer 7. This one really frustrated me for quite some time trying to diagnose and reproduce the problem. Internet Explorer 7 settings can prevent the Omniture Excel Client from connecting, thereby resulting in an Internet Explorer Script Error, in my case, Error 422. This problem leaves you hanging without access to updating datablocks or even access the Workbook Library.

Fix: Close Internet Explorer 7, go to your Windows Control Panel (both XP and Vista), select Internet Options, click on the Advanced tab, and under “Reset Internet Explorer settings” click on “Reset”. If you reset all your settings, you’re likely to get rid of the one offending bug that’s stopping you from logging into Omniture through the Excel client.

Less of a real problem, but something that makes you scratch your head is the scheduling option within the SiteCatalyst Excel Client. What I was hoping for in a scheduling option is to keep the datablock bookmarked on Omniture’s server so that instead of compiling and downloading each job on a routine basis (like Monday mornings), the datablock would compile as per the schedule and just download when requested.

Workaround: None, this is more of a feature request.

Conclusion

Omniture does deserve some credit for developing a stellar tool that enables SEM’s to fully-automate their reporting. I can’t imagine assembling dashboards on their web interface with the same amount of sophistication and relevancy as my Excel reports. Aside from the few problems and sacrifices I’ve had to make in the past few months, I’m not sure what I would do without it.

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Garry Przyklenk

Hi Remi,

Could be a lot of things. I've seen any of the following help with problems like yours:

-You may have to upgrade the Excel client if the version you are using is old.
-If Add/Remove Programs, Uninstalling, etc doesn't work when upgrading, you may have to browse to the directory on your computer where the excel client lives, i.e. usually searching for "*.XLA" will help you find where it is. Find it, delete it, reinstall the Excel Client fresh.
-You may have to clear your cookies, temporary files, and settings from Internet Explorer (best done through your windows control panel)
-You may be locked out due to license restrictions, which is rare, but a quick call to client care will solve that

Hope this helps!
Garry

Remi Turcotte

Hello I need help,
The excel client screen freezes when I try to login. Do you know how to solve this ?
Thanks

Remi

Garry Przyklenk

Hi Paige,

Good question. Search Center functionality relies on data collected on reserved s.props and s.evars, usually s.prop50 and s.evar50, I believe. Classifications are done on this raw data and populate the Search Center interface and reports within the web UI.

There is a separate Excel client for search center alone, but it's less for creating custom reports and more for bulk modifications to your keywords, ads, etc.

The standard Site Catalyst Excel client can be used to pull reports from Search Center classifications though. The trick here is to find the right Datablock type/report to pull.

Here's where it gets potentially confusing...

Since SiteCatalyst uses report names like "Campaigns" and "Keywords", Search Center has to use report names that are similar, but singular. So if you want to find a Google Adwords campaign, you have to pull a "Campaign" report (no "s").

However, it's also a bit more complicated because if you don't name campaigns uniquely by search engine, you could have the same campaign name "Used cars" in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. In that case, when you pull a "Campaign" report you'll get a mashup of both campaign keywords, spend, and ROI numbers.

...Crappy, but you can tell I've suffered through this pain.

If you do happen to have identical campaign/ad group names, you have to subrelate reports by search engine first.

A good rule of thumb to avoid subrelating in the excel client would be to name campaigns according to search engine. I.e. in Adwords, call your campaign "Used Cars (USA, Google)".

This might have gone way beyond what you were asking, but it might help someone else.

Please feel free to let me know if more is needed. Given this is one of my most read posts, I'm should probably follow-up with more info one day.

Regards,
Garry

Paige Brashen

Hi Gary~

Does the excel client work when attempting to pull reporting data from Search Center? Or is it just site catalyst?

Thank you,

Paige

Garry Przyklenk

Thanks for the insight, I had no idea that was the case.

The bug you speak of can certainly be a problem. It normally has to do with the complexity of datablocks being requested, and can usually be prevented. Omniture has a good knowledgebase article in their help section on how to avoid timeouts.

I also offer a few tips on a few best practices in my most recent post Omniture SiteCatalyst Excel Client Best Practices.

Lasse

The excel client is actually not an Omniture invention. This tool was part of the Clientstep toolkit that Omniture got their hands on through their acquisition of Instadia and so was the publishing functionality. I have worked with quite a few web analytics tools but i still have not come across any tool that was as innovative and flexible as Clientstep. It was not as polished as Omnitures products but for the advanced user it was incredible. Faster and far more flexible than discover and it had the integration with excel and publishing functionality.
Apart from airing my nostalgia I want to also hear if you have experienced a bug that is driving me crazy and that Omniture obviously has problems solving. If I build large and complex reports and publish them across multiple report suites some of my data blocks are not populated and everytime i run the reports it is different datablocks that lag data. This seems to be completely random and if you or anyone else has encountered the same problem and come up with a solution I would be forever gratefull!

Garry Przyklenk

Unfortunately, yes, many giants that suffered the .COM crash "just know" how to survive without the new bells and whistles, but it's our job as search marketers to point out how small changes in conversion rates can make big changes to their bottom line.

I think one major roadblock that you're facing is their relatively low PPC spend. Omniture products are a significant investment, one that has to be rationalized. When you start spending in upwards of $50,000 per month, a Search Center subscription becomes more palatable and necessary.

However, that's not to say you can't win them over. Start with the basics (although your spend isn't meager by any means), aim for small successes, optimize ad text and landing pages, comparing status quo to the new variants and win them over so that they become more comfortable with increased spend.

Jason

Thanks for your feedback Garry.

Have you ever heard of a 10 year old, $50 million a year, ecommerce only business model spending between $8000-15000 a month just for adwords and just recently having implemented conversion analytics?

I've been begging for some accurate adwords conversion analytics since I started 5 months ago and it's been like pulling teeth to get anything implemented. I guess it's just not that important.

It just blows me away how inefficiently many businesses are still run today. That's the situation here, so hopefully I can help turn this ship around and stop the bleeding.

Garry Przyklenk

Hi Jason,

Great question, and difficult answer. I guess it all depends on what you're doing with the analytics. Most of my implementations for companies doing any kind of search marketing spend, Google Adwords or otherwise, will involve at least two analytics opinions.

Even if my client opts for Search Center (or an equivalent), I like having a second opinion with Google Analytics. However, with such a large keyword list, I doubt any solution will make managing 50,000 keywords easier!

Search Center does make managing complex business rules much easier though. For example, if you have one product that is otherwise dormant for much of the year and suddenly there is a spike in impressions, clicks, and conversions to your landing page, Omniture can detect that change and maintain position by raising your bid automatically. Then, when things slow down, Search Center can tune down the keyword bid so as to avoid low-quality clicks. Google not so much...

I would suggest to tough it out for the meantime to get your company on track, then recommend an upgrade path, if it makes business sense. Other free options should be available in the future as well, such as Index Tools.

Jason

Hi Garry,
Thanks for the great article.

What has been your opinion of SiteCatalyst 13.5 vs. Google Conversion analytics implementation?

Our comapny just implemented SiteCatalyst 13.5 (no search center) and I am a bit disappointed with the granular keyword data compared to what Google provides. It seems great for broad measurements, but it's not real quick and easy to determine which individual keywords are converting.

For adwords it seems that Google analytics is just the best way to go for those of us that are working with 150+ campaigns and over 50,000+ keywords and unique products. My company isn't ready to spend the extra for SearchCenter, which I know is really the way to go for adwords tracking.

Your thoughts please???!

Garry Przyklenk

Hi Michael,

Thanks for stopping by, and I'm glad you enjoyed the post. With the majority of my analytics experience in Omniture and Google Analytics, I can't say that I can compare the Excel Client to HBX's Report Builder.

From talking with other SEMs it seems many either use the online tools to build dashboards of analytics, or develop their own applications to handle various APIs.

Michael

Hi Garry,

It was nice to read a review on Excel Client. I have extensive experience with HBX's Report Builder tool and wonder how you compare them?

I often find myself pulling year/year metrics for both content and top level metrics and plenty of that "hardcore analytics data" soon we will be using Excel Client to do so.

DO you have experience with both tools?