Thanks Omniture for putting on another great Summit #omtrsummit Here is a collection my thoughts and notes:
Omniture Summit 2011
Sound-bites
“Mobile is the glue which ties together our digital and organic life.”
“Brand perception today is being influenced more by customers than brands.”
“There is a shift from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends.”
“65% of companies have ‘lost’ campaign data due to implementation errors. And 86% of companies reported on having implementation issues.”
“[Implementation] audit early and often.”
“Interpretation is a living thing.”
“An attempt to lure is not a social media strategy.”
“Competing for the future is about competing for the moment.”
“[Social] brands think people want a relationship with them whereas consumers want discounts and offers.”
“There is a now a 5th ‘P’ of marketing; perhaps the newest is going to be the most important, PEOPLE”.
“The 5 ‘i’ of social marketing: Intelligence, Insight, Ideation, Interaction & Influence.”
“Successful landing pages are built by asking the right questions at the earliest planning stage.”
“You need to use tracking code to monitor clicks from social campaigns wherever possible as only 60% of visits are from a web-based app. The remaining 40% will report as ‘direct’.”
“Integrating art with science.”
More smart mobile devices were sold last qtr than PCs and the growth of mobile will continue to be far faster than PC; with many people in the world only ever experiencing online via mobile (eg India has 500m mobile vs 100m PC).
Omniture report suite specific
Adobe Tag Manager launched. Enables you to manage all your tags through a container tag.
Adobe Social Analytics is now in Beta and looks great. It will be interesting to see how Adobe price it.
SiteCatalyst V15 allows you to create a segment and push it to Test & Target.
SiteCatalyst V15 ‘normalise’ feature is something I’d missed when looking at the Beta. This will be very useful to aid quick comparison of trended data.
Focus of Omniture’s development is moving towards mobile first.
Make sure that you keep an up to date implementation document repository, including: SDR, change log, a copy of the s_code with full comments of what the code does, audit dates and actions.
Use Fiddler to map a local copy of the s_code to your site to enable better testing.
Set alerts for high traffic and KPIs.
There are publishing widgets to push data to the public; such as showing top searched items or products on to your homepage.
The Adobe Tag Manager product launch (I haven’t seen a demo or any literature beyond the PR yet so my understanding is limited) should prove to be a smart move for Adobe and its customers.
The tool will allow customers to deploy tags from other vendors through the SiteCat tag. Should a customer do this, then Adobe knows that it will be a much bigger business pain for that customer to leave Adobe and switch to a competitor because it won’t just be the SiteCat tracking which would stop working when a contract ends. This should help ensure longer term contracts and revenue protection for Adobe.
The customer will benefit by having an easier mechanism to deploy tags and crucially to maintain their SiteCat 
implementation (which for many brands is a significant pain and barrier to optimisation). This will save many clients perhaps several months of wasted time whilst they are waiting for availability in a release schedule to update the code.
My feeling is that this tool should be provided free of charge to all customers and it will be a mistake if Adobe decide to charge anything more than a nominal fee. If there is a significant charge, then I suspect many companies will use an independent Tag Management system (such as the UK vendor TagMan) which will allow them to move away from Omniture in the future and all their existing tags will continue to work.
Whilst I’m taking about “free” I believe that Digital Pulse should be packaged with SiteCat for all customers to help maintain a good quality implementation. A better implementation leads to a happier client and a stronger client / supplier relationship.
#askbrett and the “Brett Error Show” was great – check out the YouTube video (link not available yet) when it’s live.
Official photographer photos are on Flickr.
Even Jonny Vegas wanted to know more
Whilst analysing a client’s data I noticed a significant anomaly with regards to the visits related data. Basically, there were far too many visits in relation to other metrics.
After lots of investigation I narrowed the issue to the Safari browser. The client has quite a high Safari user base.
Visits and bounce rate were all very high; whilst page views per visit, average time spent and revenue per visit were all very low. Visitors looked reasonable.
At first I thought there was an issue relating to people using iPads and iPhones but this proved not to be the case.
With some help from Adobe ClientCare and Ben Gaines (thanks for your help) the issue was narrowed to the Safari ‘TopSites’ feature.
Cause of the issue
TopSites shows a nice visual representation of my top 12 visited (or saved ‘pinned’) sites. What’s unique about Top Sites is that the images are live representations of the sites including up to date content and code; or at least sometimes they are live.
So, when I open Safari (Top Sites is my homepage page), if such a site SiteCatalyst tracking code then the appropriate tracking data is generated (probably the same for other analytics tools). Hence a visit and page view data etc is recorded even though I may not actually visit the site.
This is causing havoc with my client’s data.
I’m not sure how often TopSites updates or how it decides to update; but in my limited testing it seemed to update at least once a day.
(Chrome doesn’t suffer from this issue as they use a cached thumbnail rather than a ‘live’ image.)
Possible solution
Ben Gaines sent me a link to a blog from Martin Sutherland of Sun Pig which helps explain things in more technical terms and also a possible solution. I’ll be investigating the solution over the coming weeks to see if we can adapt and deploy it; basically we need to make sure data isn’t processed where the header includes ‘X-Purpose: preview’.
So, if your client has a reasonable Safari user base, you’d better check your ‘visits per visitor’ ratio to see if you have a TopSites issue.
An amendment to the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive will come in to force on 26th May 2011.
The changes are potentially significant for owners of websites; though as the legislation seems to be pretty poorly thought through in places I suspect it will be many months until there is clear guidance on how the Directive should be implemented.
The Information Commission’s Office issued a PR on 9 May and also a summary on the changes, which in my mind doesn’t offer enough clear-cut information on what is such an important update.
The main points of the summary are:
- As a company, you are not expected to implement the new Directive on 26th May. To quote the ICO, “… we would expect an organisation’s response to set out how they have considered the points above and that they have a realistic plan to achieve compliance.”
- “The key point is that you cannot ignore these rules.”
So, you don’t need to make any changes live by the 26th, but make sure you have started your planning process and have considered what you will need to change should your current process be challenged.
Why is this potentially poor legislation?
If we offer a new visitor the option of accepting a cookie, how do we know (i) if they are a new or repeat visitor and (ii) if they have previously opted-out of accepting cookies because we need to use a cookie to ‘remember’ these facts! Also (iii) how do we get consent from people seeing our display advertising on sites which we have no control over?
If you want to read more, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights did a very good post on this topic several weeks ago.
Updated, 11th May
eConsultancy has a new post covering possible US legislation.
I’ve posted this idea on the Adobe Ideas Exchange. If you think it makes sense, please go and promote it.
This is a request for Adobe to enhance Discover such that it can handle dates much more effectively and offer more flexibility in order that frequently accessed Projects are much more usable and I can stop wasting several hours every week.
Let me explain …
Let’s assume that on 22nd March I created a Project and set the date range to “this year”. Each time I open this project after 22nd March the Project will no longer be using the date range ”this year” but instead it will show data just from 1 Jan to 21 Mar. If I update the date range and resave the Project, this new date range is ignored and the original period is still applied next time I open it.
This is frustrating and detracts from the usefulness of Discover for Projects that I need to access often, rather than those which have been created just for one-off analysis.
Suggestions on how Discover should handle dates:
When I save a Project, I need the ability to set the date range for the Project. This should over right the initial date range that was used when the project was selected.
I need the ability to set a fixed or rolling start and end date and for this date mask to be applied each and every time the Project is opened.
I need to be able to decide whether this date mask is applied to all Worksheets and Workspaces within the Project and then to be able to override this and apply a different date mask to individual Worksheets and Workspaces as I see fit. This will give much better date control.
When I change a date mask I need the appropriate reports to be updated automatically. This will stop me having to manually set the date sliders on each and every report separately. This wastes time.
If I have a Workspace with many metrics / columns, I need the date sliders (at the bottom of the screen) to be more intuitive to use; ie to make it easy to ‘grab’ the all of the sliders in one go. For example, if I have several columns, I tend to have to need 2-3 goes to move them all to the desired date.
I also need the ability for dates to be better handled when I want to email and schedule reports. If the above changes are made similar functionality needs to be included in the save options.
And whilst I’m writing about saved reports, I need the ability to select which reports in my Project I want to have emailed to me (or someone else), and for them all be to attached to the same email as separate Excel files.
If you think it makes sense, please go to the Ideas Exchange and promote it.
Census 2011
We should be able to trust the govt with the personal data they hold about us. However, they have proven over the past several years that they are incapable of protecting laptops, USB sticks, DVDs, CDs and paper copies of personal data, and I suspect that the security in place for the NHS database is quite pitiful (would you bet against there being a wiki-leaks style outpouring of everyone’s medical data within the next 5 years?).
So it concerns and worries me that I can’t find any satisfactory statement on my 2011 Census form with regards to data protection besides this very short statement, “Your personal information is protected by law. Census information is kept confidential for 100 years.”
There is no related information in the entire 32 page Census document, nor in the 4 page brochure! I am told that “Your census response is required by law”, so this leaves me with two very important and unanswered questions.
1 What happens if I don’t want to complete a question? For example, why does the Govt need to know the name of my employer? Are they asking me if I drive to work so they can devise more ways to tax the motorist who has to park at work? And am I breaking the law and could I be prosecuted if I don’t answer?
2 What will they do with the information they collect? My understanding of the Data Protect Act is that they should at least state who will own the data and to be clear about the key purpose for collecting the data. Specifically, I want to know if any of my data will be used (either sold or given to) third parties who can then use it for marketing purposes. If so, what data may be sold, to whom and for what purpose?
Census 2011
A little more up-front planning would surely help promote a little more trust.
