PPC-Advice.com

Omniture Excel Client: One heck of an Analytics Tool

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 If those users have the requisite permissions, they can even refresh worksheets so the reports are never outdated.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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