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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.

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.