So I can’t really post on anything I’m doing, because I’m doing some troubleshooting on things, but expect posts on multi-variate optimization, a cool SEO hack for Google Analytics, and the ever growing list of data visualization tools I need to try out.  In the meantime, in case you missed it, Adobe bought Omniture today. Below is a model of Adobe’s take on how Omniture will fit into the grand scheme of things, and here is their press release.

Adobe + Omniture model

I don’t have a very strong opinion on this but I’m sure tomorrow my Google Reader feed will have a million posts on it. Everyone at ZAAZ was talking about it when we found out, but it should be interesting to see how they integrate aspects of Omniture page tagging into Dreamweaver and Flash. Hopefully it will be a good thing.

Last weekend I went to Arizona as a birthday trip. Not sure how I feel about all the malls and new-ness, but I loved the landscape, the weather (thunderstorms included), and how friendly everyone was. Some random lady at a restaurant bought our lunch for us on the first day. Didn’t leave a message, just did it. I wanted to go hiking, but I got too scared about hiking in the desert for the first time without a guide. Below are pics of Sedona and Montezuma’s Castle.

Sedona red rocks

Sedona thunderstorms

Thunder and lightning near Sedona

Montezuma's Castle

Ok yes I am being a baby because I’m not used to the weather, but its really hot for once in Seattle, so I feel uber lethargic. I think I’m typing at about 40 wpm, that’s how lethargic I am. Pyramid beer probably did not help. Below is a picture of the weird clouds hanging out now that we have crazy hot weather, courtesy of Cydne.

Today at work finally gained some momentum on a project, got to do some event tracking, and figured out how to get rid of those pesky parameters appended to the end of URLs in Google Analytics like: “sarahdeatley.com/index.php?id=13c4eb92kp“.  Sometimes they are useful for tracking different content within a site or for campaigns, but other times its the same content, and yet you’re seeing 20 different URLs that all are the same page.

I thought that you’d need to create complicated filters to accomplish this, but turns out its a really simple fix in the profile settings. Its easy:

1. Click “Edit” when viewing profile settings.
2. Click “Edit” in the first box that says “Main Website Profile Information”
3. Enter the offending URL Query Parameter in the form. So in the example above you would enter in “id.”

Yay for simple solutions, but if you have more complex needs, see this post by Justin Cutroni. Or if you need web analytics inspiration in general, read Avinash Kaushik’s latest post.

In other news I discussed my page tagging ideas with someone at work, and found out that the excessively complex page tagging is mainly in Omniture, and not so much WebTrends.  Basically we decided that controlling too much of the tagging limits creativity, but lack of documentation/control can lead to a chaotic mess.  We also talked about the advantages and disadvantages of automation in extracting data from reporting tools.  We both find the idea scary, but I know there are others who think its key to having more time to focus on analysis. I’m too hot to figure out an answer. Someone else should do it for me please.

I’ve played around with WebTrends some already, but now I can compare it more to Omniture and Google Analytics. Main things that struck me:

1. Things take forever to load (especially when you first open a profile because of the volume of data) and there’s no indication of that the page is still loading. This is a UI feedback issue, but still, kind of annoying.
2. The dashboard (I think the same goes for Omniture too) is not easily manipulable like in Google Analytics.
3. I like their way of changing the period of time viewed, that its a calendar and a drop down menu of common time periods.
4. Its nice to be able to have templates so you can easily access certain reports that are targeted for deeper analysis within a profile.
5. Graphs are not very visually appealing, so I can see why you’d need to create graphs and charts in Excel most of the time.
6. You can create a calculated measure for a metric, such as bounce rate (I still wish it were automatic like in GA though). **OK I lied, I think you still need to calculate bounce rate in Excel because of the available fields for report queries and calculated measures.
7. What is an active visit, WebTrends? I discussed this with someone for 10 minutes and we could not figure out the difference between an active visit and a normal visit. They claim its something to do with sessions, but the numbers were almost exactly the same, so who knows.
8. I did like that they define terms on each report page, which is nice for a novice, but you can turn it off as well.

Ultimately this seemed about the same as Omniture, though I know there are more differences, my only preference would be for Omniture based on the UI alone. I’m sure I will develop a more detailed impression over time.

Also, Seattle? Thunderstorms, really?

UPDATE: talked to someone about active visits in WebTrends, and found out that its a metric meant to measure the users who are on the site overnight as one visitor. So if someone is looking at the site from 11:59 PM until 12:03 AM the following day, they will not be counted as 2 visitors. He also said that he doesn’t really use this metric (I didn’t think that “active visits” would comprise a large segment of users), and this made me feel vindicated.

Omniture

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:

1. Omniture has way way more metrics that can be measured with a lot of granularity.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Google Fusion Tables

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.

DD4D

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.