One of the old adages in business is location, location, location.  In this post, I will share a way that you can ease end-users into the data you want them to see by embedding key reports in to places they are already are frequenting.

Why Embed Reports?
In my experience, most users don’t log into tools (check the SiteCatalyst usage logs) and many ignore e-mailed reports.  But if you can provide relevant information in a context that is meaningful to them, you have a better chance of adoption.

Another barrier to web analytics adoption is that SiteCatalyst reports don’t provide a lot of context.  What I have longed for is a place where I could share more than a few sentences of information about the report an end-user is viewing.  However, for all of its virtues, SiteCatalyst does not provide a lot of tools to provide context to reports.  The ones I have seen are as follows:

1. Adding a text reportlet to a SiteCatalyst Dashboard.  This is ok, but it is hard to share a lot of information or graphics here.
2. Adding notes to reports.  Again, you are limited to basic HTML and it is difficult to replicate report notes to many report suites.
3. There is no real way to associate notes to reports that are e-mailed out other than a short description.
4. Adding notes to an Excel Dashboard.  This is what I have used the most, but Excel Dashboards can be harder to share and have issues for Mac users.

In addition to the above limitations, as stated earlier, I like to get reports closer to my end-users.  For these reasons, I choose to embed reports into Intranets and web pages.  For example, recently, our development team launched a cool new sidebar helper tool on the website affectionately known as “Super-Sassy.”  Instead of sending a report to my users telling them how the new tool has performed, why not show all recipients what the tool is with the associated data:

In the example above, I might show data related to our “Super-Sassy” tool along with explanations of all of the metrics on an Intranet page used by the people who designed and developed the tool.  This provides context for people who would not normally be using web analytics data and (hopefully) gets them excited about learning how the tool they have developed is being used.  I even included a button at the top that allows them to launch the full report in SiteCatalyst should they want to change the date range, country data set or dig into more detail.  Finally, in the embedded SiteCatalyst report, I can pre-filter the data using a search and pre-select the appropriate report suite and date ranges, which all goes a long way to simplifying things for people who are not web analysts.

Which do you think will be used more, the above report or the same report buried in an eVar report somewhere within the SiteCatalyst interface?

How’d He Do That?
So how do I do this?  Obviously embedding depends upon the environment you are trying to embed into so I will share the general principles and hoepfully you can apply them to your own envirnment.

One approach is to use SiteCatalyst Widgets.  About a year ago I showed how to use SiteCatalyst Widgets to embed reports into tools like iGoogle so I recommend you check out that post to see if that will work in your environment.

For today’s example, I am going to show what I did above, which is embedding SiteCatalyst reports into Google Sites.  If you are not familiar with Google Sites, it is a free template-based tool you can use to build team group pages, Intranets or any other site you’d like.  I like to use secure Google Sites to build Web Analytics portals or embed reports in existing Google Sites being used by teams at my organization.

Let’s imagine that your social media team has a Google Site that they use to track information about the company’s social media program.  This site has a page for the social media team, social media policies, articles related to social media, etc… Now let’s say that you have implemented some cool Omniture SiteCatalyst Twitter Integration which allows you to see how often your company’s branded keywords are mentioned on Twitter.  Wouldn’t it be cool if you could embed the report showing Twitter mentions directly into the social media team’s existing Google Site?  Here’s how to do it:

• Work with your social media team to add a page to their Google Site that describes the business question that your report aims to solve.  In this case it might be something like “How often is Salesforce.com mentioned on Twitter?”  On this page, you should provide some context, such as what keyword phrases you would characterize as a “Salesforce.com mention” so users know what makes up the metric.

• Next, in a new browser window/tab, create the SiteCatalyst report that you want to show your audience on the page.  You do this as you would normally create a report, by selecting the variable (eVar, sProp or Success Event) and the desired date range.

• Next is the tricky part, in the Google Site menu, insert a Google iFrame Gadget as shown here:

• Once this gadget is embedded, click the Properties link which will show the window below.  In your SiteCatalyst tab/window, use the new shortcut link feature (if you need a refresher on how to do this, see this post) to create a shortcut link to the report you created above.  Enter this shortcut link in the “URL to content” box.  Choose the sizing and border settings as you wish and when you are done, save the gadget.  The only bummer in this technique is that Omniture only keeps these shortcut links for one year which means that you would have to repeat this step with a new link once per year (please join me in lobbying Omniture to make these links indefinite!)

• Finally, save the new Google Site Page and you are finished.  You can go to the Google site and search on a phrase you included in your page (i.e. “Twitter”) and see the new page in the results list:

• When your users click on the page you created, they will see a page like the following:

Presto!  You now have a SiteCatalyst report embedded into a Google Site already used by your stakeholder that provides useful information and as much free text/graphic context as you would like to add!

How Much of a Web Analytics Geek Are You?
So the above example is specific to Google Sites, but there are many ways to create iFrames of the shortcut links or the Widgets discussed earlier.  However, if you do use Google Sites and are truly a Web Analytics geek, there is a checkbox in the Google Site setup that allows you to track how Google Site pages are used (using a tool that shall remain nameless here!).  Said tool would allow you to see how often people are accessing your wonderful new page and might look something like this:

Final Thoughts
Since most of you out there are more technical than I am, I expect that you can apply these concepts in ways I never imagined to do amazing things.  The goal of this post was simply to get you to “think outside of the box” and realize that there are many more ways to share your SiteCatalyst data other than e-mailed reports and SiteCatalyst Dashboards.  Enjoy!

Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com.  You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco.  Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.

Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.

I know many Omniture clients that spend much of their time using SiteCatalyst for SEO and SEM tracking.  If you are one of these clients, the following will show you a fun little trick that you can use to improve your Search reporting by setting custom Search Success Events.

That Darn Instances Metric!
As a Search marketer, you tend to spend a lot of your time in the various Paid and Natural Search Engine reports within SiteCatalyst.  While in those reports, you would normally use the out-of-the-box “Searches” metric for most of your reporting.  If you stay in the Search reports, life is good, as you can use the Searches metric and any other Success Event to see what success takes place after visitors arrive from a particular Search Engine or Search Keyword.  For example, here is a report that shows Searches and Form Completions coming from various Search Engines:

However, as I blogged about a while back in my Instances post, the Searches metric is really a really a renaming of the dreaded SiteCatalyst “Instances” metric.  Why is that bad?  It means that if you need to see Searches in any other Conversion Variable (eVars) report, you are out of luck.  For example, let’s say that your boss wants to see a report that shows Searches and Form Completes (and possibly a Calculated Metric that divides the two) by Site Locale (each country in which you do business).  To do this, you would open the Site Locale eVar report and add Form Completes, but guess what…there is no “Searches” metric to add to the report since it only exists in the Search Engine reports!  Rats!

Let’s say you are an eternal optimist and you say, darn it, I can solve this!  I’ve read all of Omni Man’s blogs and there has to be a way to do this.  After pouring over past blogs, you finally arrive at the perfect answer!  I can use Conversion Subrelations to break the Search Engine report down by Site Locale while the Searches metric is in the report!  So you go back to the Searches report shown above and realize that all you have to do is use the green magnifying glass icon to and break the report down by the Site Locale eVar (which BTW will only work if Site Locale has Full Subrelations enabled).  I’m a genius, you think to yourself!  Then you wait for the report to load…brimming with anticipation only to see this…

Yuck!  What’s up with all of the “n/a” values?  Foiled again by the darn Instances metric!

Don’t Panic!
Don’t be so hard on yourself since if you got that far, you are ok in my book!  Just consider this a well earned lesson on why you have to be careful around any Instances metric (don’t fall for the same thing with Product Views!).  As always, I don’t like to just present problems since the Omni Man is all about solutions!  To solve this enigma, we have to find a way to get around the Instances metric.  At a high level, the solution is to set custom Success Events when visitors arrive at your site from a Search Engine.  I usually set a Natural Search, Paid Search and Paid + Natural Search metrics.  This can be done in several ways, but the easiest way is through the Unified Sources Vista Rule or the JavaScript equivalent known as the Channel Manager Plug-in (I recommend talking to Omniture Consulting about implementation details).  Regardless of how you implement it, once you have true custom success events set when visitors arrive from a search engine, you can use these success event anywhere within Omniture SiteCatalyst which means that you can now create the report you were looking for above like shown here:

The following are some other advantages of using a custom success events for Searches:

1. You can use these metrics in Calculated Metrics (i.e. Shopping Cart Additions/External Natural Search) without having to rely upon the ExcelClient
2. You can create Alerts on Paid or Natural Search metrics
3. You can add some cool SiteCatalyst Plug-ins or advanced features to the new Custom Search success events that make them even better than the out-of-the-box Searches metric (i.e. Avoid back button duplicate counting by using the getValOnce plug-in or Event Serialization).
4. You have an easy way to create a metric report for Searches (see below) and add it to a SiteCatalyst Dashboard

The only caveat I will give you is that the new custom Search metrics will probably never tie exactly with the out-of-the-box metrics, but in many cases you can make them more accurate and useful.  If SEO/SEM is something that is important to your organization, I suggest you talk to Omniture Consulting and give it a whirl…  Let me know if you come up with any other cool uses for this functionality…

Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com.  You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco.  To be alerted to new blog posts, I recommend subscribing to this blog via e-mail using the tool provided on the top-right of this page.  Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.

Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.

While there are many great out-of-the-box reports in Omniture SiteCatalyst, there is one key limitation to them that can cause problems from time to time.  This limitation is that you cannot apply  SAINT Classifications to out-of-the-box reports.  In this post, I will demonstrate why this can cause issues and how I get around this limitation.

What’s The Big Deal?
So you cannot classify some out-of-the-box reports.  What’s the dig deal?  Let me show you a real-life example of where this limitation comes into play.  Let’s imagine that your boss tells you that he needs to see a weekly report of the top 25 Natural Search Keywords leading to Site Registrations.  No problem!  Simply open the Natural Search keywords report, add the Site Registrations Success Event and schedule the report for delivery (easy enough!).  However, the life of a web analyst is never that easy.  Next your boss says that he needs to see the same weekly report, but broken out by Branded vs. Non-Branded Natural Search Keywords.  Uh oh!  Now you have a problem.  Your first thought is to use the ExcelClient to download the Natural Search Keywords report and then use a pivot table to group each Keyword into Branded vs. Non-Branded buckets.  However, you soon realize that this will soon become a maintenance nightmare as you will have to manually do this each week and there isn’t an easy way to distribute the report to all Omniture users like you can through a SiteCatalyst Dashboard.  So next, you recall reading a [brilliant] blog post about Classifications and realize that the easiest thing to do would be to classify the top 200-300 Natural Search Keywords and then add the Branded vs. Non-Branded Classification version of the report to a SiteCatalyst Dashboard.  This would only require a one-time work effort and barely any maintenance.  Problem solved!  However, when you go to the Admin Console to add a Classification to the Natural Search Keywords report, you soon discover, that there is no way to do this (why, Omniture why?).  The inability to classify this report can have a real negative impact on end-user adoption, which is why at times, this can be a big deal.

But this is not the only place where this limitation can haunt you.  Another common example, is the Visit Number report.  It is pretty cool that you can look at the Visit Number report and add a Success Event metric and see what percentage of success takes place within the first visit, second visit, etc…  But if your site has a “long tail” it may take many visits for success to take place.  How would you like to present your boss with a report about Internal Searches that looks like this:

While not the worst thing in the world, this report does not provide an easy way to perform analysis, nor does it “tell a story” at an executive level due to its level of granularity.  However, if you could classify the Visit Number report, you could create a more functional report like this:

Here we can more easily see that the bulk of Onsite Searches are being conducted by first timers and those who have been on the site many times which can lead to follow-on questions.

The following are some of the places where I have run into this limitation:

1. Search Keywords
2. Search Engines
3. Visit Number
4. Referrers/Referring Domains
5. GeoSegmentation Country, Region, City, etc…

The Workaround
So if this limitation has affected you or you could see how it might in the future, how do you get around it?  Thankfully, the solution is very easy if you know what you are doing.  To get around this problem, all you need to do is to use JavaScript (or in some cases a VISTA Rule)to copy the values stored in these out-of-the-box reports into regular Traffic Variables (sProps) and Conversion Variables (eVars).  By duplicating this data into custom variables, which can be classified, you can use the Menu Customizer to steer your users to the custom versions of each report (which contain the Classification) instead of the out-of-the-box versions.  I have seen this quick/easy solution help clients turn otherwise unused reports into versions that are popular amongst SiteCatalyst end-users.

Enjoy!

Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com.  You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco.  To be alerted to new blog posts, I recommend subscribing to this blog via e-mail using the tool provided on the top-right of this page.  Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.

Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.

A few weeks ago, with the release of SiteCatalyst v14.6, there were a few interface features added that people like me have been requesting for a long time.  While there were many new items released, two of the more simple ones can go a long way to making the lives of power users easier.  Below is a quick description of these two enhancements and why I like them.

Send Link
Have you ever worked hard to create a beautiful report in SiteCatalyst and wanted to share it with others at your company?  To do so, you usually have to save it as a Bookmark or to a Dashboard and then share that Bookmark or Dashboard and then tell users how to find it and add it to their list of Bookmarks or Dashboards.  Alternatively, you could send it to them in PDF/Excel/CSV format, but then they cannot manipulate it (change the dates, add different metrics, etc…).  Well all of that is a thing of the past now since you can now easily send a link to the exact report you are looking at to one of your peers.  The only prerequisite is that they have a log-in to SiteCatalyst and have security access to the report suite and variables used in the report.  This is a real time-saver and I think will be useful in driving SiteCatalyst adoption by getting people into the tool to explore vs. always looking at reports sent via e-mail.

To send a link to a report, simply click the new icon found in the toolbar…

…and you can copy this link and send it to people at your organization.  I was told that these links would be good for a year which should be plenty of time.  The way I am excited to use this feature is in PowerPoint presentations where you can put a screen shot of a report and then make the entire screen shot image a hyperlink to the real report so when you are presenting you can easily dive right into the report without having to fumble around to find different reports when you are short on time and/or in front of executives.

My only complaints/enhancement requests of this new feature are as follows:

• I would like to be able to have this feature for Dashboards as well
• It would be cool if you could e-mail the link to SiteCatalyst users be picking names from an address book since they all exist in the Admin Console anyway.  Even better if you could set-up some groups for people who you commonly e-mail
• In the future, it would be interesting if you could send the link to a Publishing List which would show the same report, but for a different report suite to different groups of people (however, this would mean you need to check a box to determine if the link is variable or not like Dashboard reportlets)

Update Dashboard Reportet
The second new feature I love is the ability to update Dashboard reportlets.  Using this feature, you can now make changes to a Dashboard reportlet much more easily than in the past.  Previously, to update a Dashboard reportlet, you would have to:

1. Open the Dashboard
2. Launch the reportlet into full view
3. Make your changes
4. Click to add the new version back to the Dashboard
5. Update the reportlet settings
6. Wait for the Dashboard to open
7. Delete the old version of the reportlet
   
8. Move the new version to the correct space (phew!)

Now you can accomplish the same thing by doing the following:

1. Open the Dashboard
2. Launch the reportlet into full view
3. Make your changes
4. Click the new link (shown below) to update the Dashboard reportlet

As you can see, this is much easier and much more intuitive for end-users.  In addition, you can even change report suites and view the same reportlet for a different data set and update it and it will be saved back to the Dashboard tied to the new report suite!  Very exciting for Omniture guys like me!

Well those are my two favorite enhancements, but I know there were many more made.  Let me know if you agree/disagree that these two items are useful or if there are other feature updates that you have found useful or if you have additional suggestions on how these two can be improved (maybe Omniture Product Management will end up reading these!).  Thanks!

Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com.  You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco.  To be alerted to new blog posts, I recommend subscribing to this blog via e-mail using the tool provided on the top-right of this page.  Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.

Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.