Content Management System Cake, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

This weekend Clarkson and I decided to build a cake based on the Google Analytics dashboard. It was a fairly complex construction that ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. It was based around a Waitrose Lemon Drizzle cake recipe, with lemon butter icing filling. I actually had to bake three separate cakes. One for each layer of the main body of the cake and another to use for the 3D elements on the top.
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I mentioned briefly before that I had failed to get Omnitures ClickMap working but today I had a flash of inspiration and had another go. It is fairly well documented how it fails on the latest version of Firefox, but IE7, surely they would have fixed that? They had, I hadn’t restarted due to my alternative stance on environmentalism. Idiot!

So what is the fuss about? Web Analytics is all about the creative display of information and ClickMap (plus other providers in the field ie CrazyEgg) goes one step further to show your data in context of the page being reported. This is tremendously powerful because the insight drawn from this visualization of user behaviour can far better drive intelligent design decisions than any graph or scatter chart.

I could see straightaway that the most popular links were not what I expected. People do not particularly like large images and instead head for text links. The horizontal navigation was popular as indeed was the footer. Unbelievably it appeared that people were clever enough to know what they wanted and were not being swayed by fancy design. It is worth noting here that this is unlikely to change my choice of background images. They are here to stay. Sorry.

Then I delved in further. Perhaps I can identify trends over different times as the design changes. Hmmmm problems. No matter what range I selected I never got a click figure above 1000. Even when looking over a year period. I tweeter my frustrations and was surprised to hear back rather randomly from OmnitureCare. They were obviously trawling Twitted for negative tweets or messages that indicated that customers were having problems. This really is an example of fantastic customer service. I had already exhausted Google and forums and every other type of search worthy of my time. So getting answers directy from Omniture was exactly what I needed.
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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.

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