Monday Randomness

So…currently kicking it in Hilton Head, SC. On the annual vacation to our neighbors to the South. Today, saw about a 6 ft gator. I am going to try borrow my brother-in-law’s iPhone to see if I can get a pic of the gator and post here. Tonite, going to a tennis exhibition, complete with kegs and a Dutch announcer. Its highly entertaining.

Next week I am traveling to Japan for the first time to meet with the marketing team there. Really psyched. I hate flying but love visiting new places. This is the first time I’ve been out of the country in 10 years, since I went to Australia for summer school and large scale debauchery. The debauchery should be made into a movie at some point as it included international gangsters, gambling, tall-tales, leaches, aborgines, drinking, and wallabies amongst other things. As for the Japan trip, allegedly we are going to see a Japanese baseball game (right Churbuck?) which is a definite live-blogging opportunity. Now just need a device to do it on.

Speaking of devices…I think I might splurge this summer and grab an iPhone. Somehow I need to con Lenovo in to paying for it, as I need it for mobile advertising research.

OK…I wrote something as part of my agreement.

Maybe more tomorrow on some web analytics stuff I am putting into words.

Mike Mann is famous

Congrats to Mike Mann on the interview on china.org.cn

I was disappointed that there was no mention of the St.Patty’s day suit as that was probably an international incident.

Also, congrats to Brian White for getting it published. Brian is my sister-in-law’s boyfriend who’s over in China this summer doing an internship. He’s also from Appalachian State, so he’s got that going for him as well.

NBA Draft ‘08

So I am not a big fan of the NBA, though I watched more of it this year than I have in the last 10 years. But there is one thing that I do watch every year and that is the NBA Draft.

Why?

Because it is highly entertaining for the following reasons…

1) You have giant dudes shaking hands with David Stern

2) You have ridiculous suits

3) You invariably have some guy who thought he was a lotto pick sitting in the green room until the 2nd round and the camera starts getting closer and closer as the picks move along.

4) The hilarious post-pick interviews with the players

5) The look of someone who just got drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks or Memphis Grizzlies.

6) New York boos all their picks

On top of that, I usually get together with some friends and watch it with full commentary through the night.

The thing that is absolutely missing is Charles Barkley. Back when TNT had the event, Barkley was the main attraction. ESPN please bring him in for one nite!

Serialization of Events

yeah its 5:09 AM. Its called insomnia, and it sucks.

Anywho…wanted to write about something that folks may or may not know about how Omniture collects success events. If you do nothing on the backend to restrict the success events from occuring on pages, an event would be collected everytime a page is loaded. For the uninitiated…success events are basically measured goals or objectives on a site, such as purchases, email optins, leads, getting to an important piece of content, watching a video, downloading a file, etc.

Example – we have a success event on the first page of our configurator. If a visitor configures a product and clicks the back button back to the first page of the configurator it would trigger the event again and we’d capture 2 events. In reality, I just want to capture it once. So what to do?

There is a functionality called ‘Event Serialization’ which allows you to use a unique identifier in conjuction with an event so the event is counted only once.

Example:

s.events=”event1:1234567″

You have to create some logic to make the unique identifier occur but then you will only count the unique instances of it. You could probably do it a variety of ways such as using a sessionid, whatever you do it needs to be server-side code and not some randomizing function that assigns an id because the random function would create a unique id each time a page loads, which defeats the purpose.

I assume in my example above with the configurator that I could configure the serialization to happen on a specific product too, because a visitor could configure multiple products during a visit and I want to capture each unique product being configured, but only count it once per product. I’ll try to put this one into practice and report back the result.

Omniture Survey

When I logged on to Omniture last week I noticed a new tool within their suite called ‘Survey’. The only details I have are in the screenshot below, but if I were to wager on it, I would think Omniture has a new tool to create online surveys that could be triggered based on events, such as a shopping cart or getting to a piece of content. And then those responses are tied to the normal web analytics via Omniture. So if you get a ton of responses saying “Your site sucks” you can now study the behavior of those users as a segment to understand why they think your site has room for improvement. Web Analytics is good at telling you what people are doing, but doesn’t do a great job of telling you why. This gives you a little more insight into what users wanted to do or what they find frustrating/good about your site.

I hope to learn more about it, and hopefully its something I can deploy in the near future. If I do, I’ll write more about it. Right now you now know as much as I do.

My Morning Music Review – My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges

2 weeks ago brought us the latest from one of my favorite bands, My Morning Jacket. I think their last album Z is one of the best albums of the last 10 years. The show they put on at the Cat’s Cradle in 2004 was one of the all-time greatest shows that I’ve witnessed in person (here’s proof). Needless to say, I was jacked about them having a new offering called Evil Urges.

So…how does it stack up?

The first 3 songs are jarring in a very odd way and just don’t sound at all like My Morning Jacket. First of all, Jim James’ vocals are very different than MMJ’s previous albums, singing in a R & Bish falsetto. You’ll read in other reviews ,like Rolling Stone, that its Prince-esque in a way but I don’t hear any “When Doves Cry”, its just missing the normal reverb. “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt 1″ sounds like a Flaming Lips song. The 3rd song ‘Highly Suspicious’ is a disaster and even more so when you consider how amazing MMJ usually is. The chanting chorus, the laughing, the whole thing is a mess. I can’t tell if its a joke or what, but one thing is for sure, MMJ is trying to tell you that what you think of them from their past efforts can essentially be thrown out the door. 3 songs in and I’m like this is going to be a bad record. Some of the other early songs on the record are reminiscent of 80’s ballads, and not in a good way (is there a good way?).

Its not until the 4th song “I’m Amazed” does the sound of previous albums’ start to take shape. In fact, the rest of the album plays out like a normal My Morning Jacket affair with James’ voice back into the normal reverb-soaked wailing and fantastic guitar playing. The second half of the album is excellent and almost makes me forget some of the experimentalness of the first half. Almost. I think the one thing that still bothers me about the record is that it seems like they wanted to experiment in the name of experimenting, not because it actually sounds good or is interesting. Instead, its solely because they wanted to do something different than what they’d done in the past. Its cool not to want to be pigeon-holed as a band that sounds like this or does that, just as bands in the past have done such as Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ or Wilco’s “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel” which worked well. This one just didn’t work as well.

And my criticism doesn’t mean there aren’t good songs here, there are. “Look at You”, “Smokin from Shootin”, and “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt 2″ are all outstanding. And in fact, I’ve grown to like the first song ‘Evil Urges’ which at first I couldn’t get into at the initial listen. Same to a lesser degree for “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt 1″. So this appears to be an album that will grow on you over time, though “Highly Suspicious” will never grow on me. Never.

Overall I’d give it a B -

If you are wondering about the rest of their discography:

Z – A+ fantastic album

It Still Moves – A

At Dawn – A

Okonokos – B+

Tennessee Fire – B

Little Known Omniture fact – Unified Source DB VISTA Rule

I came across this one in talking with my account manager….but Omniture has an interesting offering that some folks might not know about about called the Unified Source DB VISTA Rule. Just rolls off the tongue.

Anyways at its essence its a backend data rule that transforms non-campaign driven traffic/revenue so that it shows up alongside of your campaigns in SiteCatalyst. For example, you have things coming through Organic Search via your SEO efforts which aren’t a campaign per se but you want them to show up alongside of your other tactics, you can have Omniture create the Unified Source DB VISTA Rule so that it does. You can do this for all the stuff that currently shows up in your ‘None’ bucket of campaigns so that ‘None’ truly will only be stuff that had no referring source. Another example is if you have traffic coming from things like press releases or industry sites like Engadget or Gizmodo, you could classify that traffic to show alongside of your paid campaigns to show the true breakdown of how your traffic/revenue/etc came into being.

The bad thing is the rule costs something to implement. My feeling is this should be part of the de facto setup within Omniture and not a custom rule. Or even a classification piece of Campaigns.

Campaign Stacking in Omniture Vol.2 (The Wrath of Khan)

I started this with the original post cleverly named Campaign Stacking in Omniture but wanted to expand a little based on some emails I got from people wanting to hear my experience with it. Since the post in December I implemented the campaign stacking plugin but haven’t really exploited the data that was captured. Couple of reasons why:

1) There still isn’t a great way within SiteCatalyst or Discover to visualize the data as to how visitors are encountering tactics, the typical patterns, or the influence of the tactics on one another. Basically we are just capturing the string and then classifying the tracking codes into categories. The usability of the data is still needed. I wanted to bring that up at the Omniture Summit in March, but we ran out of time, and I’m sort of shy.

2) Classifying the data is time-consuming. Since every string of unique tracking codes is captured you get a ridiculous amount of data to classify. This takes forever even after I built some databases to automate some of it.

3) Doesn’t capture things that aren’t campaign identifiers. For example, we use the Genesis integration for DoubleClick which passes data from DART but not as a cid. The campaign stacking logic is looking for a cid= in the url string. DART doesn’t have a cid. Also, you miss out on non-campaign tactics like SEO or people just coming in via Bookmark/Typed in.

4) The last limitation is that you have no frame of reference as far as time goes to the campaign stacking. You don’t know the time between each tactic. Like is it 3 weeks later that someone goes from Paid Search to an Affiliate? There is no timestamp captured.

If Omniture fixes all of these things, Campaign Stacking becomes infinitely useful.

Another semester in the can

so avid Diary readers probably are astounded that I already wrote something today (on web analytics to boot) and now followed it up with one of my patented “I am still alive” rants.

and yes, I am still alive. thanks for asking.

Tonite ended my summer school session. Only took one this summer as opposed to the 2 I took last summer that almost killed me. It feels friggin awesome to be done….at least until mid-August. Then only 4 courses remain. Holy crap. The Entrepreneurship class was top notch as was the professor, Dr. Baker. It challenged me to think about how my social network is built and what I am actually trying to do careerwise and if my network is aligned to that goal. Plus, we read some Malcolm Gladwell, which is always a good thing. Plus part 2, I learned how to spell entrepreneurship.

and now..i am basking in the glow of being done. and drinking a Rogue Hazelnut. sort of my personal victory cigar. Just like Red Auerbach.

So what am I gonna do with all this free time?

1) hang out with the fam. My family gets completely shafted in my school/work bonanza and need to do a better job with the balance

2) reclaim my blog….seriously, going to post every other day until the fall semester

3) Read books I want to read instead of forced to read. Reading Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy now

4) See my friends. Just like my family, I’ve been delinquent.

5) Make some more beer.

6) Go to Hilton Head for a week

7) Maybe go to Japan (we’ll see)

Speaking of beer…Rooker informs me our latest batch the Liberty Ale is “oily”. Have no idea what that means, but sounds disgusting. He thinks its due to the dry-hopping, which also sounds disgusting. We shall see, its not supposed to be ready for 2 more weeks. He also mentioned he couldn’t even drink a full glass of it…and this is a man who can drink some beer. If it stays that way, this one will be named “Valdez”. And will be taken down from future consideration.

On the entertainment front I think I’ll write about the new albums from My Morning Jacket, Coldplay, and Wolf Parade on Friday/Saturday.

Anywho…I am going to get back to doing nothing. No case studies, etc. Just watching some baseball on MLB.com. and doing some coding… I know.

Talk to ya soon.

Get Your Geek on – More adventures in Omniture coding (getPreviousValue)

yes, this actually is a blog post.

So one thing that has been plaguing me lately is the way I did some of my Omniture implementation a few years back. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I made quite a few mistakes. I did it waaaaay too quickly and because of our infrastructure at the time of implementation, we had to do some very obtuse things to make it all work. So I am going through some exercises to remedy some of my decisions.

One such bad decision was the way I artificially siloed our sites into report suites. For the most part all the country data goes to a country-specific report suite. In theory, that is a decent way to do it. The problem is there are applications that are actually shared across multiple countries, so where does that data go? That was the case with our eSupport site where I created a separate report suite just for that since all countries pointed to the same one and I didn’t really have a way to distinguish country at all. Wasn’t in the url, meta, etc. It always bothered me because it created holes in my pathing reports and weird entry points within our metrics as people left the “public” report suite and entered the “esupport” report suite based on the s_account values I had created.

So fast forward to today where I was browsing the Omniture Knowledgebase and found a plug-in I hadn’t really considered before called getPreviousValue. I think I never saw it before because it was formerly called getPreviousPage, which I couldn’t think of a great purpose for. But with getPreviousValue I found something interesting in that I could actually capture a value for a variable from a previous page and pass to the next page’s Omniture code. All of a sudden I had a way to pass the country identifier along in subsequent pages. So for instance someone is on the Lenovo UK homepage and clicks ‘Support and Downloads’ I can now carry over the ‘UK’ in a variables such as an s.prop and bring it into the code of the ‘Support and Downloads’ page which is shared by all countries. I can now artificially say it belongs to the UK and send it the corresponding country-specific report suite by manipulating the logic for assigning the s_account value.

I plan on throwing this out there soon to see if it solves my problem. And thought I’d share the idea to others that have run into implementation problems where some their site is shared with other entities or countries within their report suite architecture. Hopefully this helps someone or spurs on other thoughts.