Archive for Adobe Analytics

Webtrends is in the game

Posted by MitchellT 
· Wednesday, July 20th, 2016 
· No Comments

wtcomparison
Web Analytics shootouts are always useful to those who haven’t yet committed to a web analytics platform or who are looking for an alternative. Most web analytics users are using Google Analytics “free” and Something Else paid. Now that Google Analytics 360 has come along and isn’t as expensive as the old GA Premium many WA users want to take a look at all the tools and platforms available.

Webtrends has done a major rewrite of their pioneering offering and they are in the game with Webtrends Infinity. The features and capabilities checklist is rather impressive, with all the real-time capability. Infinity looks to address many of the issues and shortcomings of Webtrends older offerings as well as those of other vendors. I look forward to testing Infinity in the near future, especially since new web analytics deployments are facilitated with tag management tools.

Adobe Analytics post roundup for early April

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, April 5th, 2015 
· No Comments

A great post describing how techniques for debugging Adobe DTM implementations appeared at Search Discovery’s site. Who better to get this info from than the inventors of Satellite, the predecessor to DTM!

Debugging and validating an Adobe Dynamic Tag Management implementation

Search Discovery also published another blog explaining why results can vary between Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics installations.

The next link I want to pass along is about documentation – something we’re all loathe to do. Antti Koski over in Finland blogs about his approach to documenting SiteCatalyst implementations using Microsoft Excel in this great post on his site, . This post is from a little more than a year ago, but it is relevant for anyone working with a new or existing Adobe Analytics setup. Other tools exist for this documentation process, such as the R library I’ve mentioned a few months back and there’s an Adobe employee written tool which integrates with MS Excel as well. So far I can’t get that tool to work, but I’m still interested in it and will update here when I get it working for myself. Cheers!

Adobe Analytcs Analysis Workspace Freeform Analysis

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, April 5th, 2015 
· No Comments

AdobeFreeformAnalysis_snagCatching up by posting several items related to Adobe Analytics (aka Omniture SiteCatalyst). First, there’s the great new beta tool called Analysis Workspace which allows for freeform analysis with out having to jump through Java hoops with AdHoc (aka Discover). There’s only one problem with Analysis Workspace – you can’t print or export yet. That’ll be solved soon enough I’m sure, but I found that it’s tough to even screenshot a report produced from this tool. SnagIt got stuck in the editable fields at the top of the screen (report title).

Other than these issues, I love the trendlines and seemingly limitless breakdowns. So far there’s sparse documentation, and no tutorial videos yet, but I’m sure this tool will be popular with analysts since no additional implementation is required to use it.

Hit and Run and a belated Happy New Year

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, March 8th, 2015 
· No Comments

So, today is the first day of daylight saving time (DST) here in the U.S. and it’s also the occasion of my first post of 2015. So, belated Happy New Year to you all, and here’s a heads up that this post will be a hit and run listing of links I want to keep track of. You may find some of them useful too.

First off is Omniture for Beginners by Tom Capper at Distilled. At the very end of the post is a table which will help guide folks accustomed to Google Analytics as they get started with Adobe Analytics. That table is the reason I kept this post around. I’m sure it will come in handy as I train and teach others in the future.

Next is a post by Stuart Roskelley at his blog, “How to Dissect a Vendor Script”. His blog is aptly called “The Hidden Layer” and it deals with modern approaches to web analytics using tag managers, DOM scraping, etc. I found the post relevant because I’ve spent a lot of time recently shoehorning vendor tags into tag management and making all the tags play together nicely. I do have to admit that some of the problems I’ve encountered were self-inflicted, but that’s how I learn. Breaking and fixing.

Until next time, ‘keep on trackin‘! *
    *(With apologies to Dan Fredeen)

ATM 2.0 swan song

Posted by MitchellT 
· Wednesday, December 17th, 2014 
· No Comments

With apologies for not posting any blogs since May, I’ll just dive right in. At long last, I received an email from Adobe announcing that its legacy tag management tool, Adobe Tag Manager 2.0 (ATM) would be phased out beginning in August 2015. Originally most of us had read that December 2014 would be the sunset date, but since only recently have we been informed about old versions of Report Builder being phased out in January 2015, I figured ATM still had some time left. And so it does, thankfully.

ATM 2.0 served me well allowing me to build a fantastic SiteCatalyst implementation on a hosted system where I couldn’t make programming changes for web analytics just any time I felt like. It also allowed us to establish control over 3rd party vendor tags, and in general, ATM got me to learn jQuery (and about time!).

So, thanks Adobe, for making ATM available a while longer… and thanks especially for bringing Satellite into your product mix as Dynamic Tag Management (DTM) which will be the successor to ATM.

On to the really important dates:
We’ll be able to edit ATM tags and containers until August 1, 2015, and by October 1, 2015, ATM will no longer function. This allows plenty of time to move onto DTM as soon as possible. This way we can complete peak season comfortably this year, then move on to the next generation of tag management.

Looking forward to your comments and ideas…

Working with Clickstream Data out of Adobe Analytics

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, February 9th, 2014 
· 2 Comments

4/28/14 UPDATE: the original thread on LinkedIn for this topic continues to draw useful comments regarding serious implementations/requirements. Take another read on it as time permits.

I honed in on an interesting thread on the Omniture Enthusiasts group on LinkedIn. The topic author, Nicholas, asks: “Has anyone has implemented a SiteCatalyst Clickstream Database solution?” The thread has turned into an interesting conversation, and another active participant has posted an R package at GitHub to faciliate this type of data movement and analysis. Turns out that it is possible to have a daily dump of clickstream data sent similar to a Data Warehouse data file for further processing. Hmmm – what an intriguing possibility.

Adobe Analytics / Omniture SiteCatalyst Resource Kit

Posted by MitchellT 
· Wednesday, January 29th, 2014 
· No Comments

Hopefully I covered all my bases in the title of this post. Every time I think about the confusion around Adobe renaming Omniture SiteCatalyst, I think of the pop artist Prince (a/k/a “The Artist Formerly Known As…”). But I digress.

Today I’m passing along a link to a compilation of SiteCatalyst resources you’re bound to find interesting and useful. Some call it the Ultimate Cheatsheet for Omniture.

Enjoy!

Saving Page Referrer as an eVar for better correlations

Posted by MitchellT 
· Saturday, January 11th, 2014 
· No Comments

Antti Koski has written a well-illustrated post about using SiteCatalyst processing rules to save page referrer data in an eVar for better correlation in analysis. I expect to try this using logic in my Adobe Tag Manager code in the meanwhile. I agree with Antti that using the default Referrer report in Adobe Analytics leaves much to be desired. When will it be possible to correlate everything with everything?

More insight into Adobe Dynamic Tag Management

Posted by MitchellT 
· Saturday, November 16th, 2013 
· No Comments

This week’s Adobe Digital Marketing Blog post for Analytics offers insight into Adobe’s plans for Dynamic Tag Management (the recently acquired Satellite tool). I found it most interesting that in 2014 it will support a formal integration of Google’s Universal Analytics, as well the possibility of DTM being made available publicly, not just to Adobe customers. I only wish there were more documentation, samples and other education about this fantastic tool available now.

Improving the Data Layer for web analytics

Posted by MitchellT 
· Tuesday, November 12th, 2013 
· No Comments

At last, the good articles about creating and maintaining a web analytics Data Layer for tag management are coming to light. Josh West at Web Analytics Demystified has written an article entitled “Getting the Data Layer Right” and while it does not mention any specific tag management system (TMS), it builds the case for making careful choices when setting up a data layer and reasons for using a data layer rather than relying on query strings or accessing DOM elements directly.

I became aware of Josh’s post when an email arrived from Jan Exner’s Web Analytics for Developers blog, and it contained his commentary ‘”Data Layer” Tips’ which provides additional guidance more closely related to using Adobe SiteCatalyst/Adobe Analytics. This is primarily because he mentions using Processing Rules and Context Variables and s_code.

Enjoy these articles and enjoy the benefits of implementing a data layer for your current or next web analytics project!

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