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March was an extremely busy time for me personally, so I passed up the opportunity to write about an awe-inspiring keynote delivered by Michael Eisner of Disney fame at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City. In his address, he eloquently explained how technology enables a never-ending and consistently innovative evolution of content delivery mechanisms: from Gutenberg’s printing press back in 1440 all the way to present day with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Read more…

Having worked in online marketing and web analytics for nearly a decade, I’ve heard it all when it comes to myths passed around small and large companies alike. Here is a top 10 list of my favorite web analytics myths and practical advice on how to dispel them. Read more…

I dropped the ball on this one, it’s been over a year since Yahoo acquired IndexTools but with all the Microhoo/Yagoog/Yahbing/Binghoo news between then and now, I admit that I took my eye off Yahoo Web Analytics.  Thankfully, enough folks remained on the IndexTools/Yahoo Web Analytics team, and I was able to get my hands on membership.  With the rumors going around about how Google pimps their own Search conversion/goal attribution, it’s nice to know there’s more choice out there. Read more…

The honor of interviewing a world-renowned Web Analytics expert such as Avinash Kaushik doesn’t come along every day, so I’m pleased to present a little preview into what marketers can expect at SES San Jose in August.  Avinash’s official title of “Web Analytics Evangelist” at Google really beguiles his true dedication to our industry:  he’s author of a best-selling book Web Analytics an Hour a Day, his blog Occam’s Razor is a first-stop on my daily online reading list, he speaks at countless conferences across the globe, and manages to sustain a frantic pace on Twitter.  Plus he’s a really approachable and helpful guy. Read more…

I received an interesting plea for help recently via e-mail regarding tracking paid versus organic keywords in Omniture SiteCatalyst.  Although many functions are available within vanilla installations of SiteCatalyst, and several settings can be added to implementations after the fact – the little guy is often left holding the stick.  It’s easier for Omniture to say, just buy Search Center, because well, 9 times out of 10, they make money that way.  For simple keyword tracking without incurring any residual fees, get ready to roll-up your sleeves. Read more…

Attending the eMetrics conference this week in Toronto wasn’t necessarily a huge eye-opener for me, but several insightful discussions did arise from the show’s fundamentally significant panels and presentations.  One such topic included a sore spot for all online marketers and analysts at some point in their career: campaign attribution a.k.a. who gets the final credit for a conversion.

Who gets the credit?  Traditional Marketing?  Online advertising?  Last source of conversion?  Sales?  Or maybe customer service?  Who gets blamed for bad leads?  Someone’s gotta take the heat, right?

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Despite the recession and tough economic times, there still seems to be a huge demand for analytics talent in the industry, especially when it comes to individuals well-versed in implementing and supporting Omniture.  You have to hand it to them, they’ve become the defacto standard in web analytics through incremental in-house development of SiteCatalyst, and also through strategic acquisition of names such as HBX and Visual Sciences.  But before you go rushing into signing a long-term contract with Omniture, here’s a few things you should know.

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What’s the problem with most analytics solutions out of the box?  Nothing really.  In fact, most mainstream free analytics solutions are safelisted on many browser spam filters, or at least held in higher regard than their more expensive enterprise-level alternatives.  What the heck am I talking about?  Cookies.  Those little 1×1 pixels that track everything from the time and source where you came from prior to arriving at a site, right down to your browser type and increasingly – even your demographics!  Don’t accept them or delete them after and your tracking can be inaccurate. Read more…

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. Read more…

In the closing paragraph of my article posted yesterday on recent improvements made to the Omniture SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter applications, I mentioned the company also recently released a SiteCatalyst app for the iPhone.  Love it or hate it, the iPhone has amassed a huge following world-wide in the developer community and can now boast a significant application base.  Omniture is the first analytics company out of the gate, so how do they fare? Read more…