Here are my top lessons learned and next steps from day one of Omniture SiteCatalyst Advanced Implementation training held at Omniture’s headquarters in Orem, Utah. The class was probably a little larger than usual with more than 20 of us attending, not including a few no-shows. Some students were brand new to the Omniture web analytics package, but most were like me and had some experience. A few seemed pretty advanced. It wasn’t unusual to hear of attendees coming in to fix botched Omniture implementations, including one company going through three failed attempts.
If you take the class, take a look at the training videos and be familiar with the report interface. Better yet, show up with the specific business objectives and conversion events that you want to track.
Key Points and To-Do’s from Day I
- Set the debugger
- Version 13.5 is now available – start using it
- Make sure all users log in under their own accounts so they can personalize it, remember favorite reports, etc.
- Version 13.5 can now display more than 50 line items at a time! Yay!
- Create full spreadsheet mapping business requirements to reports to Omniture variables
- Call Omniture support to turn on daily uniques and visits for your most important s.props (this isn’t turned on by default)
- Continue to test and tweak your code in the development report suite; go “live” in production (I had been instructed that development was for when you first implemented, but after that you always worked in production; in fact, you can set up multiple report suites for whatever purpose you want)
- No charge for multiple report suites; you might want ones for different countries, companies; or for a church and a school). If you want data populated in more than one report, though, then it costs extra.
- Omniture doesn’t officially support Firefox for reporting, but it’s working fine for me; with Firefox, you can use FireBug for debugging.
- In the Admin tab, go to report suites and edit settings to turn on props.
- Internal search terms – use toLowerCase(); script to change values to all lower case in order to combine like values
Church Mojo 