Sarah DeAtley
information + analysis + design
July 11, 2009 at 4:36 pm
filed under Data Visualization, Web Analytics
Tagged bentley, data visualization, dd4d, google analytics, google fusion tables, omniture, page tagging, running, tools, web analytics
These topics may not be entirely related, but I am making them related because I don’t want to devote an entire post to each one. Between playing with Bentley and watching reality tv on Bravo, I played around with Omniture, an enterprise tool for web analytics. I read some about page tagging variables in Omniture, but I’m not quite sure I understand when you use eVar versus sProp for every situation. Because my primary experience is with Google Analytics, what I’m noticing so far is the difference between the 2. Main things I’ve noticed:
- Omniture has way way more metrics that can be measured with a lot of granularity.
- Google Analytics has a better UI and is more concerned with making things easy for the user (novices especially), so metrics like bounce rate are automatically calculated for you.
- I like the visualizations better in Google Analytics and the site overlay tool helps to show click maps visually on any page in the site.
- Omniture might help make more informed decisions because it is drawing so much more data and aggregating it for the user.
Overall I think I will grow to like Omniture more because it is so powerful, but I wish that they would include some of the better visualization tools from Google Analytics, or calculate bounce rate for me. Maybe that is asking too much, but from what I hear, free tools like GA are catching up to Omniture and WebTrends quickly, so they might offer the same things eventually.
I had never heard of Google Fusion Tables before, but that might be because its in Pre-Alpha right now. It basically takes data sets from things you import (like spreadsheets/csv files) and uses different visualizations like the ones in Google Analytics and Google Maps. One cool part of this new tool is that it allows collaboration and you can combine other tables if they have the same columns (because its probably treated like tables in a database). They also allow sharing of certain sections (like database views I’m guessing), and easy online publishing of the visualization. There is a lot of potential to use this in web analytics I think, but so far I found the visualizations and UI to be somewhat confusing to manipulate. Below is a motion chart showing predicted temperature change for the US.
Finally to continue the visualization fixation I have, I found a cool blog, information aesthetics, that posted about the DD4D (Data Designed for Decisions) conference. There were some cool things, but what I thought was most interesting was a way to show the overall change in various factors of a problem, which predicted an end result. It would be interesting to try, but I’m not sure how you assign numeric value to subjective things in a meaningful way.
DD4D Sense Change Making Visualization
Wow. Longest post ever. So now I’m going for a run to not think about web things for a little bit.
Related posts:
Omniture, Google Fusion Tables, and DD4D | Intersections- SFWEBDESIGN.com
on July 11, 2009 at 6:26 pm
[...] is the original: Omniture, Google Fusion Tables, and DD4D | Intersections Tags: asking-too, calculate-bounce, Google Analytics, made-it-very, more-because, performance, [...]
First Impressions of WebTrends | Intersections
on July 12, 2009 at 11:40 am
[...] played around with WebTrends some already, but now I can compare it more to Omniture and Google Analytics. Main things that struck [...]