As I mentioned in my Omniture Summit 2009 recap, I was fortunate enough to be a co-presenter for a breakout session – ‘Makin’ Gold Records: Turning your SEO team into Rock stars.’ One of the most difficult things to do is track SEO and to determine how successful the SEO efforts have been. I am not going to talk about tips about how to optimize your site for search engines. There are already quite a few blogs and forums that talk about how to do this. What I am going to talk about are reports and analysis that can be set up to help determine how successful the SEO efforts have been. I am going to borrow from one of the slides in the presentation that really helps with this point, ‘43% of marketers don’t or can’t accurately measure ROI from SEO. To be successful with SEO, you must accurately measure success to drive value and action. In the end, it is not about driving traffic to the site, it is about making money.’ The question now becomes where to begin? To borrow another quote from the presentation, ‘With so much data available…the most important metric is that which helps improve your site.’

This is really good advice, but before I get into some of the reports that can set up to help analyze SEO, you need to make sure to get some of the basics down first. No matter which tool you use, you need to make sure you use tracking codes for your paid search marketing campaigns. This is a small, but very important thing that needs to be done. Depending on which web analytics tool you use, will depend on how this get accomplished. To accomplish this for Omniture specifically, you will need to go to the admin console to the Paid Search Detection area and enter which query string tracking code(s) that is going to be used for your paid search campaigns. For example, you will enter ‘cid’ into the text box next to Query String field. For the Search Engines, I would leave the setting to ‘-Any-‘, unless you want to add the tracking code to a specific Search Engine.

The last thing that needs to be decided, before you start to set up reports for tracking SEO, is determining which KPI’s are the most important that will help you improve your site. The KPI’s that will be the most important to you will depend on the vertical of your site. Here are some examples of some SEO KPI’s:
• Keyword Conversion Rate – Revenue Per Search
• Entry Page Conversion Rate – Leads Per Search
• Conversions – Leads, Orders, Subscriptions
• Bounce Rate – Keyword or Entry Page
• Average Time on Site – Keyword or Entry Page
• Keyword Conversion Rate – Page Views / Search
• Conversions – Page Views
• Conversions- Video Plays
• Keyword Conversion Rate – Video Plays / Search
• Keyword Conversion Rate – Sweepstakes Entries / Search

SiteCatalyst has a couple of Natural Search reports out of the box that do a pretty good job of analyzing most of the KPI’s above, but you can go one step further. There are two ways that will allow you to create additional natural search reports. The first way is through a Unified Sources Vista Rule and the second way is through the Channel Manager Plug-in. These are two different ways to help you crate marketing reports. Each one has its good points and bad points. The biggest difference between the two is the Unified Sources Vista rule is created through Engineering Services, while the Channel Manager Plug-in is created through Consulting Services. The Channel Manager Plug-in does allow you a little more flexibility, but with some good planning you can accomplish the same reports with either option.

Here are a few of the reports that you can have create with either option.

Natural Search Keywords – This report might seem a little strange to put on this list since it is an out of the box report. Even though there is an out of the box report for Natural Search Keywords, there is one metric that I would like to this report and the only way to get it is to pass the keywords into an eVar. The metric that I would like to add to this report is Visits. By adding visits to this report, will give you a slightly different view of the keywords report and allow you to create calculated metrics that are visit based. You can use this report to quickly see which keywords are performing the best for different metrics or KPIs. You have the ability to easily sort by each column to see which keyword drove the most engagement or conversions (ex. Page Views/Visit or Video Plays/Visit)

Natural Search Entry Page – This report can be very valuable by itself or in combination with the Natural Search Keywords report, which is another reason to pass Natural Search Keywords into an eVar. You can enable full sub-relations for both of these reports and you can drill down from the keywords report to the entry page report to see the top entry pages for different natural search keywords. The report by itself can help you see what the pages visitors are entering your site on, which can help you discover gaps in your keyword strategy by identifying entry pages that drive the most engagement or conversion from natural search. You can see how deep into the site visitors are landing and do those pages drive more engagement or conversion than the home page or a section front page. You can create a calculated metric for bounce rate and see which entry page has a higher bounce rate. You can then go to your SEO team and let them know which entry page is not performing as well as you would like it to, you then can do some testing on a new design to see if a new design might drive more engagement or conversion.

Classifiy Natural Search Keywords – Classifications is another reason why it is a good idea to pass the Natural Search Keywords into an eVar. It will allow you to classify the keywords, which helps you to logically group your keywords into different buckets that make analysis more effective and actionable. One of the questions that I have been constantly for a SEO team is how well branded and non-branded keywords perform. When you classify the keywords, there is not a need to download the Natural Search Keywords report each time and then try to go through each keyword to find branded and non-brand keywords. The classification will allow you to easily see this information in a single report. Classifications also an easy way to breakout Natural Search keywords by any dimension that is needed, besides just branded or non-branded. Classifications are set up in the admin console through the SAINT upload.

Backlinks Report – This report is another valuable report to give you information on which site that is linking your site is driving more engagement or conversions. The backlinks report is based on filtered referrals and can give you insight into your existing link popularity strategy. If you have a linking strategy that involves blogs, facebook, twitter, or some other site this report will allow you to quickly see which linking strategy is working the best in driving engagement or conversion.

Another good report that you can utilize to help you with your SEO strategy is an internal site search report, which can help to identify additional SEO keywords to optimize your site. Though this report is not specifically tied to the Unified Sources Vista Rule or the Channel Manager Plug-in, it can be very helpful in finding SEO keywords. You might not want to just look at internal keywords that drives success, but also at keywords where users did not find what they were looking for. You can go to the search team and the SEO team to talk about how you can leverage that information by building content on the site that is SEO friendly. Some additional tools you can use to help you research which Natural Search keywords to focus on are: Hitwise, Google Trends, and Webposition. These tools will help you look at natural search keywords that are driving traffic to your competitors.

SEO Forum and Blog
Highrankings Forum

Jordan LeBaron – Omniture SEO Consultant

When I started thinking about what I was going to write for my next blog post, I had a couple of topics in mind trying to keep with my original plan for my blog of sharing my experiences in web analytics. Then the news broke that Adobe has agreed to purchase Omniture. Whether this acquasition is going to be good or bad, only time will tell. There has already been enough written on this topic, so I am going to focus this post on another topic. When the news broke of the acquisition, an idea for a post came to me. About a year ago or so, I co-presented a webinar with Omniture for an Adobe online seminar. Little did I know what would transpire a year later. As you can see from the title of the post, the webinar was about measuring and optimizing Rich Internet Applications. I have been very lucky in the last couple of years to have the opportunity to measure and optimize RIA’s and to work for the company that worked with Omniture to develop their flash tracking (ActionSource). Though I am not a developer and have never actually added the ActionSource tracking I work very closely with our flash developers to make sure the tracking that I would like is added to the RIA’s. Though I have tracked many different applications, most of the RIA’s that I going to cover in this post involve flash video, but I think this will give you a good idea of some of the tracking capabilities.

Before I get started going over part of the presentation, here is a link to the Adobe Webinar. In order to play the webinar, you will need to have an account with Adobe. If you do not have one, you can create an account. Creating an account is free and after you register will take you directly to the webinar.

Optimizing Rich Media
As I mentioned in one of my other posts, Video Tracking, video has been one of the bigger priorities for us and we are incorporating video in a more integrated fashion through the site than we have before. When we first developed this player, we started with the video list, but questions come up, would a Full Video View be a better experience, which would give users have the option of viewing the video list by clicking on More Videos link in the upper right hand corner. Instead of just letting our gut instinct take over and fall into the typical decision making trap, we decided to let our visitors tell us which video player they preferred. We ran an A/B test on both of these versions with a 50/50 split, using the Video List as the control and the Full Video View as the test. Take a second and think about which player you think generated more video plays? We have asked this question to people in the past and majority of the people thought the Full Video View preformed the best. After we looked at the results we learned that the Video List had 35% more video plays than the Full Video View.

Hotspots or Overlays
When we added hotspots to the videos, users had the ability to click on certain links within in the video as the video played to learn more about certain products. But this was not driving user engagement with the hotspots because we believed user’s were not aware that there were links with in the video that they were able to click on. Knowing this information, we then wanted to test this against having an overlay in the bottom portion of the video where users can click on the overlay and bring up a window over the video. The video behind the overlay will pause while the user views the information in the overlay, where they can play a video or click on links that go to the advertiser’s site. It is not a big surprise that the overlay drove more click-throughs, but the question is by how much. We quite surprised to see that the overlay had a 56% better click-thru rate than the hotspotting. After seeing this information, we are now in the process of adding overlays to all of our videos and this also gives us an additional revenue source with our advertisers.

Other Platforms (Widgets)
Now that we have tried the traditional modules and traditional applications, Scripps wanted to try something new. Go outside of the box and saw an opportunity to try the next new thing. Since the iPhone is one of the hottest phones and the market, we decided we wanted to build an iphone application for Food Network. Was this going to work? We were not really sure, but we knew we wanted to tracked how our users interacted with the application, including which tab users clicked on click, which videos users viewed, and if they were using the search box which would drive users to the Main Food Network site. The iPhone application was considered a success and we are now in the process of developing iPhone applications for some of our other sites. After the iPhone application we wanted to try another, more fun application within Facebook, so we built a cupcake application, where users can create their own cupcake, chose the wrapper they want, the type of frosting, and place a message on top of the cupcake and send it to their friends. On the right hand side of the application, we listed some cupcake recipes and we tracked if users clicked on any of the recipes that would then take the user to the Food Network site. This application was not quite as successful as the iPhone application but was pretty successful. After seeing this, we wanted to really go outside of the box and different and we created a Food Network widget for the Chumby, where we would upload a recipe of the day for the Chumby, where users can log onto the Chumby and recipe the current recipe or view any past recipes. We tracked which recipe users viewed and how they moved through the widgets, either through hitting the arrows or scroll through the slides. After looking at the data for the Chumby, we saw that the Chumby was a failure and we have discontinued creating any new widgets for the Chumby, which goes to show you why it is important to track and test these initiatives so you know where to focus the resources.

So what have we learned from all of this? By using the ActionSource tracking (except for the Facebook Cupcake application, where we used tracking codes), it gave us the ability to track the different interactions that our visitors used and helped us better optimize the experience. It also helped us make decisions on which video player technology would drive the most user engagement which and be the most effective for our advertisers and it let us determine which non-traditional applications would be worth investing more time.

Have you ever experienced someone in the marketing department (SEM, Email, Corporate, etc) asking you how well the marketing campaign they just ran has preformed, only to realize that the campaign was not being tracked? This can be a very frustrating situation to not be able to let the marketing department know how well the campaign performed. The campaigns can be a newsletter, paid search, banner ads, twitter, facebook, widgets, or tiny URLs. The marketing department can run a marketing campaign on any combination of these. If the marketing department is not aware that the campaign needs to be tracked, then it is hard to let them how well their campaign performed. One of the things that I do is set up a weekly meeting with the marketing department to walk through their campaigns to make sure everything gets tagged. A bi-weekly meeting might be enough, depending on your company. I also created a document for the marketing department on how to add the tracking tags to each type of campaign. I am going to go cover add tracking tags for Google Analytics, Omniture, and Coremetrics.

Before I get into the different tracking methods for the three web analytics tools, I am going to go over where to add the tracking tags to each of the campaigns. Where to add the tracking tags is very similar for each of the marketing campaigns.

Email: The tracking code will at the end of the href of each link with in the html. For each of the links, I would recommend creating a separate tag to understand how each link performs in driving conversions.

Paid Search: When the keyword campaign is created, the tracking tags will go at the end of the landing page URL.

Banner Ads: The tracking code will at the end of the href of each link with in the html of the banner.

Twitter: Here is where it can get interesting. If you were doing a marketing campaign for your own company, normally you can just add the tracking tags to the end of the URL. Since twitter only allows 140 characters to type a message, adding a full URL to a tweet is not going to happen all that much, unless the URL is really small. Also, for your personal tweets, you might tweet a URL to another website. Both of these situations lend it to the use of a tiny URL tool. If you want to know what users are saying about your brand and you are an Omniture client, you can use the Twitter API and the Omniture Data Insertion API. You then can see what is being said about your brand in Omniture.

Tiny URL: There are several different tiny URL creators. Of course, there is tiny url, but there is also cli.gs and bit.ly. There are a few more, but what I like about these two is the tracking capabilities. I personally use cli.gs to shorten URLs as I really like the reports that I can get from the tool. Besides the tracking capabilities from these tools, when you create the tiny URL, you can add a tracking code to the end of the landing page when you create the tiny URL. The URL that users will see this URL, http://cli.gs/mD75b, which will re-direct to http://www.yoursite.com/?cid=trackingcode.

Facebook: The tracking code for facebook is very similar to a paid search campaign. When you put a link in facebook to your site, add the tracking to the end of the URL.

Widgets: The tracking code for widgets is fairly straight forward, it will go at the end of the href of each link with in the widget.

Now that I gone over where to add the tracking codes for the different marketing campaigns, here is how to create the tracking codes for Google Analytics, Coremetrics, and Omniture.

Google Analytics
For Google Analytics, for tracking non-adwords campaigns you can use the URL builder to add the tracking tags to the end of the URL. There are up to five tracking codes that you can add to the end of the URL. Three of them are required. The three that are required are: Campaign Source (utm_source), Campaign Medium (utm_medium), and Campaign Name (utm_campaign). The Campaign Source is used to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or some other source. The Campaign Medium is used to identify a medium such as email, banner ads, twitter, or facebook. The Campaign Name is used to identify a specific promotion or strategic campaign. Here is an example with these three tracking tags in the URL, http://www.testsite.com/?utm_source=tweet081609&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=testcabinets. For non-adwords campaigns, you can an optional additional tracking tag, Campaign Content. This can used to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL. Here is an example of the four tracking tags, http://www.testsite.com/?utm_source=newsletter081609&utm_medium=email&utm_content=hometextlink&utm_campaign=testcabinets.

Coremetrics
Creating a tracking code for Coremetrics is fairly straight forward. You will use the mmc (multi marketing channel) tracking code. This code will then populate the MMC reports. For the MMC reports, there are four items that needs to be added to the tracking code and all four items must be added to the tracking code or the tracking code will not work. The tracking code will look something like this, www.yoursite.com/?cm_mmc=Twitter-_-073009-_-Brand Keywords-_-Home Page. The MMC reports have different views for your marketing reports, from forward looking, backward looking, same day, 30 days, etc. When you create a new marketing channel (email, twitter, etc), this information will go under the Other Channel, but you will be able to go into the admin console and create a custom category.

Omniture
Creating a marketing campaign tracking code for Omniture can be done in a couple of different ways. One of the ways you can create a marketing campaign tracking code is to create a code that makes sense to you. For example, it could look something like this, e073009txthp. You can then can take this code and create a classification table in Omniture to identify the different parts of this code. For example, you can create a classification table that would indicate this is an email campaign that was sent out on 7/30/09 that is a text link going to the home page. You can create this type of tracking code for any of your marketing campaigns and create the classification table. If you do not have the bandwidth or you do not want to manually upload the classification for every new campaign, you automate this in a way. Instead of just having cid as the tracking code, you can have cid1, cid2, cid3, etc as the tracking code. The URL would look something like this, www.yoursite.com/?cid1=email&cid2=073009&cid4=text&cid5=homepage. This type of tracking is good if you do not have the time or do not want to create the classification table. To be able to breakdown each of these five eVars, you will need to have full subrelations turned on for each of these. The drawback to this type of tracking is it makes it difficult to create different eVars with different attribution window (same day, 14 days, 30 days, etc). If you want to use this method, you will typically use only one attribution window.

As I mentioned in my last post, Video Tracking, video is starting to become one of the more popular ways that sites are communicating and/or sharing information with their users. With the increased focus on videos, that begs the question, are the video plays hurting page views? This is a very interesting question. I am going to share some of the experiences that I have had of the last couple of years with the sites that I have worked since we have had more of a focus on video plays. The media sites that I work on also have tv channels that go along with the sites. Whenever possible, we publish full-episode videos to get users to come to the site to watch the episode that they missed on tv. Though there is also content about the show on the site, our theory that we had was that was that the video plays were hurting page views. Did this theory hold true?

As I mentioned before, we had content on the site to supplement the videos, but were users viewing that additional content. Depending on the site and the user’s reason for coming to the site, some of the users would view the additional content. But how much of it did they view. We have put video all over the site to ensure that user’s who want to watch videos; will be given the opportunity to do so. To help me break this out and take a look at what the video users were doing on the site, I used the Omniture Discover onDemand product. Using Discover onDemand, gave me the ability to segment the users who played video. How I defined video users, were users who actually started watching the content. With most media sites, the videos have a pre-roll ad that plays before the content. Also, a lot of sites have turned on auto-play on the video so the users are going to be exposed to the pre-roll right away. I wanted to make sure I took that into consideration when I built my segment. An argument could also be made that I could have segmented users who completed 10% of the video, but for this segment I went with when users began the content.

The first thing that I looked at what how many total page views did the video users consume. I was very surprised when I saw that video users contributed to 25% of the total page views. I was also equally as surprised when I saw that video users contributed to only 12% of the visits. Though when we looked at page views per visit, video visits viewed 2.5x more pages per visit than non-video users. This was a very basic analysis and we did not take into consideration the purpose for coming to the site or the traffic source from which the video user came to the site. We looked at it from a high level perspective. But even from a high level perspective, these results were very surprising. The next thing we looked at as the time spent for video users vs. non-video users. These results were not all that surprising. For video users, the majority of the users spent 10 to 30 minutes on the site, followed by 1 to 5 minutes, and then 5 to 10 minutes. For the non-video users segment, the majority of the users spent 0 seconds on the site (bounces), followed by 1 to 5 minutes, and then less than 1 minute spent on the site. This really goes to show the each segment really does have a different purpose for visiting the site and that will be one of the next things that we will look at.

One of the final things that we took a look at for this analysis, were how many visits played only one video, two videos, three videos, or four or more videos during a visit. Before I took a look at those results, I first wanted to see the average video plays per visit. I saw that video users watched a little more than 2 videos per visit. I based this calculation on video users segment only, so I could get a more accurate number. The results of this analysis were a little surprising, but not too much with 62% of the video visits watched on one video, 15% watched two videos, 8% watched three videos, and 13% watch four or more videos. We were a little surprised with how the percentage that only watched one video. Taking a look at this analysis, we know that a majority of the users watch only one video, but they typically spend a little longer on the site and they will view more pages per visit than non-video users. The answer to the question does an increased focus and an increase in the number of video plays hurt page views. We found the answer to be NO, an increased focus on videos and an increase in the number of video plays do not hurt page views as the video users turned 2.5x more page views than non-video users. But the video users are still a small percentage of visits. So now the question becomes how we can get more visits watching video and viewing pages during the same visit. One of the other things you might want to consider if breaking down this information by traffic source. That is on my list of projects to get done.

Up next: Tracking Marketing Campaigns (paid search, newsletters, twitter, tinyurls, etc)

Video is starting to quickly become one of the most popular ways that sites are communicating and/or sharing information with its users. Sites like Hulu, Sling, and YouTube are growing in popularity. Portal sites, like AOL have a section that is completely dedicated to video. Media sites are putting more video on the sites than ever before, from video clips to full episodes. With this increased interest in video, it is important for accurate video tracking and to track the data that will help you understand how users are viewing the video. In this post, I am going to cover different tracking methodologies, video success metrics, the different pieces of information that you might want to capture about the video and video KPI’s.

Depending on which type of video player you have on your site will determine which type of video tracking that you need to use. I am going to lump the video players into two categories: non-flash and flash. A little simplistic, but it makes it easier to refer to these two players. Up until very recently non-flash players were very difficult to track in Omniture. You would typically have to look at the log or akamai files to get video plays or use some other tool that could capture these video plays (ex. Web Trends) from the log or akamai files and have a good reporting interface. About a year and half ago, Omniture announced their first attempt to capture video plays in non-flash players. The methodology would also would on flash players, but it was not without its issues. Though you are not going to capture all of the information, you do want to make sure you are as accurate as possible. With the new method, there was a real chance to lose some data which might not be as accurate as you might want. For media sites, this could be a big issue. Omniture then modified this method to allow you to customize the code to make calls more frequently. I would like to cover this new method in more detail, but Omniture has posted a blog post on how this new method works and some examples of some reports. Again, this modification will work with both non-flash and flash players. You are probably thinking, if this method captures both non-flash and flash players then how can there be a second method to capture video information. For non-flash players, this is really the only option. Though for flash players, there is a second option. The video tracking option that Omniture has is great and it can be customized, but if you need to a lot of customization I would recommend using ActionSource to track video plays. The only negative against this methodology is you can take advantage of some of the video reports that Omniture has. That being said, ActionSource allows greater customization and you have more control over the when the calls are made.

After you choose which method that you want to use to capture video information, next you need to decide what video success metrics that you want to capture. The video success metrics that you will want to capture will depend on the type of site. For example, an eCommerce site will probably not have any ads in the videos, so they will not need to capture that information. For the video content, they might want to only capture video start, video 50% and video 100%. A media site, for example, will have ads typically before the video content starts so media sites will probably want to track the ad plays as well as the content plays. The success metrics for the content plays can be tracked a couple of different ways. You can track, video starts, video 25%, video 50%, video 75%, and video 100%. There are different successes metrics that can be tracked for the content videos. Here are the video success metrics that I capture for the sites that I work on. The next step for video tracking is to determine what information about the video that you want to track. There is a lot of information that you can capture about the video and you will want to pick up only the information that is going to help you figure out how users are interacting with the video. Here is the information about the video that we capture. Each of these variables accomplishes something different and lets us know which videos the users are viewing, in which channel the videos reside, the slot number from where the video was played, and which player the video was in. One of the most important information that should be captured is the Channel Name. This will allow you to easily aggregate several videos together. The other reason the Channel Name is important is you can use the Channel Name to differentiate between short form videos and long form videos. With the emergence of sites putting full episodes on their site, tracking how well they perform is very important.

After you decide on which information about the video that you want to capture, there are a couple of different items that I would report. A lot of media sites these days have auto-play turned on for the videos. The question is how video is effecting the users experience. One way of looking at this information is passing the video title in a traffic variable and then turn on pathing on the traffic variable to see how many times users go on the second video, third video, etc. Here is an example of the video title pathing report, which will show you if the users made it on the second video. The one thing to keep in mind about this report, when you see enter site it does not mean the user entered the site on the video, it means it is the first video that the user viewed during the visit and exit site means it is the last video the user viewed during the visit. Another thing that you can do for video tracking is to pass the page name and video title in the same traffic variable and then turn on pathing for the traffic variable. Here is an example of the video title/URL pathing report, which will show you how deep in the users path that the user viewed the video and if they played more than one video during the visit. The difference with this report is entered site means the user did enter the site on that page and exit site means the user exited the site either after viewing a page or video.

Here are some of the KPIs that you can report on for videos:
o Ad Completion Rate
o Content Completion Rate
o Video Player / Visit
o % of Video Visits
o % of 1 Video Visit
o % of 2 Videos Visit
o % of 3 Videos Visits
o % of 4+ Videos Visits
o Page Views / Video Visit

These KPIs will show you the percentage the user makes it through the ad (are users making it through the ad), the percentage the user makes it through the content (are users enjoying the video), and how many videos are the users watching during the visit. These will also show you how users are interacting with videos and the site.

Up next: Are more videos on the site impacting page views.

In the years that I have spent in web analytics, one of the main questions that I have been asked is how do I determine success for the sites that I have worked on. That is a very good question and obviously determining success will very from site to site. The first few years that I spent in web analytics was spent on e-commerce sites. Determining success for an e-commerce site is fairly straight forward. For an e-commerce site you are going to look at revenue to determine success. Though you can also look at number of items purchased, Average Order Value (AOV), or Average Order per Visit, which all of these metrics are ultimately based on revenue. Though I have not worked on an airline site or a hotel site, determine success for either one of these sites is also fairly straight forward. For an airline site or a hotel site you are going to look at revenue as well, though you can also look at number of bookings or the look-to-book ratio to determine success. Another way to determine success for an airline or hotel site is the number of sign-up for the frequent purchaser program. I have spent the last couple of years working on media sites and determining success for media sites is not quite as obvious or straight-forward. So that leads to the question, how do you determine success for a media site? Well, the answer to that question is it depends on the site. I have been fortunate enough to work on several different media sites the last couple of years in a couple of different categories and determine success for each of the sites were slightly different, even for two sites in the same category.

To help determine success for the different sites, I sit down with the business owner for each site and talk to that person about the site, the different aspects of the site, what data he or she needs to help program the site, what data he or she needs to help sell the site to the advertiser’s, and finally how he or she is ultimately going to be judged how well the site performed. When I think about determining success, I like to think about success beyond the page view and video play. For a media site, those are two basic measures of success and every site that I work on those are the first two items measured. I like to think above and beyond those. One of the most recent examples of this process and thinking about success besides just page views and video plays is a new site that we just launched a couple of weeks ago, Food2. The Food2 site has several different components to it and there are several different interactions the user can perform on the site which can be used to determine success. Some of these interactions are: Facebook Connect, Recipe View, Blog Post View, Status Update, Upload Recipes, and Share Video. Here is a screen shot of all of the success events for Food2 that we capture. Since there are quite a few ways users can interact with the site, we wanted to capture those different ways to help us focus on the most used features to help better program the site and to potential those features to advertisers for sponsorships. To give you a contrast here is a screen shot of the success events of a site in a different category. The success events for this site are used for several different purposes. Besides helping us program the site, some of these success events are used to give to clients that have already purchased certain advertising on the site. Here is a screen shot of success events for a site in the same category as Food2. As you can see, the success events are a little different from Food2, even being in the same category. Though the success events are slightly different for these sites, the one thing they all have in common is the process of determining which success events should be captured for the site.

Now that it has been a couple of weeks since the summit has ended, I wanted to give me thoughts and opinions about the summit this year. On the last day of the summit, during the ski party someone asked me how many summits that I had been to. When I told him that this is my third summit, he asked why I keep coming back to the summit. What do I get out of the summit any more? Those are very good questions. My reasons for going to the summit this year have obviously changed from the first summit that I went to three years ago. Here are some of the reasons why I went to the summit this year:
o See what new products that Omniture is going to be releasing
o Networking – meet other companies that are tackling the same problems we are
o Get to talk to the Product Managers in person
o Customer Advisory Board meeting
o See what other companies are doing with the Omniture products
o Skiing, of course
OK, skiing is the not really one of the primary reasons why I went the summit this year, but it always nice to blow off some steam after a long week of meetings and sessions. When I went to the summit, I a few things that I wanted to get accomplished. We were having some issues with SiteCatalyst and I wanted to talk to the Product Manager in person to help get my questions answered and bring to their attention how serious this one is we are having. I always like the network component, you can never enough contacts. I have always enjoyed the keynote presentations and this year was no exception. Typically, have been hit and miss. Though this year I thought the breakout sessions have the best in the three years that I been to the summit (and I am not saying that because I was a co-presenter). I listen to a couple of the presentations that I was not able to make and I thought they were both great. Though I did not listen to all of them, I did download a few more of the presentations in pdf and really enjoyed that information that I got from the slides, though I did not get the full benefit of the full presentation.

I really enjoy the keynote presentation by George Colony. He did a fantastic job and I think he made some good points. They may be some basic points, but there were a lot of things that a lot of companies do not think about. Not many people can sit down with a CEO and tell them “your website sucks – if you are not using persona, scenarios and analytics you are in trouble.” I though that was a great line. Though there are a lot of companies using analytics, there are still a few that are not and hopefully this will get companies to invest time and money into developing personas and invest in a/b or multivariate testing. A lot of companies will invest in either developing personas or testing, but not both. I also like one of his other points, “Technology is changing your customer… …your customer will change your company.” He then goes on and compares the differences in technologies used between Gen Y and Gen X. I can speak to personal experience on this one. At my current company, we are seeing a shift in not only who uses our websites, but also who is watching our TV channels. We are working on a strategy to go with this change. The final point that George Colony went over was “When it comes to technology do me (and your company) a favor… …stop being clueless.” You can not understand the technologies until you use them. I agree with this, but I would add that you might want to have a strategy around these new technologies. One of the other keynotes that I really enjoyed was Martin Lindstrom. When I first read the description of the session, I was a little skeptical about it. Buy-ology, what is that and what is that going to mean to me. But I am really glad that I attended the session. Martin did a great job and it was very thought provoking. How many companies can “smash” up their brand and still have their customers recognize the brand? There are probably not many brands and/or companies that can “smash” up their brand and still be recognized. Makes you think that without your logo, can your brandy still be recognizable.

As I mentioned before, I also really enjoyed the breakout sessions. Of course I do have a little bias. I was fortunate enough to co-present at two of the breakout sessions. My first presentation was “Makin’ Gold Records: Turning your SEO team into Rock stars” and my second presentation was “And the Survey Says…..” In the SEO session about some of the KPIs and reports that can help your SEO team. We talked about the Channel Manager Plugin that will give you some advanced SEO reports. In the survey session, we talked about Omniture’s Survey product and how you can tie back the responses to the survey questions to success events. Though I was really busy thinking about my presentations making sure I covered all of my points, I was fortunate enough to attend two other breakout sessions. The first one I attended was about RIA applications and the second one I attended was about Advanced Omniture Tip and Techniques. Both of these sessions were great and the presenters did a great job. I wish I had the opportunity to attend the Media session, but I was preparing for my first presentation. After attending the Media session last year, I was too sure that I was going to get a lot of the session this year. After talking with one of the co-presenters and playing the recording of the session that Omniture sent out last week, I wish I had the opportunity to attend the session. It had some good information about how to pick up ad impressions using the product variable so you do not have to use an eVar, create a success event which then can be tied back to other Conversion reports. I listened to other recordings from other sessions that I was not able to attend and from the few others that I listened to, they all great content and great information.

One of the parts of the summit that I did care for was the vendor booths, though they are necessary and they pay for part of the conference I do not like going in there and being “attacked” by the vendors. Not all of them do this, but the small few ruin this part of the summit for me. Of course there are also the sales calls that I receive, even when I do not visit the vendor’s booth. Even with this part, I though Omniture did a great job and really look forward to next year’s summit.

When I wrote my first post on Implementing Omniture, I wanted to give a general overview of some of the techniques that I use to implement Omniture to help inform business decisions. I have had a better than expected response to the post. I want to follow up with more techniques, but I am going to cover a few more items. I am going to go over the differences between an eVar, a prop, and an event and how I choose which one I use. I am also going to cover the Omniture plug-ins that I use and why I use them. I was looking at some of my RSS reader and I saw a post by Adam Greco of Omniture that goes over some of the plug-in that Omniture offers. I know there are some people who are searching to find the Omniture Implementation manual for SiteCatalyst. As far as I am aware, the only way to get the Omniture Implementation Manual is having a login for SiteCatalyst. You will need to go to Knowledge Base section under Help and do a search for “full implementation manual.” That should get you the result where you can download the Implementation Manual. To understand if you should use a prop, an eVar, or an event, you need to know how each one of these items is used. Understanding these items, will ultimately help fill out the Omniture Tagging Strategy document.

A prop (s.prop) is also know now a Custom Insight variable and are available under the Traffic reports. Props are counters that count the number of times a value is sent to SiteCatalyst and can be enabled to correlate to other props. The only thing about this is for the correlation to be effective two values need to be passed into SiteCatalyst during the same call. For example, the value for prop1 and the value for prop2 need to be passed together and then a correlation can be set up to relate the two items. Also, keep in mind that props are non-persistent variables and can be used in pathing reports. Enabling a pathing report for a prop will help see the exact order the value that was being passed into a particular prop occurred. For example, for internal search, you might want to see the exact order of keywords that visitors are typing. If you are passing the on-site search keyword into prop5, you then turn on pathing for prop5. This will allow you to see if visitors are searching for bedroom, then bathrooms, then kitchens or if visitors are just searching for kitchens. Though keep in mind that if you want to see what order visitors take two different actions on your site, those different actions need to be passed into the same prop. For example, for on-site search, the visitors have the option of filtering to narrow their results after they search and you want to see which filters are used after a particular search keyword. Both the keyword and the filter need to be passed into the same prop. After a visitor searches on bathroom and then he or she filters on color: red, both the search term bathroom and color: red need to be passed into prop6. Then once pathing is turned on for prop6, it will allow you to see that after a visitor searched for bathroom, he or she filtered on color: red. Some of the information that I have captured in props in the past are: URL of page, Title of page, Page Type, clicks on modules on the site, on-site search term, search filters, Timepart information. I have not turned on pathing on every prop, but only the ones where I want to see the order in which something occurred. Once pathing is turned on, it will also turn on certain metrics, such as entries, exits, single access, etc. Though be careful about some of these metrics, as they may not mean exactly what you think they do. Though if you just want to see how many times an internal keyword was searched for, you can pass that keyword into a prop and it will give you a count of the number of times they keyword was typed.

Now that I have gone over what a prop does, now I am going to go over what an eVar (s.eVar) does. An eVar is also referred to as Custom Conversion Variable and can be found under the Conversion reports. An eVar is used how well specific attributes or actions contribute to the success of your site. eVars are persistent variables that are tied back to your “success” events. You can set an eVar with the same value as a prop, but the eVar will tell you how much revenue or how many registrations where driven by the eVar. Some of the information that I have captured in an eVar are: all marketing channels (SEM, Email, etc), site search term, search filters, clicks on modules, video information. To really help understand what an eVar does, it will help to understand what an event does. There are two types of events: pre-defined and custom. Pre-defined events are geared towards eCommerce site, so I am going to go over custom events. Custom events help you define that type of success that you want to track. Success is defined as a goal that you want your visitors to achieve. For example, some of the success events that I have tracked are: page views, video plays, print a page, save a page, email to a friend, clicks on ajax links, registration, sweepstakes entries, etc. By having these types of “success” events it allows me to track how well our marketing programs are performing or how well our internal search is performing. For example, I can see that when someone searches for bedroom, they viewed 100 pages on the site after they performed the search, played 50 videos, printed 10 pages, 150 sweepstakes entries, 250 clicks on ajax links, etc.

After deciding which props, eVars, and events that you want to set up, now you need to decide which plug-ins that you need to use. Plug-ins is used to run customized routines to gather or alter the data being collected. Some of the plug-ins that I have use is:
1. Time Part: I used this plug-in to determine, in aggregate, the time of day and day of week when most of the pages are viewed on the site. I would recommend setting up a correlation between day and hour and if you are capturing the URL of the page or Title of the page, I would recommend setting up a correlation between day and/or hour and URL and/or Title.
2. Case Sensitive: I use this plug-in to force value of the prop or eVar to one case, this way we do not have the same value, one with capital letters and one with lower case letters. This plug-in is the most useful for internal site search, where visitors will typically search for the same thing, but with different capitalization.
3. QueryParam: This plug-in allows you to pick up values from the URL. This plug-in is the most commonly used for marketing campaigns, but can also be used for internal search.
4. ValOnce: This plug-in allows you to pick up the value from the URL only one time during the visit. This again is the most useful for marketing campaigns. If a visitor views a second page during the visit and then hits the back button, the information in the URL will show up again and the plug-in will only count that value one time.
5. PersistValue: This plug-in does the exact opposite of the ValOnce plug-in, it persists the value for the whole visit. Again, this plug-in is mostly used for marketing campaigns. I have used this plug-in in the past to persist SEM keywords so then I could correlate the top page views by each individual keyword. To see if this plug-in is working properly, you will need to de-bug the tags being thrown.
6. NewRepeat: This plug-in is used to determine the activity on the site between New or Repeat visitors. I have passed this information into a prop and an eVar in the past, so I can see how many page views, visits, and success events come from new or repeat visitors. Of course, keep in mind that this plug-in is cookie dependent.
7. DynamicObjectId: This plug-in is used to automatically assign an object id to each link on a page so Clickmap can more accurately determine the clicks on each link on a page. The only issue I have had with this plug-in is if I have also have custom link tracking on each link on a particular page that Clickmap still does not work properly even with the DynamicObjectId plug-in. I have custom link track on certain pages, so I can easily maintain the click history on links, since with Clickamp that history will go away once the link is taken off of the page.

I some times use more plug-in than this, but these are the plug-ins that I use the most often.

After you understand the differences between a prop and eVar, how do you determine if you should use a prop or an eVar. I decided that based on the business question that is being asked. If the business owner wants to know how many page views occurred in a section or page type or how many clicks (metric will still be page view) a module received or how many visits viewed a page or section of the site I will pass that information into a prop. If the business owner wants to how success (page views, video plays, print page, email to a friend, etc) was had after an action was taken, I will pass that information into an eVar. Since props are not persistent (unless you use the PersistValue plug-in), it will count things only one time, where eVars are persistent and will tie back to “success” events.

Omniture Tagging Strategy document

There has been a lot of talk about social media, companies talking about using Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. I am going to talk about how my current company uses social media, though I am going to take some liberties with what most people might think of as social media, but I am also going to give some examples of tradition social media. Another way of looking at Social Media according to Wikipedia is User Generated Content (UGC). One of the biggest examples of user generated content for us is our Rate My Space section on our site. Within this section of the site, users can upload pictures of their spaces into 21 different categories. Visitors to the site can comment on the photos and also it them. Photos are uploaded by our visitors every few minutes. Since there are always new photos being uploaded, our visitors come back frequently to check out the new photos to get decorating and/or re-modeling ideas for their spaces. The people who typically uploads photos of their spaces, uploads more than one photo to give multiple views of the room. Visitors will also upload photos of their spaces if they do not like a particular space and would like some help with ideas on how to re-decorate their space. We have also extended this type of UGC content beyond the Rate My Space section of our site. Four our Dream Home sweepstakes, we have My Dream Designs where visitors can upload photos of what is inspirational to them for their dream design or how the HGTV Dream Home has inspired them in their designs for their spaces. To help us promote the dream home sweepstakes and My Dream Designs we started a Twitter account, hgtvdreamhome. These are a couple of things that we have done to try to get visitors coming back to the site and participate in the site.

One of the other social media applications that we have used is a cupcake application on Facebook for our Food Network brand. This application was not only about people creating and sending cupcakes to each other on Facebook, but we also wanted to drive users back to Food Network. We had cupcake recipes on the right hand side of the application to bring users directly to Food Netowork. To see how much activity we receivttp:ed on these links, we added an Omniture tracking code to the end of each URL. During this same time, we developed a Food Network iPhone application. While this is not really a social media application, we used social media to help promote the application. We posted some information on digg to some buzz about the application and see what people thought about the application and if we might need to do some tweaks to it. This was a great way to get immediate feedback.

Where all of these social media applications and/or promotion successful? Each of them had there various level of success. Some where of them were very successful and some of them are moderately successful. Will we continue to spend time in social media? Yes, we will, but we will spend as much time on the applications that did work as well. Though for us, at the end of the day, it is about getting out brand out there and we will continue to use social media to drive more brand recognition.

Now that the tagging plan has been completed, the code has been written, and the tags in place one of the tasks that is usually asked is for web analyst to be-bug the tags to make sure the tags are what you expected when you created the tagging plan. This is a task I am asked to do on a continuous basis. I de-bug tags, not just when a site is first tagged, but on an ongoing basis. There are several de-bugging tools that you can use; Fiddler Tool, Web Analytics Solutions Profiler (WASP), Charles Debugger, and Firebug. The tool that I use the most often is the Charles Debugger, followed by the Web Analytics Solutions Profiler. One of the things that I like about the Charles Debugger is I can view all of the pages that I have viewed or actions that I have taken on a site, though I use the Web Analytics Solution Profiler for a quick check of the tags on a page. When I de-bug new tags, I open the Tagging Strategy Worksheet that I created and then I open up the Charles Debugger. I look at the different pages and take the different actions to test each scenario in the tagging strategy worksheet. This gives me an opportunity to see if the tags being thrown match what I had envisioned for the tag. If the tags being thrown matches my vision in the tagging strategy worksheet, I then put an “x” in the Working column to let me know that I tested that information, so when I come back to review the worksheet to do additional testing I know which tags are working.

Charles or the Web Analytics Solutions Profiler can de-bug more tools than just Omniture, though my examples here are for Omniture. In this Screen Shot of the Charles De-bugger, you will see the different items to look at in the de-bugger. The first thing you need to look for is the Omniture report suite name (RSID). You will notice the 122.2o7.net. The first numbers, indicates which Omniture server the report suite is on and the 2o7.net is the Omniture third party collection code. If your site is on first party cookies, you will see something like “metrics.RSID”. You can see all of the page information and/or the flash interactions. You will also notice the variable information on the right side, it is in numerical order, so the props and eVar information is mixed together. When I de-bug new tags on a site, I usually test different scenarios to make sure the tags are doing what I expect them to. As I mentioned before, the Charles De-bugger can be used for than just Omniture. Here is a Screen Shot of Web Trends tags using the Charles de-bugger. The Charles de-bugger can also help if you have more than one web analytics tools on the site. Here is a Screen Shot of Three Different Web Analytics Tags on a site. As I mentioned before, I use the Web Analytics Solutions Profiler to help me de-bug tags on a single page and/or multiple tags at one. Since the Web Analytics Solutions Profiler recognizes several hundred different tools, it makes it very easy to tell which tool’s tags you are viewing. Here is a Screen Shot of the Web Analytics Solution Profiler that show multiple tags on a site.

Though a most of my examples are Omniture based, you obviously can de-bug more than just Omniture and create a tagging strategy spreadsheet for more than Omniture. Some of the tools might not have as many options as Omniture, so the tagging strategy spreadsheet might not be as detailed as my example. The first tool that I implemented was Coremetrics. If I had developed a similar tagging spreadsheet to give to the developer, it would have answered a lot of his questions and we could have implemented Coremetrics a little quicker than we did. I could have put which tags go on which types of pages, the categories that should be assigned for each product depending on how the site was browsed, how to tag the onsite searches, and marketing tags. Creating this type of information will make it easier to de-bug the site in the future.