As I was at Omniture Summit last week, I couldn’t believe that it had already been a year since I started talking about integrating Twitter data into Omniture SiteCatalyst!  Since I haven’t seen many updates about this integration come from Omniture, I thought I would share a few enhancements I have made over the year in case any of them are useful to those out there using the integration…

Competitor Twitter Share
When I first envisioned importing Twitter data into SiteCatalyst, my primary focus was tracking how often my brand was mentioned and importing the brand-related tweets.  This allowed me to monitor my brand usage and filter tweet reports to send the right tweets to the right people based upon search phrases.  However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this integration could be used to keep tabs on competitors as well.  Instead of setting one “Brand Mentions” Success Event, you could expand the scope of what is tracked and also grab tweets mentioning your competitors and set a second Success Event named “Competitor Tweets.”  This second Success Event allows you to trend your competitors and track them on the same SiteCatalyst dashboard you use to track your own brand:

This led me to another cool idea…Why not track overall “Competitor Tweet Share” in which you quantify the % of tweets your brand gets in relation to those of your competitors?  This would allow you to trend your “share of twitter” for your narrow competitive niche.  To do this, create a Calculated Metric as follows:

This results in a graph like this which allows you to see when spikes occur to see if local events or press releases move the needle:

You can also set Alerts based upon this Calculated Metric to be notified when you are spiking or tanking in relation to your competitors!

General Tweets
The next concept I thought about was “general tweets” that were related to a business.  For example, if you are Coca-Cola, you might want to keep tabs on tweets mentioning “soda” or “soft drink.”  However, you wouldn’t want these counted as “Brand Tweets” or “Competitor Tweets,” so instead you can set a third Success Event called “Twitter General Mentions” and specify a list of keywords that should trigger this Success Event.  This allows you to see if a list of “general” keywords related to your business is rising or falling over time to gauge the general level of interest in your category over time:

#Fail
Lastly, I decided that the #Fail hashtag was too good to pass up.  If your brand is mentioned in the same tweet as the #fail hashtag, you probably want your social media team (if you have one!) to be alerted at once!  To do this, all you have to do is create a scheduled report with #Fail in the search box and schedule it to run hourly.  Unfortunately, SiteCatalyst delivers hourly reports whether there is data or not (to stop this please vote for this idea) so you may need your social media folks create an Outlook rule to filter the alerts that say “No Data” in the subject.

In addition, you can perform the same exercise for your “Competitor Tweets” since your social media team may want to be notified when your competitors have a #Fail hashtag in tweets mentioning their brand name!

So there you have it…a few minor updates or enhancements to the Twitter – SiteCatalyst integration.  If you have other ideas, please leave a comment here…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.  You can also hear Adam on the BeyondWebAnalytics podcast.  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.

Recently on Twitter, there was some discussion about the best way to name your pages in SiteCatalyst.  Therefore, I thought I would share some thoughts on the best way to set names for Pages, Sections, etc… when using SiteCatalyst.  Hopefully, you are already doing most of what I will mention here, but just in case, here are my suggestions.  Also, keep in mind that many people have different styles of naming pages (and feel very strongly about it!) so what is shown here are my personal preferences…

Naming Pages
If you don’t manually apply a “friendly” page name to the s.pagename Traffic variable (sProp) in SiteCatalyst, Omniture will capture the URL by default.  This is not ideal for the following reasons:

1. URL’s can be very long and exceed the sProp character limit (normally 100 characters)
2. URL’s can be hard to understand by end-users
3. URL’s can have querystring parameters that get cutoff which means that many pages get treated as one page name in SiteCatalyst (which ruins Pathing reports)
4. URL’s can have a http:// and https:// versions which means two versions of each URL which subdivides Pathing, Unique Visitors, etc…

Therefore, it is highly recommended that you name your pages the way you would like to see them in the Pages report.  I generally recommend naming pages based upon directory structures or manually by adding fields to your content management system.  Once you figure out how you will name your pages, the key question is what should you name your pages.  Here are my recommendations:

• Make sure all pages within each unique website have a common identifier.  For example, if you have three distinct websites that serve different purposes, I like to assign a value in the page name for each website so I can easily filter those pages in a global report suite (one that has data from all websites).  For example, for the Omniture website, I would have an identifer for the public (marketing) website (i.e. “omtr:”) and a different identifier for say the Idea Exchange (i.e. “ideas:”).
• I like to include the section in the page name when possible.  For example, if the Omniture public website has a section for “Products” and another for “Services,” I would include those in the page name (i.e. “omtr:products:” or “omtr:services”).  This allows you to easily filter Page reports to get all of the pages within a section.  Some companies also include the sub-section in the page name which is fine as long as you don’t hit the sProp character limit.
• Make sure all pages have a unique name.  If you have two pages with the same exact page name, SiteCatalyst will treat them as a single page and all stats for that page will be merged (including paths).
• Be mindful of case-sensitivity.  sProps are case-sensitive, so if you have the same pagename value, but in different cases, you will get two distinct page names.  A common best practice is to force upper or lower case in the JS file to avoid any issues.

So if you put all of these ideas together, a list of your pages might look like this:

One wrinkle that can emerge are cases where you have multiple geographic websites.  For many companies, this results in a similar version of the website, but translated into different languages.  If you have this situation, I recommend tweaking the above page names to include a site locale indicator.  For example, each page in the UK site should have “uk:” in the page name and so on.  When this is done, your page names might look like this:

[Advanced User Alert - If you have multiple site locales, I also recommend passing the page name without the site locale to a different sProp (with Pathing enabled) so you can see how a page does across all site locales (i.e. Participation).  I also like to pass the site locale by itself to a separate sProp so in a global report suite I can create correlations between sProps and other variables (i.e. Internal Search Terms).]

One other item related to site locales is the use of different languages or translated pages.  While I do recommend different page names for each site locale, I do not recommend that you have different pagen ames for the same page translated into different languages.  You can read more about this in my old Foreign Language post.

As you can see, this doesn’t look all that hard to implement, but by using the above items you can easily:

• Filter pages for a website (i.e. omtr: vs. ideas:)
• Filter all pages for a specific section (Search contains :services:)
• Filter all pages for a particular site locale (Search contains “:uk:”)
• Filter on a combination of the above items.  For example, let’s say you wanted to see all UK Product pages (Search contains “:uk:products:”)

When you look at this it makes common sense, but I can’t tell you how many clients I ran into that had incomprehensible page naming which made everything more difficult.  Even if it means losing some historical page data, I always recommend that clients have good page names as it pays great dividends down the road…

Site Sections (s.channel)
After dealing with Page Names, the next thing I like to tackle is Site Sections.  These are useful if you want to see how visitors are navigating your website at a higher level than pages.  If you have good page names, you really should be able to build your Site Sections by setting it equal to the page name minus everything past the last “:” symbol.   For example, in the example above, if the page name is “omtr:us:services:consulting” then the section would be “omtr:us:services” (you choose whether you want to include the “:” at the end or not).  I have seen many clients that can set Site Section values automatically based upon good page names which saves a lot of development work and ensures consistency.

Site
One variable that many clients forget to include is the Site variable.  Essentially, what you are doing here is to pass in a value for the website by itself into an sProp.  In the example above, this would mean values of “omtr” or “ideas” by themselves in an sProp.  Doing this allows you to see total Visits and Unique Visitors by site in one report and when Pathing is enabled, allows you to see how people are navigating from one website to another.  Again, if you have good page names, you can set the Site variable by simply grabbing everything before the first “:” symbol in the page name.

Page Type
Those of you who have read my previous blog posts know that I am a fan of setting a Page Type on each page that represents the function of the page.  I won’t rehash this topic, but recommend you check out my prior post on this.

Advanced Stuff
For those who are a bit more advanced in their SiteCatalyst usage, you can check out the following page related advanced topics:

• Setting a Page View Event
• Passing Page Name to an eVar
• I recommend passing the URL to a custom sProp.  This is a good thing to do since URL is not available in DataWarehouse by default.  There are also cases where being able to segment on the URL can get you out of a jam…

So there are a few items related to naming Pages, Sections, etc…Let me know if you find these tips helpful and/or if you have come up with best practice suggestions of your own you’d like to share…

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.

One of the holy grails of online marketing teams is to find a way to track and measure a company’s Brand Awareness.  There are many different approaches to do this including the use of products like comScore, Compete, Twitter, but more often than not, it takes place offline in research studies.  While this trend is not going to change anytime soon, as a web analyst, you may be looking for data that you can collect to provide an estimate of your Brand Awareness.  Therefore, in this post, I wanted to share a “quick and dirty” way to use online data to see and trend the popularity of your company brand.  While this will not be a comprehensive approach, it might provide a basic starting point into the larger “Brand Awareness” puzzle.

Why Track Brand Awareness?
There are many schools of thought on whether it is even worthwhile to try and track Brand Awareness.  While people like us try to track everything, sometimes, there are things that are just not meant to be tracked.  If you own a website that sells stuff, then there is so much you can do with Web Analytics that tracking Brand Awareness is probably way down on the list.  However, there are many companies (i.e. B2B) that don’t sell products directly and inevitably the question arises:

“What is the true purpose of my website?”

If you are part of one of these companies, the above question is often followed with a spirited debate about whether success should be judged by lead counts, unique visitors, visitor engagement, etc…  At some point one Marketer will say that the website should be used to build Brand Awareness so success should be judged by increasing Unique Visitors, only to be countered by another saying that Unique Visitors don’t mean anything if they aren’t the right types…After about an hour of this, there is rarely a consensus on how to judge the success.  Soon you can see why this is not a popular topic in Web Analytic circles!

Amid all of this confusion, I think that people sometimes forget the real reason that people care about Brand Awareness.  At the end of the day, you want to measure how often consumers that are interested in a product/service that you provide think of you when the time comes to research or buy that product/service.  If you are doing a really good job at branding your company such that you are top of mind when consumers are at this stage, then one way or another you have done something right.  This is why I think there is some value in trying to quantify this and trend it over time.

So What Can Be Tracked?
So building upon the previous section, let’s assume that you don’t sell a product directly on your website, but that there are consumers out there who need your product/service (and have a blank checkbook in hand!).  Do you think they would:

1. Come to your office and ask to see your salespeople?
2. Pick up the Yellow Pages and give you a call?
3. Mail you a letter asking for information?

Maybe in the 1980’s, but not today!  Most are going to go to a Search Engine and a few savvy ones will go to Twitter.  So if the bulk of these will go to a Search Engine, and you are truly “top of mind” from a branding standpoint, they would probably search for your company name or the name of one of your products.  For example, if the consumer is looking for a “CRM” product they might search for “CRM.”  But if you are doing your job and have an awesome brand such that the first thing people think of when they think about “CRM” is your company brand (I don’t know…maybe something like “salesforce.com” ), then you would know that your brand is alive and kicking!

Following this logic, you can see that one interesting way to track your brand awareness is to quantify how often people are coming to your website from a list of “Branded” keywords of your choosing.  This list of keywords would include your company name, product names, key executive names, etc…  If you can aggregate these SEO keywords (I wouldn’t include Paid Search Keywords), then you have a number that you can trend over time.  Keep in mind that this is not an exact way to track brand awareness, but the logic behind it is that the more people [organically] search for your key brand phrases, the more pervasive your brand is out there.  In my consulting experience, I have often found that the number of SEO Brand Searches has a direct correlation with other key website success metrics.

So How Do I Implement SEO Branded Keyword Tracking?
In a perfect world, it would be great if there were an easy, reliable way to track how often your brand keywords were searched on all of the major search engines.  Companies like comScore try to estimate this, but it is not always accurate due to the panel-based methodology.  Another way I have tried to get at this data is through Google Trends, but I have not found ways to automatically export that data through API’s (if you know how please let me know!).

That being said, if you want to use SEO Branded Keywords to track your brand, take the following steps:

1. Work with your Marketing team to identify the list of keywords that everyone agrees are “Brand Keywords.”  In order to not distort the trend, it is important that you not continually add to the list so try and get an exhaustive list and stick to it for an extended period of time (i.e. readjust yearly).
2. The next step is to isolate these Branded Keywords in your SEO reports.  One way to do this is to add each one to the advanced search criteria for your SEO Keywords report (in the interface or ExcelClient), but if you have a lot this can be difficult.  My preferred approach is to pass SEO Keywords to a custom eVar.  Once you have done this, you can use SAINT to classify these keywords as “Branded Keywords” and then use the trended view of reports.  If you are using the Channel Manager plug-in or the Unified Sources Vista Rule, you should already have the data you need in a custom variable.
3. Once you have these branded keywords isolated, you can create a report that looks like this:

In addition, if you have specific products that are brands of their own, you may want to apply the same technique to the SEO Keywords that represent those brands and chart the Brand Awareness of your different products amongst each other (maybe inspire some competitiveness?).  For example, at Salesforce.com, we group our products into “Clouds” so you might chart the SEO Keywords related to the various “Clouds” on a graph to see how each is doing (shown with sample data here):

Don’t Forget About Twitter!
As mentioned earlier, another way to look at how your brand is doing is to look at Twitter.  This can be done using the Omniture Twitter Integration I proposed last year.  Implementing this provides you with a way to see how often your brand is being talked about so you can see a chart like this:

If you want to get fancy, you can even measure how your brand compares to the brand of your competitors on Twitter.  The graph below shows what I call “Twitter Competitive Share” and is calculated by the following formula:

Branded Tweets / (Branded Tweets + Competitors Branded Tweets)

The result is a chart that looks like this:

Final Thoughts!
Well there you have it, definitely not world peace, but if you are looking for some different ways to leverage your web analytics data, hopefully these ideas give you some food for thought.  If there are other ways that you are using web analytics data to track Brand Awareness, please leave a comment here as I’d love to hear about it…

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.

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.

While most of you reading my posts are focused on your public website, in this post I am going to share how you can leverage your web analytics skills internally at your organization.  Company Intranets are often times larger than the public website and using the tips I will share here, you can get some big visibility internally and become the hero of your HR team!

Why You Should Care About Your Intranet
Companies often spend a LOT of $$$ on building Intranets.  Unfortunately, not everyone at the company uses the Intranet.  If you can help your internal team show what is working and what is not working on the Intranet, you can help them to save a lot of money.  In addition to the altruistic reasons to track what happens on the Intranet, there are the following selfish reasons:

1. Tagging Intranets is a great way to try new things and get better at web analysis in a safe environment
2. Intranets often have low traffic volume so it is a great way to help cost-justify increased budgets for web analytics (“Mr. CEO, not only does this money go towards tracking the website, it also allows us to track our entire Intranet!” – Just don’t tell them that tracking the Intranet costs all of $1,000 in server calls!)
3. Showing people what is happening on the Intranet does wonders for people inside your organization understanding what the heck you do for the public website!

I have seen situations where a web analytics team has killed themselves trying to get senior executives to see what is taking place on the website and what improvements could be made based upon solid web analysis, only to see the same team get promoted or more budget after spending 2-3 weeks showing what takes place on the Intranet (something that they actually use)!  It sounds completely illogical, but I guess if you can’t beat them, join them!

Tracking Intranets
So what should you track on Intranets?  The following are my best practices learned working with a few large clients.  The one caveat to everything below is that you have to be sure to track all of this data in a different report suite than all of your other website data!

Employee ID
Depending upon the security policy of your company, ask if you are able to track down the the Employee ID level.  I tend to not do this since it can be a bit creepy, but it is technically possible and you can replace the Omniture Visitor ID with your own unique employee identifier.

Non-Personally Identifiable Employee Info
On each Intranet page, I recommend that you pass Department, Region, Business Unit, Office Location, Employee Band Level (i.e. VP, Manager), etc… to variables.  This will allow you to break down all Pages by these data points.  I generally pass these to an sProp and an eVar (save some time setting both through this post) and also recommend you put your top five of these into a 5-item Traffic Data Correlation.

Pages & Sections
Obviously, you want to pass in a unique page name for every Intranet page like you would any other website.  In addition, you should pass the Intranet section to the Site Sections (Channel) variable.  As always, I recommend that you enable Pathing on the Channel sProp so you can see how employees are navigating between Intranet sections.

Internal Search
Just like a public website, Internal Search is usually important on Intranets.  You should track Internal Search on the Intranet just as you would on a public website.  You can apply the same principles I mentioned in this Internal Search post.  This includes tracking what search terms people are looking for, but the beauty here is that you can see these by Department, Region, etc…

Timeparting
Many of my Intranet clients were keen to see when employees were accessing the Intranet, so I recommend you implement the Timeparting Plug-in.  This allows you to see what day of the week and time of the day employees access the Intranet.  Don’t forget to create a correlation between these sProps and your other ones so you can see when each page/section is accessed most often.

Internal Promotions
Much in the same way that I described Internal Campaigns in the past, Intranets may have promotional areas that try and entice employees to click.  You can track these the same way you would a public website.

Intranet KPI’s
The following are the types of KPI’s I have seen used for Intranets:

Page Views/Visit & Average Time Spent/Visit
Depending upon whether your goal is to get employees in and out or get them to spend more time reading Intranet content, you can use this calculated metric to see how you are doing.

Page Views (Event)
As I described in this post, I would recommend that you set a Success Event on each page.  Why?  Well let’s say you want to see how many pages on the Intranet a specific internal e-mail led to.  You can open the Campaigns report, find the e-mail and then see how many pages were viewed.  You can then use an eVar Subrelation to break this down by page name (as long as you pass Pagename to an eVar) to see the exact pages viewed.

Internal Searches
As you would on a website, you should track and trend the # of Internal Searches taking place on the Intranet.

Logins
If employees have to log into your Intranet, you can capture that as a KPI to see how you are doing at getting them to access the Intranet.  This can also be used for segmentation (i.e. show me all users who have not logged into the Intranet in the past 30 days…)

Custom KPI’s
Many times, Intranets are used to get employees to fill out forms, surveys, etc…  Each of these key actions should be captured with a Success Event and in the case of Forms, you should capture the Form Name in an eVar so you can break it down appropriately.

Employee Profile Views
As we march down the road of internal social media, it is fun to track how often each employee’s Intranet Profile is viewed.  Using new tools like my company’s upcoming “Chatter” product (see shameless plug video below!), we may be moving to a world where employees get “followers” so you can track how often people are looking at or following other employees.  This allows you to see who your employees think are important (which may not always align to the org chart!).

Final Thoughts
As you can see, if you know what you are doing for tracking a public website, tracking an Intranet uses many of the same principles.  If you are just getting started in web analytics, feel free to apply the above items on your Intranet as a testing ground before you tackle the public website.  If you have some other cool things you have done to track your Intranet, please feel free to leave a comment here…

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.

In this post, I am going to talk about how Data Quality can kill an Omniture (or other Web Analytics) implementation.  I will share some of the problems I have seen and show some ways that you can help improve Data Quality…

Sound Familiar?
So you have been managing an Omniture implementation for a while.  You have your KPI’s lined up.  You have been sharing some dashboards and reports with people throughout your company.  People are starting to realize that they should talk to you before making website business decisions.  Suddenly, you find yourself in the executive suite to answer some key website questions.  Then, just as you are wrapping up your web traffic overview, an executive starts to calculate some numbers on a notepad and determines that the increase you show in Paid Search traffic doesn’t look right given other data they have seen from the SEM team.  She also questions the rise in traffic data for EMEA, knowing that his VP in the region told you traffic has been down over the last few months.  Suddenly, you are in a web analytics death spiral.  In a split second, you have to decide, do you defend your Omniture data and risk your reputation or do you back-pedal saying you will re-check the web analytics data and live to fight another day?

Hopefully this hasn’t happened to you, but it has happened to most of us who have been around the web analytics space for long enough.  Unfortunately, you only get so many chances to be wrong  about data you are presenting and even if your data is right, if you aren’t confident enough to stand by it, it might as well be wrong.

Minimizing Data Quality Risk
So how do you avoid this situation?  The first step is to realize that there is no way to be sure that all of your web analytics data is correct.  100% Data Quality is not only unattainable, but also not worth the time and effort it would take to achieve.  Therefore, I use a philosophy of risk minimization in which I try various techniques to minimize the key things that cause data quality issues.  The following will show you some of the ways to do this:

Ensure all Pages are Tagged
This is easier said than done.  As we all know, IT is usually used to deploy JavaScript tags and they often have more important things to do than to guarantee that every website page has a the [correct] JavaScript tag.  Fostering a good relationship with IT helps, but at the end of the day, new website pages are created all the time, and tags will be missing.

Use Technology
As you can imagine, where there is a need, there are technology vendors.  The main vendors that I have worked with or heard the most about are WASP and ObservePoint.  Not completely coincidental, ObservePoint was founded by John Pestana who was one of the co-founders of Omniture.  In a great blog post, John Pestana talked about getting rid of asterik’s in web analytics reports.  I am sure there are many other vendors out there offering similar products, but the gist of the technology is that it can spider your website and let you know which pages are missing JavaScript tags so eliminate any obvious omissions.

Blood, Sweat & Tears
Unfortunately, the main way that I have minimized web analytic data loss is by downloading data and looking for anomalies.  I normally do this by taking advantage of the Omniture SiteCatalyst Excel Client and downloading key data blocks by day or week and then using formulas to compare yesterday to the same day last week or last week to the week prior.  Once you have the data in Excel, you can do any type of statistical analysis you want on the data to see if anything looks “fishy.”  One thing I like to do is to use Excel conditional formatting to spot data issues.

The following is a screenshot example of using Excel to spot potential data issues.  In this example, I am looking at Page Views from one week prior to each day and if there is a change of more than 20%, I highlight it in red:

Uh-oh… It looks like our daily data quality report indicates that we may have lost a tag on Friday for the Login page and something suspicious took place related to the Search Results page the same day.  Obviously, the downsides of this approach are that it is extremely manual and that it is in arrears.  As you know, once you miss a time slot of data in SiteCatalyst, there is no easy way to get that data back.  While this approach can minimize the data loss to a day, it won’t help you get the Login Page data back in the example above.

Therefore, the way I employ this approach is to focus on the top items within each variable.  This means, I focus on the pages with the most Page Views, the Form ID’s with the most Form Completions, the Orders for the most popular products, etc…With the Excel Client, you can download multiple data blocks at once and then use conditional formatting to easily spot the issues.  Done intelligently, Data Quality for 80% of your data can be done in under a few hours each day.  By doing this, you can feel more confident when your VP questions your data knowing that if something were significantly off, you would have known about it ahead of time.

Special Cases
I have found that there are a few other situations that commonly lead to missing or bad data so I quickly wanted to bring them to your attention so you can apply some additional effort to ensure they are tagged correctly:

1. “Lightbox” pages where a new HTML page is often not loaded.  These often times are created as a window within a window and many times developers forget to put SiteCatalyst code within them.
2. Flash/AJAX pages where the page changes dynamically or you have an entire site/page developed in Flash.  By extra careful around these as they often are missing tracking code (especially when done by an outside agency!).
3. Dynamically generated content, such as a page that shows historical stock price data after a user enters a ticker symbol.  Often times, these dynamic pages are tagged as one single page, but might be better as unique pages from a web analytics viewpoint.

SiteCatalyst Alerts
If you have read my previous blog post on Alerts, you may figure out that you can use Alerts to help with Data Quality as well.  Alerts can be used to look for changes in key metrics by Month, Week, Day (or Hour in some cases).  These alerts can be handy to be notified when data is off  by more than x%.  However, I have found that if you want to look a more granular data (as in the example above), the current Alert functionality can be a bit limiting.  You can set alerts for specific sProp and eVar values, but not as easily as you can by using Excel.  Therefore, I would use Alerts as an early warning system an employ the previously mentioned techniques as your main defense against missing data.

Classification Data
Finally, when  thinking about data quality/completeness, don’t forget about SAINT Classifications.  If you have key reports that rely on SAINT Classifications, even if you have the source data collected perfectly, if you are missing key SAINT Classifications for that source data, your reports will be incorrect and indistinguishable from poor data quality in the eyes of your users.  You will know if you are missing SAINT Classification data if your classified reports have a large “None” row.  So how do you ensure your SAINT Classification data is complete?  What I do is create Excel data blocks for each Classification and isolate the “None” row for key metrics.

In the screenshot below, you can see that I have created a data block that looks for “Unspecified” Site Locale Full Names (the Excel Client doesn’t use None, but it uses “Unspecified” instead for some reason).  In this scenario, I store a 2-digit website country identifier in an  eVar and use a SAINT Classification to provide a full name.  I filter on “Unspecified”  where the metric is Visits, Form Views and Form Completes.

After running, you will see a succinct report that looks like this:

In this case, there are no Form View or Form Complete Success Events missing a Full Site Locale SAINT Classification, but there are some Visits missing the classification.  You can then easily go into SiteCatalyst or Discover, open the Full Locale Name report and break it down by its source to find out what values are left to be classified.

Finally, if you want to earn “extra credit” you can do this for all of your SAINT Classifications in one Excel workbook and make a summary screen like the one below which pulls the percentages that are unclassified into one screen so you can see how you are doing overall.  What is cool about this is that you can use the “Refresh All” feature of the Excel Client to check all of your Classifications while you get coffee and when you get back, you have a fully updated view of your SAINT Classifications.  In the above below, I have shaded some items in black that are OK if they aren’t fully classified, items in green that are acceptable and items in red that require attention:

Final Thoughts
As you can see, Data Quality is a HUGE topic so it is hard to cover it all in one post, but hopefully some of the pointers here will get you thinking about how you can improve in this area.  One last thing I will mention is that like most things related to web analytics, tools are good, but qualified people are better!  Therefore, I think that any serious web analytics team will have a resource who has Data Quality as one of their primary performance objectives.  Without this, Data Quality tends to fall by the wayside.  Try to do whatever you can to convince your management that having a full or part-time person devoted to Data Quality will pay hefty dividends in the future…

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.

As we (in the US) near the holiday in which we give thanks for what we have, it is traditional to think about those who don’t have as much as we do and those who try to help them.  In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to use this post to get your help on a project I am working on and possibly inspire you to join me in the cause.  Please read on to learn more…

Colin Powell, 1/1/1 & Thanksgiving
Last week, at my company’s annual Dreamforce conference, Colin Powell gave a riveting keynote speech to almost 10,000 attendees.  In his speech, he spoke about change, America and, most importantly, giving back to others.  We heard how many years ago, Colin Powell was part of the inspiration for the Salesforce.com 1/1/1 model of corporate philanthropy that has since been adopted by other companies in the area.  Besides the notion of donating 1% of equity and 1% of product, this model also includes a provision that each employee spend 1% of their time helping others.  This time can be spent at homeless shelters, hospitals or other similar venues.  Alternatively, this time can be spent using your skill set to help others that need help.

Ever since I joined the company, I have planned to use my 1% time to spend a week helping a non-profit or charity using my area of expertise – web analytics. After all, while many of us use web analytics to increase revenues, there are many organizations where an increase in conversion rates determine how many people can eat or receive life-saving medicines.  Therefore, I am actively looking for your help to find an organization that meets the following criteria:

1. Is a non-profit or charity
2. Has a web analytics tool or would like to have help in the area of web analytics (preferably Omniture SiteCatalyst where I know the most, but any tool will do!)
3. Would be able to devote some time with someone like me doing volunteer analysis or web analytics tagging work

If any of you out there know of organizations that meet this criteria, please e-mail me at adam@the-omni-man.com.

Care to Join Me?
Between the Colin Powell speech, Thanksgiving and Avinash Kaushik’s generosity of contributions through his books, I started thinking that there may be more that all of us could do.  I have encountered many brilliant blog readers and seen many ingenious #measure folks out on Twitter and wondered if there were others who might be interested in doing something similar.  With all of this talent out there, wouldn’t it be great if each person reading this were to donate a few days of their time and web analytics expertise to helping a non-profit or charity with web analytics? This would be great for these organizations, the industry as a whole and altruistic to boot!  Therefore, if any of you out there get caught up in the Thanksgiving spirit (I recommend watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles!) and feel like “paying it forward,” so to speak, please e-mail me your name, location and I will see if I can match up people expressing interest in volunteering with any names of organizations needing help that I hear about…

Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving!

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.

So by now, you have heard the news about the Omniture acquisition by Adobe.  Some out there have pinged me for my thoughts on the matter.  Since my blog is reserved for education vs. opinion, I am inclined not to comment much on the matter, but given the magnitude of the transaction, I thought I might provide a few random thoughts…Since football season is starting, I will do my Peter King impression with “10 Things I Think.”

10 Things I Think About the Acquisition

1. I think that Omniture has some great products and even better people.  I wish them the best and hope that this acquisition doesn’t impact them in a negative way.
2. I think that the two companies are a strange match.  I understand the potential synergies and know that both companies will do their best to portray the acquisition as having a synergistic effect, but I am a bit skeptical.  When you spend years preaching about optimizing websites and conversion, I don’t see how that jives with a company that makes design related products.  Sure you can track Flash components and Flash microsites better, but you could do that without the need to acquire the company that does the tracking.
3. I think acquisitions are hard and fail more often than they succeed.  Integrating two companies is simply hard work.  Many years ago, I was a Lotus Notes expert.  Lotus had a thriving e-mail and collaboration tool.  People like me ran consultancies around their products.  Then IBM bought them and the product died.  If you are still using Lotus Notes today, you are one of the few (and maybe proud?).  Lotus Notes became an after-thought to IBM as it was a small part of their overall business.  I fear that the same thing could happen to Omniture at Adobe.
4. I think that Omniture acquired too many companies too fast and this may have led to a loss of focus.  The Omniture leadership team often spoke about the goal of becoming a company that generated a billion dollars in revenue/year.  I think that all of the companies that Omniture bought and the difficulties in integrating them together may have made it more difficult for the company to achieve its goal.  I think they had the right vision of creating a cohesive online marketing suite (minus the sorely needed e-mail provider acquisition), but I think a more methodical approach and more up-front integration plans could have made a world of difference.
5. I think a good question to ask is why Omniture chose to sell now?  While they are getting a decent premium, I am sure they could have stayed independent for a while and continued to grow the company.  Did the management team feel they had taken it as far as they could?  Did they find the prospects of future growth too daunting?
6. I think that Google Analytics played a silent, but big part in this transaction (the elephant in the room!).  I also think that the long term winners of this deal could be Unica and/or Eloqua.
7. I think that Adobe should focus on three of Omniture products: SiteCatalyst, Test&Target (formerly Offermatica) and Insight (formerly Visual Sciences).  Without trying to offend anyone, I think these three products are the most valuable and unique to Omniture.  If I were in charge, I would focus all Omniture development resources on those products…
8. I think that five years from now, there is a chance that we may all be viewing websites and display ads that are much more Flash-intensive and interactive and that there will be people running those sites/ads using Omniture data and targeting to get more and more of our money!  Those people will look back on this date as the day that things changed for the better.  If Google Analytics can drive more advertising revenue for AdWords, maybe Omniture Analytics can drive more product revenue for Adobe…
9. I think that Adobe would be wise to keep Omniture as a standalone brand since it is very well known in the web analytics space (not to mention that I would have to change my Twitter Name!).  I don’t care if they want to cross-sell products, but the last thing Omniture customers need right now is rebranding, bundling, new contract/payment terms, etc… (unless they want to go down the free model which I would be supportive of!).  Trim the fat, re-focus the company on a few core products, retain the good folks and I think they will see a profitable subsidiary.
10. I think that Adobe could do the following to help Omniture customers and be seen as heroes:
    • Use their size and $$$ to find a way to make SiteCatalyst servers more robust, reliable and speedy
    • Find a way to simplify Omniture products so they are on par with newer analytics tools like GA (there is a cool product named Flash with which they could build a state-of-the-art SiteCatalyst interface!)
    • Deliver on the product-to-product integrations for which Omniture customers have been anxiously waiting
    • Find a way to provide more Omniture resources to help customers through Support and/or Account Management (and give Ben a raise!)

I wish both companies the best and hope to continue to be an advocate and champion of the Omniture products…

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.

Thanks to all of you who took the time to complete my SiteCatalyst quiz.  I hope it was a fun way to put your knowledge to the test.

So for the rest of this post, I will show how people answered the survey and point out what answers I was looking for.  When looked at as an entire population, if I include anytime someone got the correct answer, the majority of people got 10 correct answers out of 15 (66.67%).  However if I just look at just those responses where the exact right answer was given (no incorrect answers included where you could check off multiple boxes), the average score went down to about 6 out of 15.  However, please bear in mind that I am not an educator so if you interpreted a question differently than I did and gave a different answer, it is probably my fault not yours so don’t lose any sleep over it!  On the bright side, one (anonymous) individual in Europe got 14/15 correct (I am resisting the urge to find you by IP address and hire you!).  Either way, I strongly encourage you to look at your answers and see which ones you missed and read the linked posts below so you can become a SiteCatalyst Ninja!!

Question #1 (Correct Answer=Traffic Variables (sProps))
This first question was intended to be an easy one.  Think of it as a way to build engagement and not scare you off.  Most of you got this answer correct, but I was surprised to see that 33% of you thought that you could enable Pathing on more than just Traffic Variables (sProps).  Keep in mind that one of the main reasons to use sProps is to enable Pathing.   If you need a refresher, please check out my past posts on Traffic Variables (sProps) or on Pathing.

Question #2 (Correct Answer=True)
For many of these True/False questions, it is hard for me to tell if you got the right answer based upon knowledge or luck, but I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt!  In this case 75% of you were correct in saying that it is possible to share a segment with other users in your company.  I show how to do this in my past post about the Admin Console.  Keep in mind that you can only share a segment within one report suite so if you have multiple report suites you are out of luck.  If you really need to share segments across multiple report suites, the only way I know to do this is to create them under a shared Omniture User ID and give that ID to multiple users so they can see the segments owned by that ID.

Question #3 (Correct Answer = ZERO)
This question is admittedly a difficult one.  To get this one right, you would have had to really been in the trenches with SAINT Classifications.  Those who have ever tried to classify a variable that has a value of “0″ in the Key column have probably learned this the hard way.  While you can classify a value of “1″ or “43,” there is no way to classify a Key value of “0″ in SiteCatalyst.  Therefore, you need to pass in a text value for “0″ so you can classify it later on.  Therefore, the best answer to this question is the 3rd answer below “ZERO.”

Question #4 (Correct Answer=When a Success Event takes place or after a specified Time Period)
You guys knocked it out of the park on this one.  The correct answer here is that an eVar can be expired when a Success Event takes place or based upon a time period.  This happens to be one of my pet peeves since I really wish you could expire an eVar based upon a Success Event or a time period (whichever comes first).  There are many cases where having this ability would have saved me a lot of time.  Maybe in a future release (or all of you can help me by requesting this as a feature request!).

Question #5 (Correct Answer=True)
Most of you got this one right as well.  One of the cool things about classifying Conversion Variables (eVars) is that if you have paid for full subrelations on the eVar it is based off of, you get full subrelations on all of the Classifications.   This can save you time and money!

Question #6 (Correct Answer= All but Conversion Variables (eVars))
This question was a hard one and another one of my pet peeves.  The correct answer is the second one “Conversion Variables (eVars).”  The security features in the Groups area of the Admin Console are very good and a much better way to hide reports from select groups of users than the Menu Customizer.  However, for some unknown reason, you can hide pretty much everything in SiteCatalyst except Conversion Variables (eVars), which are some of the most critical reports!  I am not sure why this one thing was omitted and I have been asking for this for some time.  Hopefully it is on the product roadmap.

Question #7 (Correct Answer=None of the Above)
This question probably caused some confusion due to the wording, but the correct answer here is “None of the Above” since I was looking for the best way to assign credit across multiple visits.  Most of you fell for the trap I set here and chose “Linear Allocation.”  Many people I talk to think that Linear Allocation of an eVar works across multiple visits, but it does not.  Linear Allocation only works within a visit (for the most part, but the details are a bit confusing!).  Therefore, the real best answer for this question was Cross-Visit Participation which I covered a while ago.  Cross-Visit Participation is the only real way to assign credit to an eVar across multiple visits.  If you are not familiar with Cross-Visit Participation, please review my previous post.

Question #8 (Correct Answer=None of the Above)
Importing offline or external data via Data Sources is a more advanced topic, but many of you look like you are familiar with it.  The majority of you got this one correct since none of the options provided here will allow you to back out data sources metrics.  For this reason you have to be extremely careful when importing Data Sources data since there is really no going back if you make a mistake!

Question #9 (Correct Answer=False)
This is one of those questions you used to get from your teacher and absolutely hate them afterwards when they told you the answer, so I will apologize in advance.  The key phrase here is “the only difference” so the correct answer here is “False.”  While the difference cited here is correct, there is one really big difference between Correlations and Subrelations that you need to know.  That difference is that you can correlate two sProps, five sProps or twenty sProps with each other, but with Subrelations it is an all or nothing proposition.  It would be great if you could Subrelate just two eVars together, but that is not currently possible like it is for sProp Correlations.  This is a key thing that every SiteCatalyst Ninja must know!

Question #10 (Correct Answer=Unique Visitor Counts an Pathing)
Most of you got this one correct.  The key disadvantages of Roll-ups are that they don’t de-dup uniques and you cannot do Pathing analysis.  But hey, they don’t cost a lot!  Personally, I tend to not use Roll-ups since I can duplicate a lot of the info they provide using the ExcelClient and I like Pathing and de-duped Unique Visitors so I tend to favor Multi-Suite tagged sites.

Question #11 (Correct Answer=Calculated Metrics)
Great job on this one as most of you got this one correct!  In my post about Conversion Funnels I explained all of the ways they can be used and highlighted what, in my opinion, is an oversight of the functionality that you cannot add Calculated Metrics to them.  I hope this ability will be available at some point in the future, but in the meantime, you should keep this in mind when determining whether you should pass in a metric organically or rely on a calculated metric.

Question #12 (Correct Answer=Page Views)
In this question, I allowed you to choose from the following metrics.  While most of you got this correct that the Page Views metric is available in Traffic Variable Correlations those of you who also said that you could add Visits, DUV’s and MUV’s were not correct.  Please keep in mind that only Page Views are available when using Correlations.

Question #13 (Correct Answer=Classifications cannot be used in DataWarehouse Segments)
I had a hard time figuring out how to word this question, but if you really understand SAINT Classifications, you should have been able to get this one right by the process of elimination.  As you can see, most people had a hard time with this one, but the correct answer did emerge in the end as the only true statement below is that Classifications cannot be used in DataWarehouse Segments.  We can deduce this by understanding that 1) Classifications can be used in correlations/subrelations, 2) Classifications can be used in Omniture Discover and 3) Classifications cannot have pathing enabled in SiteCatalyst (You can, however, apply Pathing to classifications in Omniture Discover, which you can read about in this post on Page Type Pathing).

Question #14 (Correct Answer=False)
While I have been using Advanced Segment Insight (ASI) segments for many years, I only recently figured out that you can change the ASI type from recurring to time slice and vice versa if you know what you are doing so the correct answer below is actually False (the whole double-negative thing!).  If you have a static ASI that has run for say last month, you can use the “Add Data” link to bring up the ASI segment set-up screen, change the type to Daily Recurring and make the start date the day after your ASI last ran.  Just be sure to uncheck the box that asks if you want to remove existing data or you will lose your past ASI data.  If the ASI you already have is a Daily Recurring, simply wait until it has finished its daily processing and click the “Cancel” link.  Once you have cancelled it, you can click the “Add Data” link, make the type “Time Slice,” select your dates and set it to run.  Again you have to be sure to uncheck the remove existing data checkbox.  I am not sure if this is “officially” supported, but I have done lots of testing on it and so far it has worked fine…

Question #15 (Correct Answer=>!)
This last question is one of those “inside secrets” that only true SiteCatalyst Ninjas know.  Unfortunately, only 32% of you got this one right as the correct answer is “>!” which is a way to tell if a value exists or not in a specific variable when using the segment builder.  I covered this in my Tips & Tricks are of the Segment Builder post so if you didn’t get this one correct, check out that post which has lots of goodies in it.

Well, there you have it.  Hopefully this was a fun way for you to see some of the things that SiteCatalyst Ninjas know.  If you keep reading my blog posts, I can (almost) guarantee you will learn everything that there is to know…

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.

So here I go again (cue Whitesnake music!)…  Many of you reading this will have read my blog posts from my Inside SiteCatalyst blog on the Omniture website.  For those who are new, let me take a quick moment to introduce myself.  My name is Adam Greco and I am a web analytics guy who has worked with Omniture SiteCatalyst for longer than I’d like to admit.  I was one of Omniture’s first financial services clients when I managed the website for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  For the past four years I have worked on Omniture’s Best Practices Consulting team where I had the pleasure of working with different top tier clients across the globe.  Most recently, I have decided to “keep it real” and go back to being an Omniture client and do what I do best by helping my new employer (Salesforce.com) get the most out of their investment in Omniture products.  While at Omniture, I routinely spoke at annual Customer Summits and showed people how to push the limits of Omniture SiteCatalyst which led to me creating the aforementioned blog.

In the past year on the Inside SiteCatalyst blog, I covered the basics of SiteCatalyst, approaching it from an educational standpoint, so people using the product daily could learn how to take advantage of every feature in the product.  If you are new to SiteCatalyst, I highly recommend you start with my first blog post and read them in sequential order, as they provide a good foundation to build upon.  My goal in this blog is to continue with the educational spirit of my old blog, but to also delve deeper into more advanced techniques and practical solutions.  I received tremendously positive feedback from my last blog and hope that enthusiasm carries into this new blog.  If there is anything that you would like me to cover, please e-mail me at adam@the-omni-man.com.  To be sure you don’t miss any of my tips and tricks, I highly recommend that you use the e-mail subscription feature (I promise – no SPAM!) so you will be notified when new posts are released.  You can also follow me on Twitter by clicking here.  Thanks and 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.