As another year rolls around, it’s an ideal time to sit back and take stock of your web analytics goals and processes.

As with most reviews on any of your business areas, the key factor to consider is – what really matters most to you and your business?

Read the rest of this entry »

In such a fast paced and ever changing business and consumer landscape, business priorities are always changing and therefore your business and online analytics focus must also be adaptable to change.

It’s critical that your measurement strategies and processes are flexible to move with the shifts in your business priorities.

But what does this mean in reality?

Read the rest of this entry »

With the Australian dollar being so high I’ve found myself searching for and buying lots of different products online over the past few weeks.

The experience has been a timely reminder of how crucial it is to get the basics of a website right if you want to entice new customers in the door and also if you want to have any chance of getting them back again in the future.

After thinking about this some more, I’ve come up with three basic areas that all websites must meet & exceed if they want to prosper.

Read the rest of this entry »

The benefits that a business can gain from using web analytics to make smarter data driven decisions are widely documented and recognised. However in many online businesses, much of the analysis and learning components are stuck in the minds of the analysts – and transferring this knowledge into real business decisions does not always occur.

The true benefits of an effective web analytics strategy can only be gained when all the major stakeholders of an online business are a part of the strategy and can see the value it can deliver.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well it’s finally here! Well that is for those who are the lucky one’s to be first off the rank in the upgrade process. Adobe have turned on Sitecatalyst v15 overnight.

Thankfully, some of the features we’ve all been waiting for in Omniture Sitecatalyst have finally been brought to life.

Read the rest of this entry »

We believe that the two basic objectives of web analytics are to optimise user behaviour and to measure and increase returns on marketing spend.

If your website is an eCommerce site, assessing your website’s performance becomes so much more straightforward due to the fact you can attribute real business revenue to your user’s actions.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the first things I learnt in my consulting days was that no two businesses are the same. Businesses that operate in the same industry will all have slightly different ways of doing things.

Why should that be any different when talking about online businesses? Generally it’s not – although perhaps some online businesses use generic white label software which may be very similar to a competitor or similar business in another region.

All of this presents challenges for software companies (ie. web analytics providers) – because in order to be useful for a broad range of companies – they need to be flexible enough to cater for most businesses’ unique business rules.

Henry Ford is widely reported to have once said “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”, if only that were the case today.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amongst all the buzz from this week’s Omniture Summit came the announcement of the latest version of Sitecatalyst v15, and as you would hope with such a major release, it sounds like the product will finally have some of the features in place that will bring it back in line with some of the other products available. Here’s a quick video from Omniture of some of the new features.

The ability to segment your reports is the biggest improvement as far as we can see. Users of Google Analytics will no doubt be thinking – welcome to the party Adobe/Omniture – as that functionality has been available in the FREE tool for quite some time. Whereas prior to Sitecatalyst v15, only Omniture’s Discover offered this functionality in the kind of immediacy that will now be on offer. (There was also ASI and Datawarehouse but these had their limitations.)

So what’s the big deal about segments?

Read the rest of this entry »

In the first of our series related to getting more out of Adobe Omniture SiteCatalyst – we are going to look into a couple of advanced pathing features that can be implemented to significantly increase your understanding of how visitors are interacting with your website.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is one key thing to remember when thinking about setting up your web analytics strategy – what are you actually going to do with the insights that you uncover?

The whole point of understanding how your website & online marketing efforts are performing is to be able to make smarter decisions. Actionable Insights are what you must strive to uncover. Generating reports just for the sake of it does not help anyone – it actually costs you time & money – not just from the person creating them – but from the people who end up reading them.

Read the rest of this entry »