It is by now fair to say that everyone was caught off-guard when Adobe announced it’s acquisition of Omniture. There’s also been no shortage of opinions and commentaries about the acquisition: those who like it and those who don’t. By and large, most customers that we’re dealing with are somewhat neutral, as Adobe is a strong company that has successfully integrated the Macromedia products into its offerings. Of course Omniture’s business model is so different than Adobe’s that it remains to be seen how the acquisition goes.

Instead of providing commentary on the acquisition, we decided to take a different approach and provide some speculation (not predictions) about the market to come. Some are outright outrageous and they’re primarily for amusement purposes.

1. PDF Tracking becomes available

With Adobe owning both the PDF standard and the measurement technology of Omniture, tracking PDF usage finally becomes a reality. This will benefit the industry greatly and has been a feature that’s been requested for a long time, but technological hurdles have alaways made it difficult to pull off.

2. Adobe offers free web analytics

If Adobe’s plan is to compete with Google, then it’ll have to offer a free or a very low-cost analytics solution. However, this is unlikely to happen on the SiteCatalyst platform which is both expensive to maintain and difficult to implement and support using a free model. A better choice would be the HBX platform. Could we be seeing HBX making a comeback and being offered for free? If so, how would former HBX customers react?

3. Microsoft buys Webtrends

I have to admit we were expecting to see someone else like Microsoft acquire Omniture. Microsoft has already made an attempt to compete with Google Analytics when it acquired DeepMetrix. Although Microsoft Analytics did not pan out as expected, we still think that Microsoft will enter the analytics space. At this point Webtrends seems to be the most likely candidate for acquisition by Microsoft since Webrends also offers a SaaS product that can be repackaged by Microsoft.

4. SiteCatalyst adopts Flash cookies

We all know the limitations of regular cookies. Flash shared objects provide a more reliable way of measuring unique visitors. The adoption means a more accurate web analytics reporting and a more efficient way to measure uniques. Like all new technologies, Adobe will have to overcome the privacy PR, but if done correctly, the industry will benefit from a proper adoption of the technology.

5. Adobe to acquire an ad serving company

One of the main things that Adobe gets by acquiring Omniture is a diversification in its product line. Adobe’s core offerings have been on the decline for some time now and it needs to enter growing markets. Digital Marketing is one such area, but to compete with Google and Microsoft, it’ll have to offer its own ad serving technology, since Google and Microsoft have both acquired DoubleClick and Atlas respectively.

6. SiteCatalyst 15 UI in Flex

This is more of a wishful thinking. Flex provides a great technology for building application user interfaces. One way to start integrating the technologies is to build the next generation SiteCatalyst UI completely in Flex. There are some upcoming analytics solutions that are built completely in Flex and the technology has proven to provide a great deal of flexibility and customization that otherwise would not be possible in HTML interfaces.

7. SiteCatalyst CS5?

Purely speculative we admit. It would be interesting though to think what a software version would look like. What is likely though would be an interface directly inside Dreamweaver and Flash where designers could see the performance of their content and their effectiveness, allowing them to make quick edits based on data. That’s after all the value proposition that the acquisition is promising to provide.

8. Quark buys Coremetrics

OK, I admit, this is very unlikely, but certainly amusing. For those of you who’ve been following Adobe for years, their top competitor in desktop publishing has been Quark, developers of Quark XPress. Quark still owns a large percentage of the desktop publishing market, but it’s a company on the decline, since desktop publishing is dying. What if Quark decided to diversify? Again, this is pure speculation and mainly entered for amusement purposes.

9. Adobe sells Visual Sciences assets

The big question mark is what’s going to happen to Visual Science (Discover On Premise or Omniture Insight) customers? We haven’t seen much discussion about that specific technology, but the engagements are far too consultative for Adobe to be interested in. It makes more sense for Adobe to sell off that technology to a BI company such as Business Objects, which would be a better fit.

10. Adobe sells Omniture

Key to any acquisition is that there are so many synergies that 1+1=3. Many are still scratching their heads to find the synergies and if Omniture continues to be a completely separate business unit, then it definitely remains to be seen. So what if the synergies don’t exist? If the only value proposition that Adobe is going after is integration of analytics into Dreamweaver and Flash, then the synergies are minimal since you can very easily integrate other analytics into those platforms today. In that case could we see Adobe sell the business unit? Again this is very unlikely because of the premium that Adobe paid for Omniture but as of today, the number of doubters is more than the number of believers.

Tealium is proud to be a new member of the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN). This certifies Tealium as one of the few organizations to implement and support Yahoo! Web Analytics. It also allows retaining customers to gain access to Yahoo! Web Analytics for free.

Yahoo! Web Analytics is a full-featured, enterprise analytics solution developed as part of the IndexTools acquisition by Yahoo!. It provides detailed segmentation, audience demographics, click-stream and campaign analysis features using a customizable user interface.

Some key features within Yahoo! Web Analytics include:

• Real Time Reports: information provided within minutes of the activity
• Custom Dashboards: create customized dashboards, including KPIs based on needs
• Custom Reports & Custom Fields: custom fields let you collect information beyond that captured by default web analytics. Examples include content date, author, genre, etc.
  With custom reports, you can get more detailed reporting using custom/multiple dimensions and metrics
• Custom Alerts: get automated notifications based on criteria that’s important to your organization
• And more

You can contact us to learn more about Yahoo! Web Analytics or for a live demo.

As more large enterprises are adopting Google Analytics, there’s a growing demand for enterprise-level features from the solution. Google has made some tremendous progress over the last year by introducing some advanced functionalities such as Advanced Segments, Custom Reports and API access, which has created an impressive ecosystem of add-on tools. There are still, however, some functionalities that are highly desired by the more advanced user base. One such functionality is reporting on product conversion or abandonment.

The Ecommerce functionality inside Google Analytics already provides a great deal of insight, including transactions and identifying your top revenue sources such as keywords, campaigns and affiliates. However, for those companies interested in optimizing their site merchandizing, a useful report is that of product conversion or abandonment. In other words, companies would like to understand the effectiveness of individual products at generating a view, a cart-add, checkout progress and finally a purchase.

Although this is not a standard report in Google Analytics, you can use the new Event Tracking feature in Google Analytics in order to generate this insight. This post outlines the instructions for those that want to generate such reporting inside Google Analytics.

The Event Tracking feature was originally designed by Google to help track visitor interactions within the web site. Examples include link clicks, downloads or interactions within a video or a Flash application. A typical syntax for sending an event to Google Analytics is the following:

pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value);

Where category is the name you supply to the elements you want to track, action is the name of the user action, label is the name or label associate with the event and an optional value, such as an amount associated with the event.

For this solution, we’re going to use the following syntax:

• Category: the value passed into Category will be “product”. This lets us differentiate between other events if this feature is also used for other purposes.
• Action: the values passed into this variables will be “view”, “cart”, “checkout” and “order”, depending on the stage at which the visitor is.
• Label: this variable will be used to capture the name of the product.
• Value: not needed in this case.

The next step is to code your ecommerce pages accordingly in order to pass the product name and the event into Google Analytics. Below are some instructions.

For the product pages, the following line should be added to the Google Analytics page code. The PRODUCT_NAME should be inserted dynamically from your content management solution.

pageTracker._trackEvent(“product”, “view”, “PRODUCT_NAME”);

pageTracker._trackEvent(“product”, “cart”, “PRODUCT_NAME”);

pageTracker._trackEvent(“product”, “checkout”, “PRODUCT_NAME”);

pageTracker._trackEvent(“product”, “order”, “PRODUCT_NAME”);

Viewing Reports

The reports will be available within the Event Tracking section inside Google Analytics. If you want to see the overall progress at different stages, you can start with the “Categories” report and from there, click the “product” category. An example of the resulting view is shown below.

However, this merely gives you the progress at different stages without visibility into specific products. In order to see the progress within a specific product, you can go to the “Labels” report as shown below, which provides a list of individual products and select a specific item. The ensuing screen is also shown below and provides a view of the progress at each stage for the specific item selected. Here, you’ll be able to see how many times an individual item was viewed, added to cart, checked out and purchased.

Obviously, Event Tracking was not originally built for tracking product conversions, so it’s important to note the implications of such methodology. One of the main items to consider is that Event Tracking generates extra views in your account. As a result this methodology will have an impact on your overall account pageviews, pages per visit and bounce rates. For example, if a visitor hits a product page and bounces, because you’re using Event Tracking to track the page view event, you won’t be able to see the bounce event take place. However, for those who absolutely need to track product conversion/abandonment, this provides a reasonable solution.

Every now and then, we get questions from customers about ways to use Motion Charts inside Google Analytics. For the most part, you want to take advantage of the time dimension inside Motion Charts to trend multiple items over multiple dimensions (such as visits and conversion rates). So for example, you can use Motion Charts to see how your keywords are evolving over time.

One of the best presentations that we’ve seen using this technology doesn’t even involve web analytics. Instead, it’s a presentation by Hans Rosling, the statistics guru about trends in developing countries.

This is not a new presentation, but the concepts presented and lessons about the use of data are still very relevant even in our industry.

Hi everyone, this is Olivier. I wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that I’m running for the Web Analytics Association Board of Directors.

For those who read this blog, I would like to explain briefly the reasons behind my nomination and why I’m asking you to vote for me (weird feeling now… requesting your vote! I feel like I’m entering into politics).

Anyway, I have presented my candidacy because I feel that our industry needs as much help and support as we can provide. And having been in the Web Analytics and Online Optimization space for more than 10 years now, I felt it was time for me to give back to this industry that has given me so much. My objective with the WAA if I have the chance to be elected is to put much effort in helping web analytics and online marketers solve the challenges of spending more time on what matters. For the past 10 years, and everywhere I go, it’s the same challenge.

What matters is the analysis, the interpretation, and more importantly the actions/recommendations/changes we can make base on the data that has been collected. Testing new marketing or web design ideas, improving the user experience, watching the online conversion rates increase, that’s what is fun and rewarding.

But unfortunately, most people are bugged down with data accuracy, implementation challenges, best practice measurements, etc. Too many individuals are spending their time trying to reconcile numbers, understanding and explaining why A and B don’t match as they should, figuring out the best way to measure specific web content (i.e.. flash, video, Social Media, mobile, offline data, etc.), and finally coordinating efforts with IT to implement (or re-implement) their web analytics tags for the 10th times to capture all this. There’s got to be a better way. And that’s the challenge I would like to tackle with all the players in this industry if I’m elected.

I really think that the WAA could be more proactive as an organization. Look at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and how they create web standards ahead of time for everyone, especially for technology vendors to follow. As a WAA director, I would love to list all the key challenges expressed by the WAA members (some of them listed above) and figure out proactive standards and best practices for measurement and implementation with all the key players in this industry so that WE (all of us) get to spend more time on what matters.

For more information about my candidacy, you can visit the WAA site.

I appreciate everyone’s support, and I wish you all a successful 2009.

The new beta version of the Safari 4 browser is jam-packed with new features: 150 according to Apple. One of the most appealing features is called “Top Sites”, which is the ability to have your favorite sites shown as graphical previews, as shown below.

What’s so special about Top Sites? Besides the fact that it provides a nice graphical view of your favorite sites, it lets you know if they’ve also been updated since your last visit. That’s right. Safari automatically fetches for new site content in the background and lets you know (using the blue stars in the right corner) that your top sites have been updated.

While this is very convenient for the user, it introduces new challenges for web analytics practitioners. Primarily, the inclusion of your site in your visitors’ top sites means an increasing amount of artificial traffic. Primarily, if you’re in a situation where users of Safari place your site in one of their top sites and don’t end up visiting your site, the traffic will likely show as bouncing traffic. This results in an increase in your bounce rate even though the visitor never entered your site.

We have tested the inclusion of a number of sites in Top Sites and have seen the traffic registered in web analytics even though we never visited the sites.

Safari 4 is currently in beta, so only a small percentage of your audience is exposed to “Top Sites”. Once generally available, this is sure to cause an increase in bounce rates for some popular sites. More importantly, the Safari market share has been on the rise, according to the figure below by Market Share. The latest figures show the market share at 8%. This means that as Safari continues to gain traction, this problem is bound to get bigger.

So as you’re analyzing your data, keep this trend into consideration as it could impact your overall bounce rates.

In a recent post we covered a comparison between social media and pay-per-click traffic. We covered the fact that social media was almost as effective as PPC advertising. This post provides an update on the study, with additional data collected since.

The finding: Online PR has a long tail.

Here’s the analysis. At first glance, online PR has a short lifespan. Consider the figure below, which shows the traffic as a result of PR and blog coverage associated with the release. We can see that as expected, the site gets the majority of its traffic immediately after release, with residual traffic afterward.

However, the one thing that you don’t want to do is to stop the analysis shortly after the release. Based on our findings, the long tail of online PR matters. In this specific example, over a 30-day period, the PR traffic during the peak period accounts for 41% of the PR traffic. This means that the long tail accounts for 59% of the PR traffic.

Now let’s take this to the next level and look at the KPIs for the PR campaign. More specifically, we’re interested in cost per lead associated with the online PR campaign. For benchmark purposes, we’re going to compare these numbers with our PPC programs in place. This is shown in the figure below.

In this graph, we also see the impact of the long tail on this KPI. By looking at the data for a short period of time, we see that initially online PR is not as effective as PPC advertising. However, over time, online PR turns out to be a more cost-efficient method for lead generation than PPC advertising.

The conclusion is that online PR has a residual life that when taken into account makes it as cost effective a medium as PPC advertising. So when it comes to PR measurement, make sure that you take the long tail into consideration.

Ever wonder how you can track the performance of your onsite campaigns and promotions with Google Analytics?

The first instinct is to use Google’s campaign functionality to track their effectiveness. The problem with the approach though is that you’ll be overriding your external campaigns. Consider this scenario: the visitor comes from an email campaign that’s being tracked through Google Analytics and once on site, he/she clicks on the internal campaign, overriding the email campaign. When the conversion occurs, the campaign that takes credit is the internal one, falsely leading you to think that your email campaign is not performing.

So what to do in this case? The solution is to use another Google Analytics feature for internal campaign tracking to make sure your internal campaigns do not override your acquisition programs. Additionally, consider the scenario where you may have several internal campaigns or promotions that are displayed on the page at random. For example, in one impression the visitor may get exposed to promotions A and B, and upon refreshing the page the same visitor may get exposed to promotions B and C. An example of this can be seen at the bottom of the Wells Fargo home page shown below (note: not a client). In this case, it’s not only critical to track the clicks, but also impressions because the combined data points will give you the campaign click-through rates.

In this solution, we’ve developed a script that lets you track the effectiveness of your internal campaigns using Google Analytics’ new Event Tracking feature. The reason we selected Event Tracking is because we wanted an easy way to track both impressions (for rotating banners and offers) and clicks.

So how does this work? First, download the toolkit, which consists of the script and the instructions. This solution will let you tag the links for which you want to track impressions and clicks with a query parameter. By adding the query parameter onto the destination URLs, the script will track both impressions and clicks automatically.

Here’s an example: consider you have a total of 5 promotions on your home page that rotate randomly (like the Wells Fargo home page). The destination URLs for these five promotions are:

http://www.site.com/promotion1.html

http://www.site.com/promotion2.html

http://www.site.com/promotion3.html

http://www.site.com/promotion4.html

http://www.site.com/promotion5.html

By adding the parameter “promo_id” to each one of these destination URLs, the script will automatically track impressions for each of the links and also the clicks on the click through event. The only thing that you’ll have to do is to add the provided script to the page and add user-friendly parameters to the destination URLs. The following is a sample of what the resulting destination URLs would look like:

http://www.site.com/promotion1.html?promo_id=promo1_home

http://www.site.com/promotion2.html?promo_id=promo2_home

http://www.site.com/promotion3.html?promo_id=promo3_home

http://www.site.com/promotion4.html?promo_id=promo4_home

http://www.site.com/promotion5.html?promo_id=promo5_home

Sounds simple enough? Well it is. Now on to the reports. Upon the page load, the links tagged with a “promo_id” parameter will send an event tracking request to Google Analytics with the category: “promotions”, action: “impressions”, and label being whatever you’ve entered in the “promo_id” parameter. On the click event, the script will send another Event Tracking request with the category: “promotions”, action: “clicks” and label being the value passed in the “promo_id” parameter. The result is that you get true link impression and click tracking inside Google Analytics. The reports can then be viewed in the Event Tracking section of the interface, with categories showing “promotions”, Actions reporting on the number of impressions and clicks and Labels showing you the actual links being tracked.

Of course this comes with its limitations. First, Event Tracking is still in beta and not everyone has access to this feature yet. Next, you do not want to get carried away and use this for every link on your site. Google Analytics limits you to 10 events per page and no more than 500 total events for the entire session. So we recommend that you only use this for a handful of critical onsite promotions, mainly rotating promotions. The default script has a limit of 5 links to be tracked per page, which can be configured. Finally, it is imprtant to note that if you use this on your landing pages, it will impact your bounce rates. The extra event created via the impression tracking will eliminate any potential for a bounce, reducing your bounce rate. There is a mechanism to delay the impression tracking that is detailed in the distribution. This will allow you to only track promotion impressions for users spending X number of seconds on the page in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the bounce rate metric.

As more companies are leveraging social media marketing and online PR in their marketing mix, one of the questions that is brought up is the relationship between social media marketing and search marketing (or pay-per-click advertising). Do they complement each other or do they target the same audience?

To assess this, we’ve used our own press release campaign as a case study. More specifically, we were interested in knowing the overlap between the PR and PPC audiences. The results: the two are very complementary.

First the background: the press release was launched on January 21 and can be found here. The release was also picked by a number of bloggers covering the social media and online PR measurement landscape. Simultaneously, we ran a series of PPC campaigns around social media and PR measurement as shown below. The question to ask is whether these two campaigns are reaching the same audience or are different ones.

In order to analyze the results, we’re using web analytics solutions (Google Analytics and NetInsight in our case). The results inside the web analytics solutions reveal no overlap whatsoever between the two campaigns. In other words, those who came to our site as a result of PPC did not have any exposure to either our press release or the blogger coverage of it. This is done thanks to the Tealium Social Media product. Let’s look at some of the analysis.

First, we’re going to look at the AdWords report inside Google Analytics. This is shown in the figure below. However, we need to also look at the overlap of the report with the social media segment. The social media segment is an additional segment that clients of our social media measurement service get access to. It allows you to compare what percentage of your traffic has been previously exposed to your social media and online PR (examples are PR stories and blog coverages).

We expected very little overlap between the two campaigns. In other words, we expected that our press release and blogger coverage targets a different audience than AdWords. But we did not expect the two to be mutually exclusive. Out of the 107 visits generated to the site as a result of PPC advertising, not a single one previously viewed our press release or read any of the blogs covering the release. This even holds true for the contextual advertising portion of our PPC campaign.

Now let’s take a closer look at the effectiveness of these two campaigns. For this, we’re going to look at the key performance indicators of the two campaigns, which is shown below. We can see surprisingly strong performance by the PR campaign. For example, the site conversion rate of the social media campaign is at 11.5%, only slightly lower than search advertising. At the same time, the cost per visit for the PR campaign is just slightly lower than search advertising.

The benefits of search advertising have long been known: you reach an audience that’s ready to buy at the most critical stage. But the fact that PR campaigns enjoy a similar performance means that online PR can be as effective as search advertising.

To reiterate, this study is for one site only and other sites may not experience the same effect, so you should take this into consideration. But marketers are well served adding online PR and social media marketing into their marketing mix. Not only does it target an audience that’s complementary to search advertising, but it also enjoys a level of success that’s in tune with PPC advertising, with similar cost per visit, cost per conversion and conversion rates. So go ahead – start experimenting.

We’re proud to announce the general availability of Tealium Social Media, a new measurement service for social media and online PR that’s tightly integrated into web analytics. The service is designed for marketing professionals who use social media and online PR as marketing vehicles to generate awareness and demand, and require side-by-side comparison with other marketing channels.

For a review of Tealium Social Media, please visit this blog posting by PR measurement guru, KDPaine.

How does it work? Consider this scenario:

A visitor is in the market for CRM software and comes across a blog comparing various CRM programs. The blog mentions a number of CRM applications that the visitor had no previous knowledge of, including SugarCRM and NetSuite. Because of the great feedback in the blog, the visitor decides to go to SugarCRM by doing a search for “sugar crm” on Google. This leads the visitor to sugarcrm.com, where the visitor requests a personal demo.

With traditional web analytics, this conversion would be attributed to Google. With Tealium Social Media, the conversion will also be attributed to the original blog that started everything.

Tealium Social Media is a web analytics plug-in that is integrated into popular web analytics solutions: Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, Unice NetInsight, WebTrends, Coremetrics, etc. This means you can get your social media ROI measurement directly inside your existing web analytics account.

Intrigued? Request a demo.