SemAngel

X Change Web Analytics Conference

Too Much Cool Stuff

In my last post on X Change, I talked about some of the returning attendees who are going to be leading Huddles this year. Welcoming back people like James Robinson of the NY Times, Dennis Bradley and Kevin Chan from Charles Schwab, Francis Lavelle from HowStuffWorks, and Matt Jacobs from Adobe is, of course, a pleasure. And I didn’t quite exhaust the list either - Lynn Lanphier from Best Buy and Jim Hassert from AOL were out last year and both are coming back and leading Huddles. But we have great new attendees as well. People like Greg Dowling and Shubhra Shrivasta (from Nokia), Adam Greco (ex Omniture now leading measurement at Salesforce.Com), Gil Roeder (Barclays), Russ Rueden (Kohler), Michael Scherotter (Microsoft) and Matthew Wright (HP), will all be leading Huddles at X Change.

This is almost too much to write about and I strongly encourage you to check out the full-list of Huddles and leaders on our website. But I do want to touch on some of the Huddles just to give you a flavor of what they involve.

Let me start with Adam Greco. If you worked with Adam while he was at Omniture, you know why I’m so excited he’s coming out to X Change. When he recently left for Salesforce, I did a rare (for me) Twitter on what a loss it would be for Omniture, but even as I was writing it I was thinking “at least now he can lead a Huddle at X Change!”

Adam’s chosen to tackle the measurement of social media for his Huddle (Lynn Lanphier will also be tackling social commerce). Social strategy and measurement are top priorities for measurement at many companies (not least Adam’s new home at Salesforce) and I think X Change will bring together an amazing range of perspectives well worth hearing. And since Adam was responsible for Omniture’s Twitter integration, he has deep hands-on experience in tackling social measurement from both the tool and the enterprise perspective. I will bet that Eric Peterson signs himself up for this Huddle as well – and being a part of this discussion is probably worth the conference cost all by itself!

At the San Jose eMetrics, I got to co-present with Greg Dowling of Nokia on Mobile Measurement. It was probably the most relaxed and enjoyable shared presentation I’ve ever done. Greg is a natural for a Huddle leader: he’s been an analyst and now he’s on the enterprise side leading a huge and cutting edge measurement effort and he’s just a lot of fun to talk to. That's really important at X Change because our Huddle leaders aren't presenters - they are more like "guides" for a conversation that everyone shares.

I’ve been working with both Greg and Shubhra for much of the last year on Nokia’s measurement initiative (which Greg keynoted on at that same eMetrics) and they are both doing work at the forefront of web analytics. Greg is going to reprise eMetrics and lead a Huddle on mobile measurement. Shubhra will be leading a discussion on transitioning web analytics from a discipline focused on content measurement to a discipline focused on audience measurement. Her work helping Nokia create a 360 degree view of the customer is exactly where I think most sophisticated analytics organizations want to go.

This topic leads inexorably to a discussion of data warehousing and data integration. Web analytics data is growing outside the boundaries of the traditional web analytics tool (even as the tools themselves grow outside their traditional boundaries). That’s reflected in our Huddle leader’s interests and Lynn Lanphier of Best Buy will be tacking Integrating Online and Offline Customer Data in one of her Huddles. I’m not surprised this is a top-of-mind topic for Best Buy since it’s a top-of-mind topic for most of our mature web analytics clients. But it’s an area of great complexity and high-cost.

Getting a chance to think through integration strategies with leaders from Nokia and Best Buy is the kind of rare opportunity that X Change affords.

And speaking of getting where most companies want to go, Russ Rueden of Kohler is another Semphonic client whose work leads exactlyto where I think most large organizations want to be. Kohler has used a wide variety of opinion research and voice of customer tools – from ForeSee to Omniture Survey to OpinionLab. But their experience isn’t just about tools; they’ve made integration of survey data a cornerstone of their reporting and analysis strategy. I recently did a series of blogs covering survey integration, and a good deal of that series was inspired by work led by Russ.

He’ll be leading a discussion focused on your experiences with online surveys and voice of customer integrated with web analytics. This may seem like an old topic, but in the real-world very few organizations have successfully blended these disciplines and many companies are still struggling to sort out the role each type of tool should play in their organization. This is a chance to help sort out these issues and get a better understanding of how online surveys, customer feedback mechanism, and analytics fit together.

And I’m not done yet. In my next post on X Change, I’ll cover what our AOL, Barclays, HP and Microsoft leaders have decided to focus on. And we have our analysts (Bill Gassman of Gartner and John Lovett of Forrester) back and leading Huddles as well – including a shared look at the analytics ecosystem that should not be missed!

Microsite Measurement : The Right Way to Think Small

I recently helped Paul Legutko, who heads up Semphonic’s Boston office, put the finishing touches on his “Measuring Microsites” whitepaper. It’s a brilliant piece of work. If you are using or thinking about using Microsites (small, focused, marketing oriented sites dedicated to a single campaign or product/service), this is an indispensable whitepaper for understanding their appropriate measurement.

It’s not indispensable because it lays out some pretty cool metrics for Microsite measurement that you will almost certainly not have thought about. That’s just a nice to have. What makes it truly important is that the metrics it describes provide a significantly better framework for understanding what success in a Microsite really involves. If you need to answer questions like “Is a Microsite appropriate for this content?” or “Was the design of the Microsite really successful?” or “Is this Microsite helping our brand?” then you need a set of metrics that are specifically designed to get at what’s fundamentally different about a Microsite.

“Measuring Microsites” steps through a set of metrics specifically designed to capture these fundamental differences. The paper starts with an in-depth discussion of measures of Independence and Integration. These metrics reveal (at both the visit and visitor level) how the Microsite interacts with the parent site and the extent to which the Microsite supplements, cannibalizes or is parasitic on the parent site. These measures are fundamental to good Microsite measurement because achieving the right balance between independence (the Microsite shouldn’t feel like just another piece of the parent site) and integration ( the Microsite shouldn’t act like a completely independent brand) is a major design goal for almost any Microsite.

Independence and Integration are not the only unique aspect of Microsite measurement. The small size of a Microsite fundamentally changes the design goals for good navigational patterns and consumption of content. Unlike large parent sites where flexible navigational patterns are generally encouraged, a Microsite should have tight control over the visit flow. This design goal is captured in the metrics we provide for Saturation and Directionality.

Saturation metrics help you understand how much of a Microsite’s content is consumed in a visit (or by a visitor). For a parent web site, such a metric is pretty much always meaningless – though it’s a metric we first used as a topic-specific measure of mindshare when developing behavioral segmentations. But for a Microsite, it’s a powerful measure of success.

Directionality is really just a simple routing metric (similar to what we do with Functional Router analysis) applied to the Microsite landing pages and to the Microsite as a whole. The goal is to measure the Microsites success at folding routes into a relatively narrow funnel. Microsites should display a much tighter directionality than your main site if they are working appropriately.

The whitepaper also steps you through one of the most useful metrics we’ve developed – effect size. Paul first developed effect-size metrics to help us measure the mindshare generated by individual tools or content areas on media properties. The goal of the effect-size metric is to help you understand the impact on consumption and repeat visits of a specific piece of content. In the context of Microsites, it’s used to help understand the overall impact of the Microsite on the brand.

Finally, Measuring Microsites provides a better framework for understanding Microsite sourcing in comparison to the parent site. Based on the simple but profound insight that Microsites will have a very different distribution between “brand,” “core” and “tail” words when generating sourcing, the measurement framework suggested gives you a way to really test Microsite sourcing success.

There’s even some insight into measuring viral and studying Microsite sourcing patterns to understand the optimal longevity of a Microsite. This is measurement as it ought it to be – with powerful metrics that are geared toward the understanding of particular and highly-specific business problems.

Put all this together, and you have a fundamental re-thinking of how to measure your Microsites.

If you haven’t paid serious attention to Microsite measurement – perhaps thinking that such small sites don’t warrant much attention or that you can use the same “views/visits/outcomes” metrics you’re applying to the parent site, then I hope this whitepaper will be a revelation.

You can get the "Measuring Microsites" whitepaper right now in early release (not yet on our website). Just click here to go to the AdWeek White Papers site and do the short super-simple registration - or just drop me a line and I will send it to you. And let me know what you think!

X Change Huddles – A Whole Lot of Cool Web Analytics Stuff

We’ve nailed down the Huddle Leaders and topics for X Change this year – probably the single most important part of putting together the conference. This year, we have senior measurement managers and leaders from an amazing group of companies: Adobe, AOL, Barclays, Best Buy, Charles Schwab, Discovery, HP, Intuit, Kohler, Microsoft, Nokia, Salesforce, The New York Times, and Turner Broadcasting and they are covering just about every aspect of enterprise web analytics - from team building to targeting and testing to mobile and video measurement.

The breadth of this lineup – leading companies in Financial Services, Media, Technology and Software, SaaS, and even Manufacturing should make for a unique cross-pollination of views, opinions and experiences.

And given this economy, I’m very happy indeed that almost everyone we asked was able to come out and lead Huddles. Many of our leaders are previous attendees; (though we try to rotate in mostly new leaders) so they know how special X Change is.

As usual, there are so many great huddle leaders and topics that I’m going to use a couple (of my usual lengthy) posts to describe them.

Let me start with some old friends first.

Intuit has built up a formidable and well deserved reputation in online measurement. They’ve had an amazing number of top measurement people there. Dylan Lewis, returning from last year, has been years building a practice for the TurboTax unit (which means he’s a lucky dog who gets to live in San Diego) – and he’s always one of the most consistently interesting people I talk to. Dylan’s going to lead discussions on how to find, hire, and train people to work together as part of a valuable web analytics practice. Whether you’re building a practice inside an enterprise or creating a consulting outfit like Semphonic, we all know it’s people that ultimately matter. This is one of those topics that you can only really do at X Change – a powerpoint and presentation is never going to be a substitute for a real conversation around what works and what doesn’t around hiring and training in our field.

We’ll also be welcoming back Dennis Bradley and Kevin Chan from Charles Schwab. Dennis is one of a very small number of repeat Huddle leaders from last year. I was in the Huddle he led on “Bridging the Gap between Analytics and Marketing” and it was probably my personal favorite in 2008. Dennis and Kevin have spent much of the time since then measuring a massive overhaul in Schwab’s core customer site, and they’ll be co-leading Huddles on measuring large-scale site re-design efforts. If you’ve ever tried this, you know there is a lot more involved than just running some reports. They plan to cover everything from establishing a site baseline to tracking key audience segments to creating a set of expectations throughout the organization about what to look for and how to interpret the results.

Matt Jacobs attended the first X Change and led what may have been my favorite Huddle of that year – talking about data integration. Last year, our no vendor policy precluded Matt from leading a Huddle, but fortunately he’s made the leap from Digitas to Adobe where he heads up their measurement/reporting team. So he’s back as a Huddle leader and he’ll be leading a discussion on common targeting strategies, audience segmentation and identification, magic moments, behavioral profiling and targeting, and the tools and techniques necessary to refine your audience and your message to achieve maximum relevancy. This is material close to my own heart and Matt consistently does some of the most in-depth and interesting work of anyone in our field. The demand to improve the ROI on measurement is especially keen in this economic climate and using analytics for targeting is probably the single most likely path for most organizations to do that.

I’m also really happy to be welcoming back some former attendees who are now going to be leading Huddles.

Francis Lavelle of HowStuffWorks (part of Discover Communications best known for the Discovery Channel) has been to each X Change. He and I have sat in a number of Huddles together and shared a lunch or two as well. One of the great things about X Change is that you make real connections there – not just swapping names and business cards. Francis has been grappling with the challenges of measuring and disciplining SEO work in a very rich-content heavy environment. It’s a big issue for many companies and he’ll lead a discussion group on ways to better measure organic search including stuff you really need to know about tracking organic search as a separate event, using page rank parameters, minimizing the SEO impact of measurement in terms of URL encoding, and techniques for wrapping video and other rich media assets for SEO. If Semphonic’s practice is any guide, measurement has been a growing concern for SEO and it’s a field where shared experiences are at a premium. You’ll have an opportunity in this session to learn what’s really worked for other organizations.

James Robinson of The New York Times was an attendee last year and was terrific. I think one of the best things about X Change is that everyone is a full participant – it isn’t just about speakers. I often hear the most interesting stuff at X Change from people I haven’t met before and don’t know at all. Since then, of course, James delivered one of the best keynotes I’ve ever heard at eMetrics in D.C. So I’m pretty happy to have him back at X Change leading a discussion on fully leveraging online measurement in the organization. A fundamental learning at the Times has been the importance of simplicity in arriving at and explaining analytics. It’s a hard lesson to learn because, as analysts, we are always tempted by the complex and difficult. You’ll get a chance here to explore some novel tactics for using measurement and for getting measurement used and, of course, you’ll be able to contribute your own special experiences. 

I first met Tom Cattapan of Turner Broadcasting at last year’s X Change, though we’d talked on the phone before that. I’ve been working with him over the course of this last year and it’s always been a lot of fun. Since I work with Tom to put together web seminars on web analytics theory and practice for Turner’s many online teams, we get to talk about the most consistently interesting stuff! Tom is going to lead two different Huddles. The first is a natural from a Turner perspective – a discussion on video measurement that will cover the best trade-off between cost and measurement coverage, the appropriate role for web analytics and player reporting, and some in-depth discussion of measuring distributed video. These are cutting edge topics and if you’re at all invested in video assets, it should be a highly informative discussion.

Tom is also going to lead a first for X Change – a vertical specific Huddle. I’ve toyed with the notion in the past and after talking it over with Tom I decided to try it here. We have so many outstanding media leaders and participants that I think a discussion on "Media Metrics" is highly appropriate. This is a chance to talk over your thoughts on the most important, most revealing, most unfortunately deceptive, and most interesting ways to measure content and advertising. The group will cover metrics for audience measurement, site efficiency, channel performance, editorial support, video impressions and all things media. I think there is a big opportunity for vertical specific conversations and I’m anxious to see how this works out!

The breadth and depth of these topics is what really differentiates X Change. Keep in mind that these aren’t canned presentations; these are conversations led and sustained by a whole group of serious enterprise measurement leaders on the most important topics in our field. X Change gives you a chance to be a part of what I hope will be the most interesting web analytics conversations you will ever hear.

You can register for X Change at http://www.semphonic.com/xchangeregister.aspx!

Bing – Maybe there really is a Search Engine War

Like the phony war that marked the early months of World War II, the search engine wars have been pretty much lacking in combat. If it takes two to tango, it also takes two to fight a war and Google has so completely owned the field in search that to describe the resulting marketspace as a war has been about as apt as applying the term to when my younger daughter indulges in her habit of playing both hands in a game of cards. War it has not been. Bing may change that.

Bing’s success is contingent on two very different factors – only one of which I have any ability to judge. The first factor is marketing. Whatever Bing’s technical merits, if the marketing campaign doesn’t shift at least trial usage then it simply won’t matter. Google’s lock on search share has been unrelenting; and Google owns most consumer’s mind-share. Personally, I don’t think much of Microsoft’s ad campaign (but that’s not my business). They are, at least, putting some serious dollars behind it.

On the other hand, I’ve been using Bing pretty extensively and we’re also doing some formal measurement on it right now. And on the technical side I think its strengths and weaknesses are pretty obvious.

From a user-interface perspective, Bing is, quite simply, much better than Google. That’s really no surprise – Ask has been better than Google for years without making any real dent in search usage. On the other hand, the difference has never been wider. Bing’s best features include a rollover popup of the page on natural search (I love this feature), excellent guided navigation and search refinement cleanly tucked in the left hand-column, and mash-ups that provide a pretty good alternative source of information about an entry before clicking through. Each of these features is a significant win vs. Google. In fact, I like just about every aspect of the Bing interface better than comparable Google features – even to things I really didn’t expect to be better like the map view and the default settings used there when you switch from a search to a map.

Now none of this adds up to a decision-engine – which is one of the reasons why I don’t like the marketing campaign. If you come out to Bing expecting anything other than a significantly nicer search engine interface, you’re going to be disappointed.

And, of course, search isn’t all about UI – the quality of search results has always been more important than the UI, and it has been the superiority of Google results vs. competitors like Ask that have negated the UI advantages of those systems.

I don’t think Bing is as good as Google – particularly for esoteric searches or cases where you’ve gotten some part of the search wrong. Google is amazingly good at figuring stuff like that out.

I do like Bing’s video search results better than Google’s – which I believe are too weighted to YouTube vs. the owning site. And, as with all the other aspects of the UI, Bing's video search results page is vastly superior to Google’s.

While Bing’s search results aren’t quite to Google standards, Bing is much better than Ask, and in the vast majority of common searches, I find Bing’s results to be roughly comparable to Google’s. On many searches, I couldn’t reasonably decide which result set was better – that’s a fact of life in natural search where it is simply impossible to choose between many thousands of sites based on two or three keywords.

Indeed, it’s the abject stupidity involved in thinking there is one right answer to the vast majority of queries that has always made me believe that improving organic search necessitates improvements in the UI not the search algorithm. Bing is the first real test case of that thesis – and while it doesn’t deliver everything I’d like, it is, in my opinion the best experience out there. I’ve changed my default search from Google to Bing – something I would never have done with Ask or any other search experience.

If Bing does shift share, of course, it’s as likely to be from Yahoo as Google. But any significant share shift will result in something that has never before happened in this young marketplace – Google will actually be under pressure to improve their basic search UI.

Can they do it?

Of course they can. Google has proven they are the best company in the world at building interactive online experiences. So why the pathetic experience you get in their core product and the almost sole source of their wealth? I think the reason is simple and yet not widely recognized.

Google makes money when you click on paid ads not natural search. Natural search results are the glue that keeps users coming back – but they drive no revenue whatsoever. So the more you improve the natural search experience and the more interactive that experience, the greater your risk of shifting share INSIDE your own engine from paid to natural search. From Google’s perspective, that would be very, very bad.

I’ve always believed that as long as nobody could shift share from Google, they had a strong incentive not to improve their natural search interface and heaven knows that’s certainly how they’ve treated it.

So the real threat from Microsoft is that it may force Google to bite their own hand. It will be real challenge to Google if they have to create a system that is better than Bing and that doesn’t shift internal share. Of course, the same holds true for Microsoft. Will Bing hold ads and revenue? To some extent, Microsoft can and must take that gamble. They need share to be relevant – they can worry about monetization later. And, of course, strategically if Microsoft can force Google revenue cuts, they can impede the unending stream of app innovation that paid search on Google currently funds. I have to think that would be a good thing from the view of the boys in Redmond.

X Change – Looking Back, Looking Forward and Digging Deeper

The Conference for Web Analytics Professionals

We announced the Keynote for this year’s X Change Conference this past week – The Four Founders. The Keynote brings together four original founders (Brett Crosby, Matt Cutler, Bob Page, and John Pestana) of important web analytics tools – and four men who have been at the center of the dramatic changes in our industry. In bringing them together, I’m hoping to create an experience that is more personal and reflective; one that can serve as a foundation for the subsequent X Change discussions reminding us all of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go as an industry.

We’ve struggled in the past to come up with Keynotes for X Change. Since the Conference is all small group discussions and is heavily geared toward serious enterprise professionals, it’s been hard to find a Keynote that would both fit the tone and tenor of the event and also capture that broader excitement you hope a Keynote would have. But when Eric first suggested the Founder’s Keynote, we all felt it captured perfectly what we wanted.

To see why, let me step back a moment and talk about our “Four Founders.”

Brett Crosby, was co-founder of Urchin and is now Group Product Marketing Manager at Google responsible for Google Analytics. This evolution from co-founder of a feisty independent company targeting the SMB analytics market to part of what may be the most powerful company in the world is emblematic of all that has happened in web analytics in the past ten years. We’ve seen the rapid progression of our discipline from an evangelical fringe to something like a “state” church (or at least a recognized order!) in the world of big enterprise.

Matt Cutler was co-founder at NetGenesis and is now the Vice President of Marketing at Visible Measures. NetGenesis was an early, influential and ambitious attempt to support real enterprise analytics. It’s a tool we at Semphonic worked with on more than one occasion and looking back on it I think it was a prophetic effort in terms of what we all want and need to do with web analytics tools. Of course, Matt is now with Visible Measures – where the focus is on video and viral measurement. And that, too, is emblematic of the changes and growth in our industry. Many pioneers have continued to push the boundaries of measurement into the newest and most exciting areas of online.

Bob Page was a co-founder of Accrue and is now Senior Director at Yahoo! Analytics. So his story is like a perfect blend of Matt’s and Brett’s. What I said of NetGenesis I might just as easily have said of Accrue, and Yahoo! is, like Google, pushing hard for broad-based, free measurement across the whole spectrum of online industry.

John Pestana, co-founder of Omniture (I wish Josh James could have come as well!) and now Co-founder and Chairman at ObservePoint illustrates a different sort of path. Omniture is, of course, the leading solution in the enterprise analytics space and has probably been the single most influential company in our industry. With ObservePoint, John has built a company and a service that extend and support that enterprise investment by addressing a key need for better infrastructure management and governance in the mid and enterprise tier of the market. This seems to me a perfectly logical and natural extension of his previous work.

Every individual is unique of course and the “readers digest” stories I’ve outlined here no more than hint at the richness of the personal histories and experiences involved. But I do believe that these four “Founders” are fascinatingly representative of some of the fundamental currents and shifts in our industry.

By giving them a chance to talk in a forum that is meant to be personal and reflective, I hope to shed a different sort of light on the state of web analytics. These four have seen the evolution of our industry. They’ve been caught up and whirled about by the changes in our market. They’ve also have a huge hand in shaping it.

I believe that by hearing them look back to where we’ve been; listening to them share their views on where we are; and pondering their own personal hopes for what’s ahead, that we will all come away with a deeper understanding of our industry and perhaps our own place in it.

That is what a great conference should really provide and what I think the Four Founders will help X Change achieve.

[Registration for X Change is now open and the Huddles have also been pretty much locked down – more on that next time – so take advantage of early registration now!]

Omniture Vista Rules : Getting More from your Omniture Implementation

We’ve been doing a LOT of implementation work in the past year – both fresh out of the box and re-implementations to fix or improve an existing setup. What probably isn’t too surprising is that the bulk of that work – both ways – is for Omniture’s SiteCatalyst. Now it’s no secret that Omniture implementations can be kind of complicated – largely because you have so many options. One of the most useful but surprisingly under-utilized of those options are Vista Rules.

Vista Rules process records as they are received, modifying, adding or moving the information contained within a record. They are setup by Omniture and since Vista Rules are custom-built, they can do quite a wide range of different tasks including copying data from one type of variable to another, copying whole records between report suites, filtering records, applying lookups and even performing calculations. However, there are some things Vista Rules can’t do – and to understand what these are the key is to understand how Vista Rules operate.

I mentioned that Vista Rules are applied to each record you send Omniture as it’s received. That means they operate on each record independently – before the records are sessionized. So you can’t have a Vista Rule do something like stamp every record in a session when the visitor ends up making a purchase or add the total visit time to a record. Vista Rules also can’t look-up previous visitor behavior or re-key previous records visitor ids once a visitor logs-in.

Vista Rules need to be custom implemented – which means they don’t come included in your implementation and you’ll have to pay for them. If you are using a stock Vista rule (something Omniture has written before or something that is quite simple), you should expect to pay a few thousand dollars to perhaps five thousand dollars. If it’s something more complex, then the price is going to be more. But you pay only once for a Vista rule – there’s no ongoing charge – and you can use a Vista rule against all your report suites for a single charge. In some types of cases, that makes them remarkably attractive.

I think the best way to give you a sense of what Vista rules can accomplish and why you might want to use them, is to give some examples of Vista rules we often recommend:

Unified Sources Vista Rule
This may be the single most popular Vista Rule around. What it does is really pretty simple – it creates a campaign source code for every visit to your site, regardless of where it comes from. If a visit is sourced from a campaign, the campaign code is saved just like you would expect. If a visit comes from natural search, then the Vista Rule detects that the referring site is a search engine and copies the search-engine name plus “organic” to the campaign code. If the visit comes from a non search site, it copies the referring domain to the campaign code. I’ve simplified it a bit, but the gist is that every single visit arrives as some kind of campaign. The Unified Source Vista Rule means that your campaign report will effectively track every single visit. That’s nice. But the real beauty of the Unified Source Vista Rule is that the campaign variable (tracking code) is fully sub-related in SiteCatalyst. That means you can see every referral – and not just campaigns – cross-tabulated with every eCommerce variable. It’s this capability that makes the Unified Source Vista Rule so popular. And depending on how expensive it is in your contract, implementing the Unified Source Vista Rule can be more economical than fully sub-relating the other sourcing variables you might be interested in.

Time Stamp Rule
It’s true that every record that gets passed to Omniture is timestamped. But in most data analysis situations, that timestamp really isn’t available to you. That’s why we frequently add a timestamp to a variable when we pass an important event to Omniture. Having the timestamp lets us select segments based on when a visitor did an important action. In addition, most clients like to track special information like the week-day and day-part for PPC visits to support day and time-parting analysis. You can do all this in the javascript  tag, of course, and we frequently do it that way. But generating that stuff in javascript can make the tag a fair amount weightier and the image tag a little longer (a concern in mobile). You can eliminate both these concerns by simply time-stamping every record using a Vista Rule. For many organizations, the cost of a simple Vista Rule is a small price to pay for the reduction in tag weight.

Report Suite Copy
You can do multi-suite tagging (sending a single image to more than report suite) right in the javascript. But there are some limitations to what you can do in the javascript. When you set up multi-suite tagging, you send an identical image request to each report suite. That’s not always what you want. In addition, if you are moving code through Dev, QA, and Production machines, multi-suite tagging in javascript introduces another element that has to be changed. A Vista Rule can copy all or some of the records and all or some of the data from one Report Suite to another. With a standardized naming convention, it can automatically detect the right environment (Test to Production) to send the copies. It can do multiple copies. And it can filter records and screen or change variables when it does the copy. Doing a Vista Rule copy doesn’t eliminate the secondary server call expense of course (otherwise no one would ever make the second call!) but it can make your report suite setup and configuration significantly more powerful and more convenient. This, by the way, is part of the survey integration solution I recommended for saving all of the survey data in a report suite.

Database Lookup
You can use a database lookup to append or translate information you send to Omniture. Why wouldn’t you use a SAINT table for this? You might, of course, but SAINT isn’t always as convenient as a Vista DB Lookup. With a DB Lookup table, you can do very large lookups in real-time with no lag. You can set variables directly, get uniques counts and pathing on them, and you can filter records in real-time. When a database lookup is the right solution, it can be vastly more convenient than any alternative. 

Mobile Robot Detection / IP Exclusion / IP Copy
Tagging solutions rely heavily on the fact that robots typically won’t load javascript. If you are using image tagging on mobile that built in protection goes out the window. You can use a DB Vista Rule (really this is just a variation of a Database Lookup) to implement mobile robot detection and filter out requests you don’t want. You can combine this with a report suite copy if you want to actually measure robotic traffic. You can use essentially the same technique to unify your IP exclusions across all report suites. And you can also use this to copy your internal data if you want to keep track of your own site usage. There are times when this is quite handy – especially when employees use public sites for operational purposes.

Visitor Geo-Copy
Like most web analytics packages, SiteCatalyst provides some basic reporting broken out by geo-demographics. If you’ve enabled it, you can get reports in SiteCatalyst that will break out visits by Country, State and DMA. Also like most web analytics packages, these reports don’t always give you the detail and break-downs you’re looking for. When we really care about geo-demographics (if, for instance, we want to track Mass Media performance using the web), we usually recommend the IP Lookup value be copied into a prop/eVar. This significantly increases the amount of reporting you can get on geo-demographic basis. Though we’ve never done it, you could even add this level of detail to the Unified Sources Vista Rule (you’ll pay more for using a non-standard version of the rule). That would give you full sub-relations on geo-demographics by acquisition source.

Mobile Device Info Copy
This is another case – like geo IP Lookup – where a vista copy of mobile information to a prop can significantly improve your reporting access. If you are getting serious about tracking mobile, this is definitely another Vista Rule worth considering.

Summary
Vista Rules can solve quite a few implementation issues.

If you need to apply similar processing to multiple report suites, if you need to lookup values against a large table, if you need better reporting access to an Omniture variable, or if you need filter, copy or move values around in or across report suites, then a Vista Rule is often the only alternative.

If you have even modestly complex rules you want to implement in javascript, Vista Rules are often a good alternative. There’s a real virtue in keeping your tag weight as small as possible. Sometimes, a Vista Rule can also take the place of tag changes which your IT department doesn’t have time for or which would cost you more than the Vista Rule.

And just a note, if you are going to implement one or more Vista Rules, make sure you surface them with Omniture as early in the development cycle as possible. They can take many weeks to get implemented – so if you start too late they may not be available when you need them.

So if you are planning an implementation or trying to improve an existing setup, make sure you give a thought to the stable of common Vista Rules that are available and to what you might be able to accomplish on a custom basis. They can be an easy and elegant solution to a great many implementation challenges.

Web Analytics for the Public Sector

I didn’t intentionally save this post about public sector web analytics for Memorial Day – it just worked out that way. On Thursday, June 4th, our own Phil Kemelor is going to be co-presenting (with Ann Poritzky from the National Institutes of Health) a webinar on the state of public-sector analytics. The webinar is based on a Web Analytics Association research project surveying more than a 100 public sector measurement users/consumers about web measurement in their organization. The research is fascinating and if you’re involved in the public sector this is a webinar you should definitely check out.

When Joel and I first started Semphonic and began our web analytics practice, we concentrated on what we knew – financial services. Over time, as our practice grew, we found that many of the techniques and concerns that we’d evolved in financial services were highly-applicable elsewhere – especially for sites that didn’t have the “easy” success measurement typically present in retail. And after awhile, that’s how we began to think about our practice – as focused on sites outside of traditional e-tail. Which is why, when I met Phil, I believed that there was a significant practice opportunity for us in public sector. All the work we’d done in branding, customer support, engagement metrics, functional analysis, and audience segmentation seemed to be ideal.

It’s been nearly two years since Phil joined Semphonic and in that time we’ve built a significant public sector practice I’ve become ever more convinced of that thesis. Of course, I’ve also learned the many challenges of public sector – both in terms of analytics and measurement and in the more mundane aspects of being a consultant/vendor. It's hard.

Measurement of success in the public sector is even more challenging than on some of the most difficult private sector sites and the audiences are often extraordinarily diverse. Both facts present real challenges for good measurement.

We work in many difficult regulatory environments – financial services and pharma for example – but the public sector is on a whole other level. The restrictions on cookies are, of course, both notorious and onerous. But the regulatory challenges don’t end there – they snake in-and-out of nearly every aspect of public sector work. What’s worse, these external factors can easily become an excuse for not doing measurement at all.

Partially because of this, the culture in public sector is not yet fully attuned to measurement. We’ve seen a tectonic shift in the perception, awareness and use of analytics in private sector marketing in the past five years. That’s a critical part of building a successful measurement program – for nothing is ultimately more important to a good measurement program than the culture of the organization.

The public sector is at least several years behind in this respect. Only in the use of more classic primary research techniques like online surveys has public sector measurement really excelled.

When I tell people that we’re growing a public sector practice, their first reaction is often: “That should be great with Obama.” And perhaps it’s true that Obama’s awareness of the online world will accelerate the pace of change. But, to be honest, I think that same tectonic shift from the private sector was already inevitable and underway.

These are exciting times for the online space in the public sector – and that translates into exciting times for online measurement as well. You can register for the webinar now.

[You might also want to check out Phil's very interesting current post on Omniture's Q1 Earnings Call]