Best Practices: Omniture SiteCatalyst Excel Client
Oct 13, 2008 Omniture
It seems that whenever I write about Omniture - either good or bad - people tune in en masse. Love them or hate them, one product that continues to impress me is the SiteCatalyst Excel Client. If you know your way around Omniture’s standard web-based reports, you can easily navigate the same data in their Excel plugin, and get really fancy with custom subrelations. They really do a poor job of communicating best practices, so here’s an unofficial guide on the Site Catalyst Excel Client.
First off, I’m going to come right out and state that this is not a tutorial. Omniture has done a good job of explaining how to use the Excel Client in online help files. Before delving into using the Excel client, you should first have a fairly strong familiarity with Site Catalyst’s web-based gui and reports. You should know the difference between traffic metrics and conversion metrics, and how the two may differ when it comes to reports that are readily available through Site Catalyst.
The foundation of pulling data from Omniture into Excel lies in datablocks. Datablocks contain the same data found in the web interface, but can be built to contain much more granularity and are not limited by a set number of reporting metrics. Before inserting datablocks into your worksheet, I recommend keeping custom reports, graphs, and even summary charts on separate worksheets (or tabs) within your file. The Excel Client has a tendency to break cell width and height formatting pretty often.
When starting off your report, it’s best to keep date ranges and report suite ID’s on the top of each worksheet, preceding your datablock, making it much easier to modify date ranges and data sources “on the fly” later. It’s probably also a good idea to make sure to leave extra columns and rows between datablocks, for future expansion of added metrics, or even static calculations on your raw data page.
Selecting the appropriate report within the datablock insertion tool is probably the hardest part of using the Excel Client. Since there are so many ways to slice and dice the data available in Site Catalyst, you really need to know which report is best suited for your needs. From someone that does this a lot, I would recommend staying away from subrelating variables in datablocks. If there is a simpler report that yields the same data, use it instead of subrelating variables from another report.
If you’re a Search Center user, I also caution you that there are likely two reports you have to be wary of. The default SiteCatalyst “Search Engine” report should not be confused with Search Center’s “Search Engines” report, and vise versa. This weird nomenclature issue also occurs for “Campaign” and “Campaigns”. Luckily, “Ad Group” is safe from this nightmare. To be sure you’re looking at the right report within the Excel Client, run both datablocks to see which is the one you need.
Once you choose a report, the first thing you should do is link the effective date ranges back to the date ranges you entered in an Excel worksheet cell, one starting date and one end date. If you link date ranges, you can simply change the range within the worksheet, hit refresh, and voila the datablock is updated. Much easier than going in to edit the datablock and changing the date.
The metrics you choose are also important when putting together your datablock. Sure you can go in and select a bunch of preloaded calculated metrics, but if you want to keep your sanity when refreshing a large worksheet full of datablocks, I’d recommend writing your own calculated cell formulae. Data refresh times can get pretty long, so why waste your time with simple metrics you can calculate yourself, such as CTR, ROAS, and pages/visit.
Once you have your metrics lined up, extra calculations and number formatting established, you’ll want to link all these numbers to your actual report to be sent to internal stakeholders, clients, or executives. Once formatted, you can do fancy charts and graphs that simply aren’t possible in the web interface. A particular favorite of mine is a month-over-month and week-over-week data comparison, or the ever-popular CPC versus average position graph (again, simply not possible in the web interface).
Tags: automation, best practices, excel, guide, Omniture, sitecatalyst
October 16th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Thank you so much for taking the time to highlight some how-to’s of the ExcelClient feature in Omniture SiteCatalyst. It is great to see our customers take such initiative to help each other out.
As a consultant at Omniture, it is very important to engage our customers in conversations like this. In addition to our traditional support channels and consulting services, many Omniture employees have been communicating with customers for some time via our blogs and social media platforms like Twitter. That being said, we’re always open to any suggestions you or your readers might have so that we can change your perception about communication of our best practices.
In case you are interested, I sponsor an “Inside SiteCatalyst” blog that discusses many of the items you mentioned in your post including the differentiation between variable types and the ExcelClient itself. I invite you to take a look and subscribe if you haven’t already. If there are any topics you would like me to cover, please send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com. Thanks again for an interesting post.
Adam Greco
Omniture Consulting
October 16th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Hi Adam,
It’s great that Omniture has stepped up in recent months to answer the call for greater transparency and assistance to existing customers. I personally struggled for months trying to find my own way through business problems, with little to no help from Omniture aside from a back-handed invitation to explore consulting services.
Whoops, bit of a tangent…
Let’s just keep it at this: your blog articles are far overdue, and certainly appreciated. But I’m still going to keep you guys on your best behavior!