Had my first real go creating Omniture reports and graph shaped things today. It gave me an interesting perspective given the free Google alternative that I have far more experience with.

Getting started was pretty easy once I started using the right version. v13.5 is extremely clunky and slow. v14 is much better and let’s you do some cool things with the data.

I couldn’t get the ClickMap plugin to work in either IE or firefox and it doesn’t support chrome, so I gave that a miss. Next I started to play with some of the reports… All the usual stuff is there and the different graphing options are really great. When google integrates their chart API with their analytics package things will be really fun.

The ability to pull in data directly into excel from omniture is really useful, although I am fairly sure I can do more computational analysis from within the tool. Also it’s very quick to see how difficult it is to group data unless custom properties are recorded at the outset. Filtering URLs is just a pain. I managed to get some good stats about top pages but not without significant excel formula manipulation. Really the only way to track top pages within different areas of the site is to add in some custom tracking.

The other discovery today is the usefulness of ratios when judging trends. So far I am fairy sure this cannot be done within site catalyst but is essential to drawing sensible insight. For example, the returning visitors report shows an interesting spike for a given month. This unfortunately correlates with a similar spike in page views. When showing the percentage of returning visitors as a percentage of total visits I can see that the proportion of returning visitors has been consistent for at least the last 8 months.

Another target of my investigations today was pulling in data from YouTube and iTunes. Although data is available it can’t be pulled in to excel like Omniture data and this will mean significant manual effort to prepare the final executive dashboards. I am hoping Omniture may be of some use, at least with YouTube buy iTunes is likely to be more tricky.

More Omniture insight as I work it out. Going to spend the rest of the week trying to run different stats against each other to try and draw some useful insight.